Editorial & Advisory Board

Director

Alan Stewart (Columbia University)

Editorial Team

Daniel C. Andersson (Wolfson College, Oxford)

Daniel C. Andersson is a Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford and a scholar of the cultural, intellectual, religious and literary life of early modern Europe. Dr Andersson works chiefly on Francis Bacon, Philology, Aristotelianism and Calvinism. Recently, he has examined Calvinist notions of the care of the soul in Ames, Perkins and Abernethy, as well as the Habsburg reception, above all in Hungarran, of these authors. These are the chief strands of his current interests in early modern history, with philology, exchange, Calvin, Aristotle being the chief tufts in the ‘thought-cloud’.

David Colclough (Queen Mary, University of London)

David Colclough is Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary University of London. His edition of New Atlantis will be volume 19 of the Oxford Francis Bacon. Beyond Bacon, his current research primarily focuses on John Donne, whose Sermons at the Court of Charles I he edited as volume 3 of The Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne (OUP, 2013); he is now preparing volume 14 (Sermons Preached at St Paul’s Cathedral, 1628-1630). He is the author of the ODNB life of Donne, and the editor of John Donne’s Professional Lives (D.S. Brewer, 2003). His monograph Freedom of Speech in Early Stuart England was published by CUP in 2005.

Leofranc Holford-Strevens (Retired, Oxford University Press)

Until his retirement in 2011, Dr Leofranc Holford-Strevens was Consultant Scholar-Editor at the Oxford University Press. He is a classical scholar with wide interests in other fields, principally languages, literature, history, chronology, and musicology. His publications include: Aulus Gellius (London, 1988), revised as Aulus Gellius: An Antonine Scholar and His Achievement (Oxford, 2003; corrected paperback 2005); (with Bonnie J. Blackburn) The Oxford Companion to the Year (Oxford, 1999); (edited with Amiel D. Vardi), The Worlds of Aulus Gellius (Oxford, 2004); The History of Time: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2005); (with Bonnie J. Blackburn), Florentius de Faxolis: Book of Music (Cambridge, MA, 2010).

Dana Jalobeanu (University of Bucharest)

Chris R. Kyle (Syracuse University)

Chris R. Kyle is an Associate Professor of History at Syracuse University. He has edited two books, Parliament, Politics and Elections(Cambridge University Press, 2001) and with Jason Peacey, Parliament at Work (Boydell and Brewer, 2002). He is currently completing a monograph entitled Theatre of State: Parliament and Political Culture in early Modern England for Stanford University Press (forthcoming, 2011). He is the author of over a dozen articles on sixteenth and seventeenth century English history and has held fellowships from the Huntington Library (San Marino, California), the Folger Shakespeare Library (Washington DC) and Hughes Hall, Cambridge University. In 2006 he received a Meredith Teaching Award and has continued to develop a wide range of courses on British history, focusing on the Tudor and Stuart period. In November 2005 he organized a symposium at the Folger Shakespeare Library commemorating the 500^thanniversary of the Gunpowder Plot.

James A. T. Lancaster (University of Queensland)

Dr Lancaster is an intellectual historian who received his PhD from the Warburg Institute, University of London. He is presently Lecturer in Studies in Western Religious Traditions in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at The University of Queensland. As a member of the Editorial Board of the Oxford Francis Bacon critical edition, he has published on the philosophical and religious thought of Francis Bacon. His publications include: ‘Natural Knowledge as a Propaedeutic to Self-Betterment: Francis Bacon and the Transformation of Natural History’ in Early Science and Medicine; ‘Natural Histories of Religion: A (Baconian) “Science”?’ in Perspectives on Science; and a chapter, ‘Francis Bacon on the Moral and Political Character of the Universe’, in his co-edited volume with Guido Giglioni et al., Francis Bacon on Motion and Power (2016).

Rhodri Lewis (Princeton University)

Rhodri Lewis is Fellow, Tutor and University Lecturer in English at St Hugh’s College, Oxford. He has published a number of articles on early modern literary, intellectual and scholarly history, and is the author of two books: Language, Mind and Nature: Artificial Languages in England from Bacon to Locke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), and the forthcoming William Petty on the Order of Nature: An Unpublished Manuscript Treatise (Tempe, AZ: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 2010). In addition to editing volume 5 of the OFB, he is presently at work on two projects: an edition of John Aubrey’s correspondence (with Kate Bennett and William Poole), and a monograph on the rise of the ‘man of letters’ from about 1600-1750.

Richard Serjeantson (Trinity College, Cambridge)

Richard Serjeantson is editing Volume III of the OFB in collaboration with Angus Vine. He has published a number of studies of Bacon’s life and writings arising broadly from this work, including (with Thomas Woolford) ‘The Scribal Publication of a Printed Book’, The Library, 7th ser., 10 (2009) 119-56 and ‘Francis Bacon and the Late Renaissance Politics of Learning’, in For the Sake of Learning, ed. Ann Blair and Anja Goeing (Brill, 2016), pp. 195–211. His edition of Valerius Terminus of the Interpretation of Nature will appear in Volume V of the OFB; a preparatory study of that work appeared as ‘Francis Bacon’s Valerius Terminus and the Voyage to the “Great Instauration”’, JHI, 78 (2017), 341–68. With Michael Edwards he has also published an edition of what is now the earliest known treatise by a different early modern philosopher: René Descartes, Regulae ad directionem ingenii: An Early Manuscript Version (Oxford University Press, 2023).

Angus Vine (University of Stirling)

Angus Vine is editing Volume III of the OFB in collaboration with Richard Serjeantson. He has published a number of studies of Bacon’s life and writings arising broadly from this work, including ‘Francis Bacon’s Composition Books’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 14 (2008), 1-33; ‘A New Version of Bacon’s Apologie: MS Rawlinson D. 672′, Bodleian Library Record, 21 (2008), 118-37; ‘Commercial Commonplacing: Francis Bacon, the Waste-Book, and the Ledger’, English Manuscript Studies, 1100-1700,16 (2011), 197-218; and ‘”His Lordships First, and Last, Chapleine”: William Rawley and Francis Bacon’, in Chaplains in Early Modern England, eds Hugh Adlington, Tom Lockwood and Gillian Wright (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), pp. 123–140.

Maria Wakely (Queen Mary University of London, retired)

Sophie Weeks (University of York)

Sophie’s research focuses on Francis Bacon. She is currently working on two projects: first, she is completing a book entitled Francis Bacon’s Science of Magic. Offering a novel interpretation of the knowledge-power relationship in Francis Bacon’s ‘Great Instauration’, this study argues that Bacon proposed a science of magic as the very core of his whole programme for the reform of natural knowledge. Sharing certain goals with the occult sciences, Bacon’s project intended the production of novelties and wonders beyond our wildest expectations and dreams. Indeed, there is something appalling, Faustian even, in Bacon’s ambition to conquer nature, including human nature. However, while sharing the goals of the occult sciences and approving their experiential or experimental bias, he scorns the theoretical underpinnings they offer and their lack of methodical perseverance. In fact, Bacon’s science of magic is resolutely anti-occultist. Second, she is editing (with Daniel Andersson and Rhodri Lewis) Volume V of the Oxford edition of Francis Bacon’s works, which comprises Bacon’s early philosophical writings to about 1611.

Advisory Board

Peter Beal (Sotheby’s/Institute of English Studies, University of London, retired)

Peter Beal, FBA, was for 25 years the English manuscripts expert (for nine of them a Director) at Sotheby’s, London. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1993; was J.P.R. Lyell Reader in Bibliography at Oxford, 1995–96; and in 2002 was appointed Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of English Studies, University of London. His major publications in the field of early modern manuscripts include Index of English Literary Manuscripts, 1450–1700 (4 vols, Mansell, 1980–93), In Praise of Scribes: Manuscripts and their Makers in Seventeenth-Century England (OUP, 1998), and A Dictionary of English Manuscript Terminology (OUP, 2008). He also co-founded and co-edited the near-annual series of volumes English Manuscript Studies 1100–1700 (1989- ).  From 2005 to 2013, he was principal researcher on CELM (Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts), an online adaptation and extension of the Index of English Literary Manuscripts.

J. W. Binns (Emeritus, University of York)

J. W. Binns was formerly Reader in Latin Literature at the University of York. He is the author of Intellectual Culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. The Latin Writers of the Age (Leeds, 1990) and the editor, with Shelagh Banks, of Gervase of Tilbury, Otia imperialia. Recreation for an Emperor (Oxford, 2002). He  was elected to the British Academy in 2004, and is currently a General Editor of Oxford Medieval Texts.

Mordechai Feingold (California Institute of Technology)

Mordechai Feingold is an intellectual and institutional historian of science, from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century. His research focuses on how the rise of modern science has transformed Western culture from a humanistic, religious, and unified culture during the sixteenth century into a scientific, technological, secular, and fragmented one by the nineteenth century.

Daniel Garber (Princeton University)

Ph.D. Harvard, 1975. Garber joined the Philosophy Department faculty at Princeton in 2002. He is also an Associate Member of both the Program in History of Science and the Politics Department. Garber’s principal interests are the relations between philosophy, science, and society in the period of the Scientific Revolution. Garber is the author of Descartes’ Metaphysical Physics (1992) and Descartes Embodied (2001), and is co-editor with Michael Ayers of the Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (1998). Most recently he published Leibniz: Body, Substance, Monad (2009). Garber is also the co-editor with Donald Rutherford of the Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy, an annual. He is currently working on a variety of topics, including studies of Aristotelianism and its opponents in early seventeenth-century France. In addition, he is the editor-in-chief of a new edition of the works of the seminal seventheenth-century thinker, Jacobus Fontialis.

Jill Kraye (Emeritus Professor, Warburg Institute)

B.A. in History (Departmental Honors with Great Distinction and University Honors with Great Distinction): University of California at Berkeley, 1969. M.A. in History: Columbia University, 1970. Ph.D in History (with distinction): Columbia University, 1991. Main research and supervision interests are: Renaissance humanism and philosophy, the later influence of classical philosophy (Aristotelianism, Platonism, Epicureanism and Stoicism), and European intellectual history, 1350-1650.

Markku Peltonen (University of Helsinki)

Markku Peltonen is a historian at the University of Helsinki whose writings focus on early modern England. He is author of multiple monographs, including Classical humanism and republicanism in English political thought 1570-1640 (Cambridge, 1995), The Duel in Early Modern England: Civility, Politeness and Honour (2006), and The Political Thought of the English Free State, 1649–1653 (Cambridge, 2022). Professor Peltonen also edited the Cambridge Companion to Bacon (1996).

Claire Preston (Queen Mary, University of London)

I joined Queen Mary in September 2013 after spending much of my career at Cambridge. I have also held posts at Oxford and Birmingham. My doctoral research considered word and image relationships in Sidney and Shakespeare; my subsequent research on Renaissance literature has been supported by awards from the British Academy and the Guggenheim Foundation, and I currently hold a major AHRC grant supporting the OUP’s Complete Works of Sir Thomas Browne (forthcoming from Oxford, 2015-2019), of which I am the general editor. My books include monographs on Edith Wharton (2000), Sir Thomas Browne (2005), the cultural history of bees (2006), and the poetics of seventeenth-century science (2015). My recent television and radio work includes The Century that Wrote Itself (with Adam Nicolson); For the Love of Honey (with Martha Kearney); and interviews on BBC Radio 3, National Public Radio (USA) and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. I was awarded the British Academy’s Rose Mary Crawshay Prize in 2005 and the British Society for Literature and Science Prize in 2015.

Heather Wolfe (Folger Shakespeare Library)

Heather Wolfe is Curator of Manuscripts and Associate Librarian at the Folger Shakespeare Library. Her first book, Elizabeth Cary, Lady Falkland: Life and Letters (2000) received the first annual Josephine Roberts Scholarly Edition Award from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women. She has written widely on the intersections between manuscript and print culture in early modern England, and edited The Trevelyon Miscellany of 1608 (2007), The Literary Career and Legacy of Elizabeth Cary (2007), and Letterwriting in Renaissance England (2004) (with Alan Stewart). Her essay “The Material Culture of Record-Keeping in Early Modern England,” co-written with Peter Stallybrass, received the 2019 Archival History Article Award from the Society of American Archivists. She is currently working on a book on writing paper in early modern England. She received her BA from Amherst College, her M.L.I.S. from UCLA, and her Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge.

Past Directors

Graham Rees †

The Oxford Francis Bacon critical edition was originally the brainchild of the late Professor Graham Rees (1944-2009), who was responsible for overseeing the publication of the first 6 volumes. Professor Rees was responsible for editing The Oxford Francis Bacon VI: Philosophical Studies c.1611–c.1619, The Oxford Francis Bacon XI: The Instauratio magna, Part II: Novum organum, The Oxford Francis Bacon XIII: Instauratio magna: Last Writings and, with Maria Wakely, The Oxford Francis Bacon XIII: Instauratio magna, Part III: Historia naturalis and Historia vitae.

Brian Vickers (Institute of English Studies, University of London)

Born 13 December 1937 in Cardiff, Great Britain. I was educated at St. Marylebone Grammar School, London, and Trinity College, Cambridge, where I took a double first in English and won both the Charles Oldham Shakespeare Scholarship and the Harness Prize. I was a Fellow and Director of Studies at Downing College and a University Lecturer in English. In 1972 I was appointed Professor (Ordinarius) at the University of Zürich, and in 1975 I moved to the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, where I also directed the Centre for Renaissance Studies. Subsequent to my retirement in 2003 I became a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. I am a Fellow of the British Academy, an Honorary Foreign Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an Honorary Fellow of Downing College, Cambridge, and an Honorary Visiting Professor at University College, London. In 2008 I was knighted for services to literary history. I was awarded the Ph. D. and D. Litt. by Cambridge, an Honorary D. Lit. by London University, and an Honorary Ph. D. by the University of Fribourg, Switzerland.