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Professor Joad Raymond

Joad

Professor of Renaissance Studies | Deputy Chair of Examinations, Co-Director of the Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies

Email: j.raymond@qmul.ac.uk

Profile

I work on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century news communication, Milton, pamphleteering and print culture, and poetry. I studied at UEA and Oxford, and taught at Oxford, Aberdeen and UEA before moving to Queen Mary University of London. My first (edited) book I published as a graduate student, and it set me on a path I couldn’t leave: Making The News: An Anthology of the Newsbooks of Revolutionary England 1641-1660 (Moreton-in-Marsh, 1993). Subsequent books include The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks, 1641-1649 (Oxford, 1996; revised paperback 2005), Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge, 2003; paperback 2006), and Milton’s Angels: the Early-Modern Imagination (Oxford, 2010; paperback 2013). I have also edited a number of essay collections on news, angels and on Milton. Of these I am particularly fond of The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, vol. 1: Cheap Print in Britain and Ireland to 1660 (Oxford, 2011), and especially News Networks in Early Modern Europe (Brill, 2016). This last was the legacy of my two-year (2011-13) Leverhulme-funded research network with the same title, and it is a paean to Europe. 

I have just finished history of news communication in early modern Europe  for Penguin books. Expect it to offer a new, international perspective on the flows of news around early-modern Europe. I have also recently completed – and am revising for publication – an edition Milton’s Latin defences for the new Oxford edition of Milton’s works.

I also research, write and record music – future folk music – under the name The Unattached.

 

Undergraduate Teaching

I teach on:

  • ESH267: Renaissance Literary Culture
  • ESH6017: In an Ideal World: Utopias from Plato to the Present
  • ESH7020-A21 News Communication in Early Modern Europe

Postgraduate Teaching

 

 

Research

Research Interests:

  • news communication in early modern Europe (newspapers, avvisi, speech etc)
  • John Milton
  • politics and print culture in sixteenth and seventeenth century Britain
  • the history of the booktrade
  • poetry, politics and religion in the seventeenth century

Though I’d be interested in supervising PhDs on other things: recent and current topics include news of men’s fashion, and breast feeding. It just needs to be stimulating and clever. So if you have an idea, do pitch it to me.

Recent and On-Going Research:

I have just finished history of news communication in early modern Europe  for Penguin books. Expect it to offer a new, international perspective on the flows of news around early-modern Europe.

I have recently completed – and am revising for publication – an edition Milton’s Latin defences for the new Oxford edition of Milton’s works, edited by Thomas N. Corns and Gordon Campbell. This is an extensively annotated parallel translation: expect it to bring some new contexts to bear, and to emphasise the European nature of Milton’s writing, and the interplay between English and Latin. During the course of my research I discovered an unknown contemporary translation of Milton’s first Defence into English (see here: https://doi.org/10.1111/milt.12191). This translation will be included in my edition.

I also research the relationship between music and history, and write and record music. See Songs for the Prophets (Where it’s at is where you are, 2019), a 77 minute album about C17th prophets https://wiaiwya.bandcamp.com/album/songs-for-the-prophets

 

 

Publications

Select Publications

Books in progress and under contract

News in Early Modern Europe: A History of News Communication, 1450-1815. Penguin Books. 

(ed.) The Complete Works of John Milton, vol. 7: The Latin Defences. Gen. eds. Thomas N. Corns and Gordon Campbell. Oxford University Press. Draft submitted July 2017; revised version to be submitted 2022. Research supported by a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship. 

Songs for the Prophets, with illustrations. Currently looking for publisher. 

Single-author monographs 

Milton’s Angels: the Early-Modern Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010; paperback 2013). Winner of the Roland H. Bainton Prize for Literature awarded by the Sixteenth Century Society. 

Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003; paperback 2006). 

The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks, 1641-1649 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996; paperback edition with new preface 2005). 

 

Edited books 

(ed.) with Noah Moxham, News Networks in Early Modern Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2016). In this I wrote or co-wrote the first 4 chapters, or 129 pp. 

(ed.) ‘Transcript of Thomas Margetts’ contemporary translation of Milton’s First Defence’, < http://www.cemmn.net/margetts/ > (online, 12/2/16). Now removed – coming out in the OUP edition. 

(ed.) with Juraj Kittler, John Nerone. Paper Scarcity and its Impact on Print Culture / Historical Parallels with the Spectrum Scarcity Debate. Media History, 21.1 (2015) Special issue. 

(ed.) with Jeroen Salman and Roeland Harms, Not Dead Things: The dissemination of popular print in Britain, Italy, and the Low Countries, 1500-1900 (Library of the Written Word; Leiden: Brill, 2013). 

(ed.) Conversations with Angels: Essays Towards a History of Spiritual Communication, 1100-1700 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 

(ed.) The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, vol. 1: Cheap Print in Britain and Ireland to 1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Winner of the Roland H. Bainton Prize for a reference work awarded by the Sixteenth Century Society. 

(ed.) News Networks in Seventeenth-century Britain and Europe (London: Routledge, 2006); also published as a special double issue of Media History 11.1/2 (April 2005). 

(ed.) with Graham Parry, Milton and the Terms of Liberty (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2002). Received the Irene Samuel Award of the Milton Society of America for the most distinguished collection on Milton published in 2002. 

(ed.) News, Newspapers and Society in Early Modern Britain. Published as a special issue of Prose Studies (1998[9]); and as a book (London: Frank Cass, 1999). 

(ed.) Making The News: An Anthology of the Newsbooks of Revolutionary England 1641-1660 (Moreton-in-Marsh: Windrush Press, 1993).

Chapters in press 

 ‘The Politics and Meaning of Thomason’s Tracts’, in Giles Mandelbrote and Jason Peacey (eds.), Collecting Revolution: The History and Importance of the Thomason Tracts (Leiden: Brill, tbc).

Selected chapters in books 

‘Spectacles of Woe: Reporting Disasters’ in Jackie Harrison and Luke McKernan, eds., Making the News (British Library, 2022). 

‘Newsletters’ in Ann Blair, Paul Duguid, Anja-Silvia Goering and Anthony Grafton, eds., Information: A Historical Companion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021). 

‘“Small portals”: Marvell’s ‘Horatian Ode’, print culture and literary history’, in Matthew Augustine and Christopher D’Addario (eds.), Remapping Seventeenth-Century Literature: Histories, Contexts, Networks, a collection of essays in honour of Steven Zwicker (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), 33-55. 

‘Milton in Sweden’, Tracey Sowerby and Jo Craigwood, eds., Cultures of Diplomacy and Literary Writing in the Early Modern World: New Approaches. (Cambridge University Press, 2019), 141-45. 

‘Matter, Sociability and Space: Some Ways of Looking at the History of Books’, in Daniel Bellingradt et al. (eds.), Books in Motion in Early Modern Europe: Beyond Production, Circulation, and Consumption, New Directions in Book History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 289-95. 

‘The Uses of Serendipity’, in Harriet Phillips and Claire Bryony Williams, eds., A Handbook of Editing Early Modern Texts (Farnham: Ashgate, 2017). 

‘Censorship in Law and Practice in Seventeenth-Century England: Milton’s Areopagitica’, in Lorna Hutson, eds. Oxford Handbook to English Law and Literature, 1500-1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 507-528. Volume won the Bainton Prize. 

4 chapters in News Networks in Early Modern Europe: ‘News Networks in Early Modern Europe’ (pp. 1-18), ‘European Postal Networks’ (pp. 19-63), ‘The Lexicons of Early Modern News’ (pp. 64-101), ‘News Networks: Putting the ‘News’ and the ‘Networks’ Back in’ (pp. 102-29). 

‘Milton’s Angels’, in Louis Schwartz (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Paradise Lost (Cambridge University Press, 2014), 138-51. 

‘Cheap Print and Popular Reading During the Civil Wars, 1637-60’, in Robert DeMaria, Heesok Chang and Samantha Zacher (eds.), A Companion to British Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 2014), 309-25. 

‘Exporting Impartiality’, in Anita Traninger and Kathryn Murphy (eds.) The Emergence of Impartiality: Towards a Prehistory of Objectivity, series: Intersections, 31 (Leiden: Brill, 2014 [2013]), 141-67. 

‘Introduction: distribution and the book in Europe’, and ‘International news and the seventeenth-century English newspaper’, in Raymond, Jeroen Salman and Roeland Harms (eds.), Not Dead Things: The dissemination of popular print in Britain, Italy, and the Low Countries, 1500-1900 (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 1-29, 229-51. 

‘News Writing’, in Andrew Hadfield (ed.), The Oxford Handbook to English Prose, c.1500-1640 (Oxford University Press, 2013), 396-414. 

‘Marchamont Nedham: polemic, analysis, allegiance’, in Laura Knoppers (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Literature and the English Revolution (Oxford UP, 2012), 375-93. 

‘El Rostro Europeo del Periodismo Inglés’, in Roger Chartier y Carmen Espejo (eds.), La aparición del periodismo en Europa: Comunicación y propaganda en el Barroco (Madrid: Marcial Pons Historia, 2012), 177-206. 

‘A Cromwellian Center?’ In Steven Zwicker and Derek Hirst, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Andrew Marvell (Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 140-57. 

‘The Rhetorical Design of Milton’s Defences’. In The Oxford Companion to Milton, eds. Nicholas McDowell and Nigel Smith (Oxford University Press, 2009; winner of the Irene Samuel Award of the Milton Society of America), pp. 272-90. 

‘Look Homeward Angel: Guardian Angels and Nationhood in Seventeenth-century Britain’. In David Loewenstein and Paul Stephens, eds., Early Modern Nationalism and Milton’s England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008; winner of the Irene Samuel Award of the Milton Society of America), pp. 139-72. 

‘Angels and the Voice of Prophecy in Early Modern Britain’, in Line Cottegnies, Claire Gheeraert-Graffeuille, Tony Gheeraert, Anne-Marie Miler-Blaise et Gisèle Venet, eds., Les Voix de Dieu: Litterature et prophétie en Angleterre et en France à l'âge baroque (Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2008), pp. 137-53. 

‘Perfect Speech: The Public Sphere and Communication in Seventeenth-Century England’. In Willy Maley and Alex Benchimol, eds., Spheres of Influence: Intellectual and Cultural Publics from Shakespeare to Habermas (Frankfurt: Lang, 2006), pp. 43-69. 

‘Introduction: Networks, Communication, Practice’. In Raymond, ed., News Networks in Seventeenth-Century Britain and Europe (London: Routledge, 2006) and Media History 11.1/2 (April 2005), pp. 1-17.

Selected journal articles 

‘Thomas Margetts: A New Milton manuscript, and a New Defender of the People of England’, Milton Quarterly 53.1 (2017): 1-22.  

‘Les libelles internationaux à la période moderne : étude préliminaire’, Etudes Episémè, 26 (2014), <http://episteme.revues.org./297>. 

‘In 1649, to St George’s Hill’ (review article on Gerrard Winstanley). Huntington Library Quarterly, 75.3 (Autumn, 2012): 429-46. 

‘Newspapers: a national or international phenomenon?’ Media History, 18.3-4 (2012): 1-9.  

‘Visual Anorexia in Early Modern British Print Culture’ (review essay), Oxford Art Journal, 34.3 (2011): 488-93.  

‘Describing Publicity in Early Modern England’. HLQ 67 (2004): 101-29. 

‘Seventeenth Century Print Culture’, History Compass, 2 (2004): 1–12 <https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1478-0542.2004.00123.x>. 

‘Complications of Interest: Milton, Scotland, Ireland, and National Identity in 1649’. Review of English Studies 55.220 (2004): 315-45.                                                    

‘Framing Liberty: Marvell’s First Anniversary and the Instrument of Government’. Huntington Library Quarterly 62 (2001): 313-50. 

‘Review Article: The History of Newspapers and the History of Journalism: two disciplines or one?’. Media History 5 (1999): 223-32. 

‘John Hall’s A Method of History: A Book Lost and Found (with transcription)’. English Literary Renaissance 28.2 (1998): 267-98. 

Supervision

I would welcome enquiries from potential doctoral students, including non-anglophone students, interested in any of the areas of my research. I am also happy to discuss partially-developed ideas with a view to finding a focus or a persuasive outline for a research proposal.

I am keen to be persuaded that things are interesting ...

Public Engagement

Appearance in and consulting work for ‘To Kill a King’ (DSP TV), screened on BBC4 17–19 December 2019. 

Appearance in ‘Downfall’, episode 1 (DSP TV), screened on BBC4 9 July 2019; <https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/proginfo/2019/28/charles-downfall-of-a-king-ep1>. This was BBC4’s 2nd highest rating documentary for the year. 

Interview on ‘Charles I: Downfall of a King’, BBC4, 9 July 2019.

Podcast on Areopagitica for Macat media, with Dotun Adebayo, 2014.

Programme on women in Restoration England with Lucy Worsley on BBC2 in Spring 2012.

Various appearances in Independent, Observer, Sidney Herald around angels in 2010.

‘The Poetry of History: Marvell’s “Horatian Ode on Cromwell’s Return from England”’, BBC Radio 4, 16 Apr. 2006. With Kevin Sharpe and Jonathan Bate.

‘In Our Time’, ‘C17th Print Culture’, BBC Radio 4, 26 Jan. 2006 <http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p003hycj>

BBC Radio 4 ‘Word of Mouth’, interview on angels, 24 Dec. 2005.

Mentorn TV documentary, ‘Blood on Our Hands’, Channel 4, Feb. 2005.

BBC2 Timewatch program ‘Killer Wave’ (October Films), interview on the flood of 1607; broadcast spring 2005.

Radio Scotland, interview for documentary on popular beliefs in angels, 2004.

Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Radio National, interview for ‘Cultures of Journalism’, 28 Aug. 2004. <http://www.abc.net.au/rn/learning/lifelong/stories/s1189608.htm>

http://www.networkcentre.uk/funding/songs-for-the-prophets/

http://www.peoplespalaceprojects.org.uk/en/projects/contemporary-narratives-laboratory/

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