The Master’s Books: a lecture by Professor Stephen Greenblatt

Date: Thursday 4 November 2021
Time: 17:15 - 19:15
Venue
TS Eliot Theatre, Merton College

This lecture by Professor Stephen Greenblatt (Harvard University) explored the significant gap in Tudor education between what the students heard on Sunday and what they read during the week, focussing principally on the example of Christopher Marlowe at the King’s School, Canterbury.

This lecture was co-hosted by Merton College, the Centre for Early Modern Studies, and the Faculty of English.

About the speaker

Stephen Greenblatt is the John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. Educated at Yale and Cambridge, Professor Greenblatt taught for many years at the University of California at Berkeley. In such foundational studies as Sir Walter Raleigh: The Renaissance Man and his Roles (1973), Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1981), Shakespearean Negotiations (1990) and Marvellous Possessions (1991) Professor Greenblatt drew on cultural anthropology to transform literary interpretation and to show us how literary texts drew from and transformed symbolic practices of culture at large – whether exorcisms, court rituals or colonial violence.

Professor Greenblatt has lectured all over the world and received many honours and awards for more recent publications. His The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (2011) won many prizes, including the Pulitzer, and in 2016 he was awarded the Holberg Prize for being ‘one of the most important Shakespeare scholars of his generation’. He is a corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.