Dr Sarah Knight

Research Interests

Sarah Knight's academic background is in Classics and English; she has an MA in Renaissance History and a PhD in Renaissance Studies. Her main research and teaching interests are in early modern literature, particularly satire and drama written in English and Latin, and in the intellectual and literary culture of the English universities during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She is particularly interested in academic drama as performed in England, France and Italy during this period, and in early modern representations of adolescence. Her most recent work has been on the relationship between satire and education, and on Elizabeth I's progress visits to the University of Oxford in 1566 and 1592.

Dr Knight's current work includes an edition and translation of Milton's Prolusions (to be published as part of Volume 11 of The Complete Works of John Milton by Oxford University Press); an edition of the plays of Fulke Greville; an edition of the seventeenth-century student play The New Moone, performed at the Venerable English College, Rome; and two essay collections: The Intellectual and Cultural Worlds of the Early Modern Inns of Court (Manchester University Press) and A Companion to Ramism: An Intellectual Phenomenon (Brill). She is writing a chapter on Robert Greene for The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Drama, and overseeing the online publication of a teaching anthology of neo-Latin literary texts. Dr Knight has a secondary research interest in mid-twentieth century film adaptation, particularly Alfred Hitchcock's adaptations of the novels of Daphne du Maurier.

She is President of the Society for Neo-Latin Studies, a member of the Council of the Society for Renaissance Studies, and a founder member and steering committee member of the East Midlands Early Modern Colloquium. With Dr Jayne Archer (Aberystwyth), she edits the Bulletin of the Society for Renaissance Studies.

Current Postgraduate Supervision

Dr Knight welcomes applications and enquiries from prospective postgraduate students, particularly those with interests in Renaissance and early modern literature, especially drama and satire; the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century universities and Inns of Court; neo-Latin literature; and translation and the reception of the classical tradition in early modern England.

Dr Knight has recently supervised postgraduate dissertations on the plays of Christopher Marlowe (PhD) and on late seventeenth-century political adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays (MA in English Literary Research). She is currently supervising a PhD on Lancelot Andrewes.

Publications

Books

John Nichols's The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth I: A New Edition of the Early Modern Sources. General Editors: Jayne Elisabeth Archer, Elizabeth Clarke, Elizabeth Goldring; Associate General Editors: Gabriel Heaton, Sarah Knight (Oxford University Press, 5 volumes, forthcoming)

The Progresses, Pageants, and Entertainments of Queen Elizabeth I, ed. by Jayne Elisabeth Archer, Elizabeth Goldring, Sarah Knight (Oxford University Press, 2007) (Long-listed for the William MB Berger Prize for British Art History)

Click here for reviews of the book by Jean Wilson in the TLS (January 2008); here for Paul Budra's review in Renaissance Quarterly 61.1 (Spring 2008), pp. 285-6; and here for Lawrence Manley's review in the Review of English Studies 60 (244) (2009), pp. 310-12.

Leon Battista Alberti, Momus, trans. and co-ed., (I Tatti Renaissance Library No. 8, Harvard University Press, 2003)

Click here for James Wood's review in The New Republic (January 2004) and here for David Rimanelli's inclusion of the edition among his 'Best of 2003', in Artforum (December 2003).

Articles and book chapters

''Goodlie anticke apparrell?': Sophocles’ Ajax at early modern Oxford and Cambridge', Shakespeare Studies 38 (October 2009)

‘Fantastical Distempers: The Psychopathology of Early Modern Scholars’, in Early Modern Academic Drama, ed. by Jonathan Walker and Paul D. Streufert (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008)

‘Robert Greene’, ‘Gabriel Harvey’, ‘Thomas Lodge’, ‘William Warner’, ‘Interludes’, ‘Parnassus Plays’, ‘University Drama’, ‘University Wits’, for The Greenwood Shakespeare Encyclopaedia, ed. by Patricia Parker (Greenwood Press, 2010)

‘It was not mine intent to prostitute my Muse in English ': Academic Publication in Early Modern England', in Print and Power in France and England, 1500-1800, ed. by David Adams and Adrian Armstrong (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006)

Queen Elizabeth’s Book of Oxford, ed. by Louise Durning, translated by Sarah Knight (Latin) and Helen Spurling (Hebrew) (Oxford: Bodleian Library Publications/Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006)

‘Powell and Pressburger's The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp and A Matter of Life and Death’, in Scope: An Online Journal of Film Studies, 2 (2005): click here to read more.

 ''He is indeed a kind of Scholler-Mountebank': Academic Liars in Jacobean Satire', in Shell Games: Studies in Scams, Frauds, and Deceits (1300-1650), ed. by Mark Crane, Richard Raiswell, Margaret Reeves (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies Publications, 2004)

(As Associate General Editor) Europa Triumphans: Court and Civic Festivals in Early Modern Europe. General Editors: J.R. Mulryne, Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly, Margaret Shewring; Associate General Editors: Elizabeth Goldring, Sarah Knight (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004)

'Thomas Farnaby', 'Barten Holyday', 'Michael Maittaire' in The Dictionary of British Classicists, 1500-1960, General Editor: Robert B. Todd (Bristol: Thoemmes/Continuum Press, 2004)

Dr Knight has written reviews for Cahiers Élisabéthains, the Canadian Journal of History, Reformation and Renaissance Journal. She is a member of the Editorial Board (Renaissance) of the online journal Literature Compass.  

Teaching and Administration

EN1050 (Module convenor) Renaissance Drama: Shakespeare and his Contemporaries

EN2020 Renaissance Literature

EN3134 (Module convenor) Angry Young Men: Students, Scholars and Satire in Renaissance England

EN3136 (Module convenor) Page to Screen: the Translation of Literary Texts to Film

EN31348 (Co-convenor) Classical and post-classical Latin (taught by academic staff from Ancient History and Archaeology, English, and Historical Studies)

At postgraduate level, Dr. Knight teaches on the module ‘The English Country House in Literature’ for the MA in the Country House, and on the ‘Editing and Textual Criticism’ module for the MA in English Literary Research.

She is Director of the Learning and Teaching Committee, and a member of the School's Research Committee and Equal Opportunities Committee.

Internet Links

Click here to read a feature on Dr Knight co-authored for the BBC website, on humour in Renaissance England, and here for Dr Knight's interview on the Today programme (BBC Radio 4).

Click here to access the Neo-Latin Teaching Anthology that Dr Knight has developed, under the auspices of the Society for Neo-Latin Studies.

Click here for details of The Bulletin of the Society for Renaissance Studies, which Dr Knight co-edits.