Stewart Mottram

My published research explores interactions between English literature, the national church, and the nations of England and Wales across the long Reformation (1520-1688), with a particular focus on writing by Spenser, Shakespeare, and Marvell. I am author of Empire and Nation in early English Renaissance literature (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008) and co-editor, with Sarah Prescott, of Writing Wales, from the Renaissance to Romanticism (Ashgate, 2012). Wales and ruins is the topic of my recent essay on Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, in Willy Maley and Rory Loughnane, eds., Celtic Shakespeare: The Bard and the Borderers (Ashgate, 2013). My most recent essay on Spenser and religion – ‘Spenser's Dutch Uncles: The Family of Love and the four translations of A Theatre for Worldlings’ – was published in Jose Maria Perez Fernandez and Edward Wilson-Lee, eds., Translation and the Book Trade in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Spenser’s views on Irish religion is the subject of the journal article ‘From swords to ploughshares: planting religion in Spenser’s A View of the State of Ireland (1633)’, currently under review.

My second monograph, Broken verse: Ruin and Reformation in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Marvell, is under review with Oxford University Press and was completed in summer 2015 as part of a larger AHRC-funded project investigating the legacy of England’s Reformation ruins in English Renaissance literature.