cems

Welcome to the Centre for Early Modern Studies

Oxford University offers unparallelled resources for the study of early modern English literature and has the world's largest concentration of specialists in this field. Based in the English Faculty, the Centre for Early Modern Studies serves as a central forum for research, conferences and graduate study, and aims to encourage collaboration across a wide range of related disciplines.

From the Blog

  • The CEMS workshop on ‘Describing, Analysing and Identifying Early Modern Handwriting: Methods and Issues’ (25 April) may have had an arcane title but it drew over 70 attendees. This showed how far the study of early modern manuscripts has burgeoned since the pioneering work of Peter Beal and others. Many issues remain to be resolved, however. Methods of describing, distinguishing and identifying hands differ...

The establishment of the Centre for Early Modern Studies was funded with a grant from the John Fell OUP Research Fund. Read more about John Fell and the history of the book.

Trinity Term 2013

Poetics and Knowledge
Fifth International CEMS Conference
T. S. Eliot Theatre, Merton College Thursday 23rd May, 10-6pm
Register here

Seminars in the next seven days

Week 5

Early Modern Catholicism Network
Caroline Bowden, 'Medicine and Health Care in the English Convents in Exile: Conventual Sources and Their Creators '
Tuesday 5pm, Radcliffe Humanities Building, Woodstock Road

Early Modern Literature Graduate Seminar
Richard McCoy , '"Take Pains, Be Perfect": Bottom as Actor in A Midsummer Night’s Dream"'
Tuesday 5pm, Breakfast Room, Merton College

Faculty of Music: Research colloquia
Edmund J Goering, 'Two voices of Mozart historiography'
Tuesday 5.15pm, Denis Arnold Hall, Faculty of Music

Belief and belonging in the early modern world
Josh Teplitsky, 'Building a library, collecting a reputation: a Jewish bibliophile in eighteenth-century Prague'
Wednesday 2pm, MacGregor Room, Oriel

Religion in the British Isles, 1400-1700
Gabriel Glickman, 'Robert Boyle and the project of a Protestant empire, 1660-1691'
Thursday 5pm, Seminar Room, Corpus Christi College

Literature and Medicine seminar series
Katherine Duncan-Jones, '“To move wild laughter in the throat of death”: palliative mirth in the age of Shakespeare'
Thursday, 6pm, Seminar Room, Radcliffe Humanities Building