Dr R Lewis
Dr Rhodri Lewis, MA MSt DPhil
Fellow and Tutor in English
E-mail: rhodri.lewis@ell.ox.ac.uk
Research Interests
Early modern literary, intellectual and scholarly history; textual criticism and history of the book. He is currently at work on four projects. First, a monograph provisionally titled Shaping Fantasies: Shakespeare and the Early Modern Mind. Second, a monograph on the emergence of the “man of letters” in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Third, editing (with Daniel Andersson and Sophie Weeks) volume 5 of the Oxford University Press edition of Francis Bacon's complete works, which comprises the De sapientia veterum (1609) and Bacon's early philosophical writings to about 1611. Fourth, editing (with Kate Bennett and William Poole) the correspondence of John Aubrey; this is one of the core components of Oxford’s cross-disciplinary “Cultures of Knowledge” project, funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation.
Teaching Areas
1509-1832, Shakespeare, English Language. He supervises graduate students at both MSt and DPhil level. Recent topics of supervision have included Roger Ascham, William Cornwallis, Francis Bacon, Robert Burton, Thomas Browne, Abraham Cowley, Henry More, John Aubrey and antiquarianism, early modern mythography, seventeenth-century utopianism, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literary theory, early modern libraries, the early English essay, and the early history of shorthand.
He is the English Faculty's Director of Graduate Studies.
Selected Publications
Books
William Petty on the Order of Nature: An Unpublished Manuscript Treatise (Tempe, AZ: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 2011).
Language, Mind and Nature: Artificial Languages in England from Bacon to Locke, “Ideas in Context” series, no. 80 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
Articles
“Hamlet, Metaphor, and Memory”, Studies in Philology 109 (2012), forthcoming
“Impartiality and Disingenuousness in Restoration Natural Theology”, in The Emergence of Impartiality: Towards an Archaeology of Objectivity, eds. Anita Traninger and Kathryn Murphy (Leiden: Brill), forthcoming
“Thinking with Animals in the Early Royal Society”, in Ethical Animals, 1400-1650, ed. Burkhard Dohm and Cecilia Muratori (Florence: SISMEL, Edizioni del Galluzzo), forthcoming
“Two Meanings in One Word: A Note on Shakespeare's Richard III, III.i.81-83”, Notes and Queries 59 (2012), forthcoming
“Shakespeare's Clouds and the Image Made by Chance”, Essays in Criticism 62 (2012), 1-24
“Samuel Hartlib”, “William Petty” and “John Wilkins”, in the Encyclopedia of English Renaissance Literature, eds. Alan Stewart, Garrett Sullivan, et al. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2012), 446-51, 780-82, 1057-59
“William Petty's Anthropology: Religion, Colonialism, and the Problem of Human Diversity”, Huntington Library Quarterly 74 (2011), 261-88
“Francis Bacon, Allegory and the Uses of Myth”, Review of English Studies 61 (2010), 360-89
“Historians, Critics and Historicists”, English Historical Review 125 (2010), 370-82
“An Early Reader of Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel”, Notes and Queries 57 (2010), 67-69
“A Kind of Sagacity: Francis Bacon, the ars memoriae and the Pursuit of Natural Knowledge”, Intellectual History Review 19 (2009), 155-77
“Hooke’s Two Buckets: Memory, Mnemotechnique and Knowledge in the Early Royal Society”, in Ars Reminiscendi: Mind and Memory in Renaissance Culture, eds. Donald Beecher and Grant Williams (Toronto, 2009), 339-63
“The Enlightenment”, in The Oxford Handbook of English Literature and Theology, eds. Andrew Hass, David Jasper and Elisabeth Jay (Oxford, 2007), 97-114
“Robert Hooke at 371”, Perspectives on Science 14 (2007), 672-87
“Of ‘Origenian Platonisme’: Joseph Glanvill on the Pre-Existence of Souls”, Huntington Library Quarterly 69 (2006), 267-300
“An Unpublished Letter from Andrew Marvell to William Petty”, Notes and Queries 53 (2006), 47-50
“‘The Best Mnemonicall Expedient’: John Beale’s Art of Memory and its Uses”, The Seventeenth Century 20 (2005), 113-44
“A Babel off Broad Street: Artificial Language Planning in 1650s Oxford”, History of Universities 19 (2005), 108-45
“John Evelyn, the Early Royal Society and Artificial Language Projection: a New Source”, Notes and Queries 51 (2004), 31-35
“The Publication of John Wilkins’s Essay (1668): Some Contextual Considerations”, Notes and Records of the Royal Society 56 (2002), 133-46
“The Efforts of the Aubrey Correspondence Group to Revise John Wilkins’s Essay (1668) and their context”, Historiographia Linguistica 28 (2001), 333-66
See also faculty website here.