Research

Preacher-Poets: Early Modern Sermons, Literature, and Gender (Routledge, 2026)

Preacher-Poets demonstrates that early modern sermons had a larger impact on early modern literary texts and culture than previously assumed, analyzing the role of gender in theological and non-theological texts. This book argues that the sermon genre was a critical force in early modern culture by illuminating its role in shaping literary texts and examining the role of gender in order to connect sermons to the broader early modern cultural discourse.

This project analyzes the works of canonical “preacher-poets” such as George Herbert, John Donne, and John Bunyan, alongside the devotional writings of less-studied women, including Anna Walker, Katherine Austen, Margaret Hoby, and Mary Rich. Importantly, the sermon genre also offers insights into the textual contributions of women in early modern England. Women’s sermon notes and devotional writings often replicated the sermon genre’s features, challenging assumptions that Protestant theology uniformly perpetuated patriarchal norms. Rather, sermons provided a framework within which women engaged actively with Protestantism. This book also further situates sermons within the broader performative landscape by connecting them to the works of Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare, revealing the sermon genre’s cultural impact in seventeenth-century England.

“Closet Catholicism, Private Entertainments, and Shakespeare in Seventeenth-Century Yorkshire” in Early Modern Performance Beyond the Public Stage Extra-Theatrical Forms and Spaces (Arden Shakespeare, Bloomsbury, 2025)

During the Christmas season of 1609, with approximately 100 guests in attendance, John Yorke hosted the Simpson players, a group of traveling players who were local to the area. Only two years later, the Star Chamber accused Yorke of harboring Catholic priests and of participating in the 1605 Gunpowder Plot. These accusations were rooted in the suspicion that the 1609 entertainments included a “seditious interlude” performed alongside King Lear, Pericles, and the lesser-known and now-lost morality play St Christopher. This chapter uses new evidence—a manuscript notebook written partially in Yorke’s hand—alongside close readings of King Lear and Pericles to corroborate Yorke’s position as a closet Catholic in northern England and to suggest that the choice of plays was deliberate. The 1609 Christmas meeting was one of Yorkshire recusants, and these performances were a means of community building and even worship.

“John Donne’s Scientific Observation of the Soul,” College Literature 49.2 (2022)

This article uses John Donne’s Devotions alongside the devotional texts of seventeenth-century women writers in order to demonstrate an early modern cultural impulse toward using scientific observational methods to gain knowledge of individual salvation. These women writers often observed the soul through practices similar to those used in the budding new science community in their personal spiritual and devotional writings. These texts suggest that women were not only active and independent in their own social lives, but also that women writers should play an important role in our understanding of seventeenth-century English Protestantism and its anticipation of the coming Scientific Revolution. Donne works as a tool through which we may view and understand the cultural swings of the seventeenth century in England, while the women writers demonstrate the widespread cultural use of observational techniques for understanding personal spirituality.

“The Economics of Salvation in Early Modern Devotional Poetry,” in Religion in the Early Modern British Marketplace (Routledge, 2022)

Recently, historians have demonstrated how the shift from an economic system of feudal stewardship to one based in commercialism stretched from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, with the two systems co-existing for centuries; this opposes previous narratives of a commercial, mercantilist system replacing a dying feudal one. I argue that this elongated period of co-existing economic systems influenced how many individuals perceived of their relationship with God after the Reformation. Was God more akin to a lord, requiring good stewardship of his subjects? Or was God more like one who handled accounts, attendant to whether or not one’s debt had been fully paid? From Jesuit Robert Southwell, to Anglican George Herbert, to Catholic-turned-Protestant John Donne, economic metaphors of stewardship and exchange appear in their poetry as a way to understand and articulate their relationship with God and their potential role in that relationship. Southwell often uses the metaphor of stewardship in his devotional poetry: he must do something for God because his very existence is God’s resource. Conversely, Herbert frames his obligation to God in terms of credit and debt. Unlike stewardship, which suggests a perpetual bond with no expectation of ever being completed, the credit framework implies repayment, raising for Herbert the anxiety that he might owe God a debt that he cannot pay. Southwell and Herbert offer two ends of a spectrum upon which Donne slides back and forth. At some moments in his poetry, Donne may view himself as God’s steward and his personal suffering as God’s resource. At others, he fantasizes through his poetry a way to repay an eternal debt here and now. Together, these three poets demonstrate how a variety of economic metaphors were a tool for understanding personal devotion well into the early modern period. The long transition from feudal stewardship to commercialism unsettled not just the material world, but also the spiritual world of souls and poems.

“Queen Anne’s Body in Stuart Court Sermons” Ben Jonson Journal 28.2 (2021)

This article aligns the 1605, 1606, and 1609 court sermons of Lancelot Andrewes with Ben Jonson’s Masque of Blackness and Masque of Beauty (performed in 1605 and 1608, respectively) in order to argue that both genres politicize James VI and I’s domestic life by commenting on Queen Anne’s political and domestic roles. Scholars have examined the ways in which Anne’s performance in the court masques allowed her to claim a sense of authority and agency over her body. Recent research on sermons has demonstrated how they were another form of court entertainment, more akin to masques and plays than we might expect, and that the sermon genre often commented on ongoing political and domestic situations in the Stuart court. Yet, scholars have not considered how the masques prompted a response from another popular court genre, the sermon. In placing these two genres—sermon and masque—alongside one another, I argue that Andrewes’s patriarchal downplaying of the woman’s body in the Biblical Nativity narrative is actually a response to Jonson’s masques, rather than the normative touchstone of early modern understandings of gender and maternity. Considering Andrewes’s view of the female body as a contrast to Jonson’s display and celebration of the female body reveals multiple models for understanding maternity in the early modern period.