Dr Máté Vince, PhD (Warwick), MA (Eötvös Loránd University Budapest)

Profile

I joined Queen Mary to work on the European Research Council-funded ‘Textuality and Diversity: A Literary History of Europe and its Global Connections, 1545-1661’ project with Warren Boutcher. I received my PhD in English and Comparative Literature at the University of Warwick, having studied English, Latin, and Aesthetics in Budapest (Eötvös Loránd University). After completing my PhD, I co-edited the critical edition of the ‘Correspondence of Isaac Casaubon in England’ with Paul Botley (Droz, 2018: https://warwick.ac.uk/casaubon). Before Queen Mary, I held an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship at Trinity College Dublin, where I completed a monograph on the rhetoric of dissimulation in the early modern period. Over the years, I have taught medieval and early modern literature, Middle English and Latin translation, palaeography, and intellectual history at Trinity College Dublin, University College Dublin, Warwick, and Eötvös Loránd University.

Research

Research Interests:

• Renaissance Literature (English, Neo-Latin)
• Translation Studies
• Comparative Literature
• History of Rhetoric
• Intellectual History

Recent and On-Going Research

My research focuses on topics at the intersection of early modern comparative literature, intellectual history, and classical reception. Currently, I work with Warren Boutcher on ‘Textuality and Diversity: A Literary History of Europe and its Global Connections, 1545-1661’ (TextDiveGlobal, https://www.qmul.ac.uk/textdiveglobal/). The project is funded by the European Research Council and will produce an interdisciplinary literary history of early modern Europe and its global connections.

My recently completed monograph is the first book-length study of ‘equivocation’ (or mental reservation), a special type of ambiguity developed in the 16^th century and widely debated after the Gunpowder Plot. Catholics and Protestants agreed that communication puts certain moral obligations on those who are involved. One such obligation was truthfulness: a speaker was expected to say what they consider to be true, as fully and plainly as possible. But what was a speaker supposed to do when they felt that the information they were required to give is potentially dangerous? For instance, it would betray the whereabouts of an innocent person who is being persecuted unjustly. By looking at English, Latin, and French literature, textbooks of rhetoric, theological controversies, and correspondence, the book explores the solutions that early modern theories of meaning provided for concealing one’s knowledge without lying about it, and for detecting such concealments. Beyond the monograph, I have published articles on how equivocation in early modern education of language and interpretation (rhetoric and dialectic) influenced Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and on various forms of dissimulation in Measure for Measure, demonstrating their links to 16-17th-century debates about when a marriage vow is valid.

I am particularly interested in the intrinsically multilingual nature of early modern literature, and much of my work focuses on recovering the connections between neo-Latin and vernacular literatures. I have written about the reception of Cicero, Quintilian, and Aristotle in early modern school and university textbooks, and their impact on English literature. In another article, I have explored the reception of Virgil and the politics of classical imitation, translation, and adaptation in Hungarian baroque epic poetry, in the context of the Counter-Reformation and Ottoman expansion. Closely related to my research on classical reception is my interest in textual editing. I have edited the correspondence of Isaac Casaubon (1559-1614), the most renowned classical scholar of his time who also worked as King James I’s theological advisor (Droz, 2018: https://warwick.ac.uk/casaubon). More recently, I have annotated the 19^th-century poet-antiquarian-clergyman William Barnes’s translations from Greek and Latin for his Complete Works (OUP, forthcoming).

Publications

Critical editions

The Correspondence of Isaac Casaubon in England, 1610–14, Critical Edition, 4 vols, edited, introduction, critical apparatus and notes by Paul Botley and Máté Vince, Geneva: Droz, 2018: https://warwick.ac.uk/casaubon.

‘Standard English poems translated from Latin and Greek’ ed. by Máté Vince, in The Complete Poems of William Barnes. Volume 3, gen. ed. Thomas Burton et al., Oxford: OUP, forthcoming 2023.

Peer-reviewed articles and book chapters

‘The Porter and the Jesuits: Macbeth and the Forgotten History of Equivocation’, Renaissance Studies 35.5 (November 2021), 837-856: https://doi.org/10.1111/rest.12728.

‘Casaubon, Eudaemon-Joannes, Prideaux, and tarnished reputations: A (not entirely) scholarly controversy’, Erudition and the Republic of Letters, 4.4 (2019), 352–395: https://doi.org/10.1163/24055069-00403004.

‘Virgil in Ottoman Hungary: The Aeneid and Miklós Zrínyi’s The Siege of Sziget (1651)’, in P. Mack and J. North eds, The Afterlife of Virgil (Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies Supplement 136) London, 2017, 85–99.

‘“utrum sententia vera sit”: Concepts of Ambiguity in Late-Sixteenth-Century Education in England’, Intellectual History Review, 26.2 (2016), 185–201: http://doi.org/10.1080/17496977.2016.1145387

‘“Tongue far from heart”: Disguises, Lies and Casuistry in Measure for Measure’, in E. Mason ed., Reading the Abrahamic Faiths: Rethinking Religion and Literature, Bloomsbury, 2015, 143–156.

‘Schools’, in Jennifer Richards and Virginia Cox eds, The Cambridge History of Rhetoric, Vol. 3: Rhetoric in the Renaissance, Cambridge University Press (forthcoming 2023).

Edited volumes

Confrontations and Interactions: Essays on Cultural Memory, edited by Bálint Gárdos, Ágnes Péter, Natália Pikli, Máté Vince, Budapest: L’Harmattan, 2011.

Shakespeare-olvasatok a strukturalizmus után, I–II [Shakespeare Criticism after Structuralism. A Reader, 2 vols], ed. by Bálint Gárdos, Géza Kállay and Máté Vince, introduction by Máté Vince, Budapest: ELTE Eötvös Kiadó, 2013.: http://www.eltereader.hu/media/2014/04/Shakespeare_2_READER.pdf

https://www.eltereader.hu/media/2015/04/Shakespeare_3_READER.pdf

Translations

Lisa Jardine, ‘Cultural Confusion and Shakespeare’s Learned Heroines’, in Shakespeare-olvasatok a strukturalizmus után, II. 129–154. https://www.eltereader.hu/media/2015/04/Shakespeare_3_READER.pdf

Margreta De Grazia, Peter Stallybrass, ‘The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text’, in Shakespeare-olvasatok a strukturalizmus után, II. 237–275.: https://www.eltereader.hu/media/2015/04/Shakespeare_3_READER.pdf

Book reviews

András Kiséry, Hamlet’s Moment. Drama and Political Knowledge in Early Modern England, HJEAS XXV/2 (November 2019): https://ojs.lib.unideb.hu/hjeas/article/view/7148/6561.

Nicholas Hardy, Criticism and Confession. The Bible in the Seventeenth Century Republic of Letters, EHR CXXXIV. 568 (June 2019): https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/cez096.

Public Engagement

In 2018, I organised public engagement events at the Dublin Festival of History and Culture Night for the Irish Research Council (http://research.ie).