School of English

Dr Catherine Richardson

Reader in Renaissance Studies  
Phone: 01227 824656 Office: NC 18
Email: c.t.richardson@kent.ac.uk on leave spring, summer 2011
Interests

I joined the University of Kent in 2007, having previously been lecturer in English and History and Fellow of The Shakespeare Institute at the University of Birmingham. My research interests are broadly speaking interdisciplinary, and many of them focus on the relationship between texts and the material circumstances of their production and consumption. So I’m interested in the way individuals described objects as they wrote them into probate inventories, but also in how theatre audiences ‘saw’ a domestic interior in relation to the dialogue of a play, the physical nature of the theatre and their own memories and imaginations. My research, then, focuses on the movement between living and writing, between experience and narrative.

A large part of this research has focused on early modern domestic life. I have tried to highlight the various relationships between what an audience saw on stage in plays like Arden of Faversham, A Woman Killed With Kindness and Two Lamentable Tragedies, and their domestic life outside the theatre. I argue that in order to understand the significance of the household in the genre of domestic tragedy it is necessary to reconstruct the material and moral meaning of the early modern house as understood by the majority of audience members. I work with a wide variety of printed, documentary, visual and material sources for households, and I’m especially interested in the kind of domestic environments about which we currently know very little – those of the middling sort.

My current project is a study of the clothing of those below the level of the elite in early modern England, focusing on the function of dress in an urban context. This offers an opportunity to examine the relationship between prescriptive discourses about clothing – sumptuary legislation, moral literature etc, and the evidence of social practice available from testamentary and judicial documents. In common with the majority of my work, this project is based on extensive examination of local archival materials, and an attempt to relate these to national discourses and the material remains of the period.

Research Supervision

I welcome graduate students in any areas of the dramatic, social and cultural history of the period, and am particularly interested in supervising interdisciplinary projects. I have previously supervised students working on various aspects of Shakespeare studies, early modern account books kept by women, military culture, the construction of community and ecclesiastical court depositions.

Professional Activities

I am the Orders Secretary and a Council Member of the Malone Society

Selected Publications

Books
Shakespeare and Material Culture, Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2011

C. Richardson and C. Dyer eds., William Dugdale, Historian, 1605-86: His Life, His Writings and His County, Boydell and Brewer, 2009 [link: https://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewItem.asp?idProduct=12878]

C. Richardson and T.Hamling eds., Everyday Objects: medieval and early modern material culture and its meanings, Ashgate, 2010 http://www.ashgate.com/default.aspx?page=637&calcTitle=1&pageSubject=1109&title_id=8858&edition_id=11638]

C Richardson and M. Merry ed., Making Household: the account book of Sir Thomas Puckering of Warwick and London, Dugdale Society, forthcoming 2011

Some recent chapters and articles
‘Social Life’, in Arthur Kinney ed., Elizabethan and Jacobean England: Sources and Documents of the English Renaissance, Blackwells, 2010 http://www.amazon.co.uk/Elizabethan-Jacobean-England-Documents-Renaissance/dp/1405149671
 
‘Household Writing’ in Summit and Bicks eds., Palgrave History of Women’s Writing 1500-1610, Palgrave, 2010 http://us.macmillan.com/thehistoryofbritishwomenswriting15001610

Giuseppina Muzzarelli, Giorgio Riello and Elisa Tosi Brandi eds., Storie di Moda, Bruno Mondadori, 2010
 
‘Tragedy, Family and Household’ in E. Smith and G. Sullivan eds., Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Tragedy, Cambridge University Press, 2010 http://www.cambridge.org/gb/knowledge/isbn/item2708254/?site_locale=en_GB

 ‘The stage, costume and fashion’ in Giorgio Riello and Peter McNeil eds., The Fashion History Reader, Routledge, 2010 http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415493246/

 ‘Dugdale and the material culture of Warwickshire’, in C. Dyer and C. Richardson eds., William Dugdale, Historian, 1605-86: His Life, His Writings and His County, Boydell and Brewer, 2009

‘Shakespeare and Material Culture’, Literature Compass, Volume 7, Issue 6, pages 424–438, June 2010 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1741-4113.2010.00700.x/abstract

‘Early modern plays and domestic spaces’, Home Cultures special issue on literature and the domestic interior, eds., Victor Buchli, Alison Clarke, Dell Upton, special ed. Charlotte Grant, Vol. 2, 3, November 2005, Berg, 269-283

‘The material culture of Stranger life’, Proceedings of the Huguenot Society Vol XXVIII No. 4, 2006, 495-508

‘Domestic Life’ for Arthur Kinney ed., The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare, OUP, forthcoming 2010

School of English, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, CT2 7NX

The University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, CT2 7NZ, T: +44 (0)1227 823054

Last Updated: 04/10/2011