Professor Andrew Gordon

Biography

Andrew Gordon (BA, MA, PhD) is Professor of Renaissance Literature and Culture and Co-Director of Aberdeen's interdisciplinary Centre for Early Modern Studies. His research explores the intersection between textual forms and cultural practices across the early modern period. He has published widely on the literature and culture of early modern London, on letter-writing, and on textual transmission in both manuscript and print.

He is the author of Writing Early Modern London: Memory, Text and Community (Palgrave, 2013) as well as various collections including Cultures of Correspondence in Early Modern Britain (U Penn, 2016) and Women and Epistolary Agency in Early Modern Culture, 1450-1690 (Routledge, 2016), (co-ed w. J. Daybell), and The Arts of Remembrance in Early Modern England (Ashgate, 2013) (co-ed w. T. Rist). He also directed The Correspondence of Robert Beale (1541-1601) funded by a Hunter-Caldwell award. 

His current major project, Renaissance Cultures of the Foot, is a response to literary culture's deep investment in the hand. Drawing on recent anthropological work that posits a study of culture on the ground, this project explores how the literary imagination of the period is informed by the embodied experiences of ‘footwork’.  It places the lived experience of feet in dialogue with a series of cultural roles fulfilled by, and centred on, the foot. Publications that form part of this project include 'The Renaissance Footprint: The Material Trace in Print Culture from Dürer to Spenser’, Renaissance Quarterly 71:2 (2018), 478-529 https://doi.org/10.1086/698139.

In recent years he has developed creative collaborations worked with the director Alasdair Hunter, and both Aberdeen Performing Arts and Lesley Anne Rose of Open Road productions.

He welcomes enquiries from prospective graduate students in all aspects of early modern research, from those interested in material texts/textual transmission, cultural mobility, memory and community. 

Research Overview

BOOKS

• Cultures of Correspondence in Early Modern Britain, co-ed with J. Daybell (University of Pennsylvania Press, Material Texts Series, 2016)

• Women and Epistolary Agency in Early Modern Culture, 1450-1690, co-ed with J. Daybell (Routledge, 2016).

• Writing Early Modern London: Memory, Text and Community (Palgrave, Early Modern Literature In History, 2013).

• The Arts of Remembrance in Early Modern England: Memorial Cultures of the Post-Reformation, co-edited with Thomas Rist (Ashgate, 2013). See the introduction.

• Literature, Mapping and the Politics of Space in Early Modern Britain, co-edited with Bernard Klein (CUP 2001, pb 2011). See the introduction.

JOURNAL SPECIAL ISSUES

• Pageantry and Performance in Early Modern London. Special Issue of The London Journal, 47:1 (2022), co-ed with Tracey Hill.
• New Directions in the Study of Early Modern Correspondence  Special issue of Lives And Letters Vol 4, no. 1 (2012), co-ed with James Daybell.
• Citizenship Beyond the State A special issue of the journal Citizenship Studies (2007), co-ed with Trevor Stack.  See the co-written introduction, 'Citizenship Beyond the State: Thinking with Early Modern Citizenship in the Contemporary World'

 ARTICLES AND CHAPTERS

• 'Textual Environments', in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Authorship, ed. Rory Loughnane and Will Sharpe, forthcoming (OUP, 2025)
• ‘Letters. Philip Sidney and the Textual Traffic of Letters’, in The Oxford Handbook of Philip Sidney, ed. Catherine Bates (OUP, 2024).
• 'Representations of Early Modern London in Literature, 1580-1615', in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature (OUP, 2024).
• ‘Moving London: Pageantry and Performance in the Early Modern City’, co-authored with Tracey Hill, London Journal 47:1 (2022), 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1080/03058034.2022.1992210
• ‘The Renaissance Footprint: The Material Trace in Print Culture from Dürer to Spenser’, Renaissance Quarterly 71:2 (2018), 478-529 https://doi.org/10.1086/698139.
  
• ‘Eastward Ho and the Traffic of the Stage’, in Travel and Drama in Early Modern England: The Journeying Play, ed Claire Jowitt and David McInnis (CUP, 2018)
  
• ‘The Paper Parish: The Parish Register and the Reformation of Parish Memory in Early Modern London’, Memory Studies Special Issue 11:1 (2018). Memory and the Early Modern eds Kate Chedgzoy, Elspeth Graham , Katharine Hodgkin and Ramona Wray, 51-68 https://doi.org/10.1177/1750698017736838.
• ‘Material Fictions: Counterfeit Correspondence and the Culture of Copying in Early Modern England’, in Cultures of Correspondence in Early Modern Britain, ed. A. Gordon and J. Daybell (U Penn Press, 2016), 85-109.
• ‘The Early Modern Letter-Opener’, co-authored with James Daybell, in Cultures of Correspondence in Early Modern Britain, ed. A Gordon and J. Daybell (U Penn Press,  2016), 1-26.
• ‘Recovering Agency in the Epistolary Traffic of Frances, Countess of Essex and Jane Daniell’, in Women and Epistolary Agency in Early Modern Culture, 1450-1690, ed. A. Gordon and J. Daybell (Routledge, 2016), 182-206.
• ‘Living Letters’, co-authored with James Daybell in Women and Epistolary Agency in Early Modern Culture, 1450-1690, ed. A. Gordon and J. Daybell (Routledge, 2016), 1-19.
• ‘Materiality and the Streetlife of the Early Modern City’, in The Routledge Handbook of Material Culture in Early Modern Europe ed. D. Gaimster, T. Hamling and C. Richardson (Routledge, 2016),  126-36.
• ‘The Panyer Alley Boy’, object study, The Routledge Handbook of Material Culture in Early Modern Europe ed. D. Gaimster, T. Hamling and C. Richardson (Routledge, 2016), 215-6.
• 'The Ghost of Pasquill: The Comic Afterlife and the Afterlife of Comedy on the Elizabethan Stage', in The Arts of Remembrance in Early Modern England ed. Gordon and T. Rist (Ashgate, 2013), 229-46.
• 'Essex's Last Campaign: The Fall of the Earl of Essex and Manuscript Circulation', in Essex: The Cultural Impact of an Elizabethan Courtier, ed. Lisa Hopkins and Annaliese F. Connolly (MUP, 2013), 153-68.
• 'The Puritan Widow and the Spatial Arts in Middleton's Urban Drama', in Thomas Middleton in Context ed. Suzanne Gossett (CUP, 2011).
• 'Donne and Late Elizabethan Court Politics', in Oxford Handbook of John Donne ed. J. Shami, T. Hester and D. Flynn (OUP, 2011), 460-70.
• 'Copycopia, or, the uses of copied correspondence in court culture: A case study', in Material Readings of Early Modern Culture: Texts and Social Practices, 1580-1700 ed. J. Daybell and P. Hinds (Palgrave, 2010), 65-81.
• '"A fortune of Paper walls": the letters of Francis Bacon and the earl of Essex', English Literary Renaissance 37:3 (2007), 319-336.
• '"If my sign could speak"; the signboard and the visual culture of early modern London', Early Theatre 8:1 (2005), 35-51.
• 'Overseeing and Overlooking: John Stow and the Surveying of the City' in John Stow (1525-1604) and the Making of the English Past, ed Ian Gadd and Alexandra Gillespie (British Library, 2004), 81-88.
• 'The Act of Libel: Conscripting Civic Space in Early Modern England', Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 32:2 (Spring 2002), 375-397. Downloadable pdf file appears courtesy of JMEMS.
• 'Performing London: the map and the city in ceremony' in Literature, Mapping and the Politics of Space in Early Modern Britain, ed. Gordon and Klein (CUP, 2001), 69-88.

ONLINE RESOURCES

• The Correspondence of Robert Beale (1541-1601), dir. A Gordon. Research Fellow, Dr Rachel MacGregor. Early Modern Letters Online, 2017. 

REFERENCE

• 'Jane Daniell (nee de la Kethulle) [also Rehova/Ryhova], b.c.1565 d. after 1612, autobiographer', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2021) 
• 'John Daniell of Daresbury, 1544-1610', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2021) 
• 'John Stow', 'Richard Grafton', and 'Robert Devereux, 2nd earl of Essex', in Encyclopedia of English Renaissance Literature ed. Alan Stewart and Garrett Sullivan jr (Blackwells, 2012).

Current Research

His current major project, Renaissance Cultures of the Foot, is a response to literary culture's deep investment in the hand. Drawing on recent anthropological work that posits a study of culture on the ground, this project explores how the literary imagination of the period is informed by the embodied experiences of ‘footwork’.  It places the lived experience of feet in dialogue with a series of cultural roles fulfilled by, and centred on, the foot. Publications that form part of this project include 'The Renaissance Footprint: The Material Trace in Print Culture from Dürer to Spenser’, Renaissance Quarterly 71:2 (2018), 478-529 https://doi.org/10.1086/698139.

Knowledge Exchange

Recently he has developed creative collaborations with Aberdeen Performing Arts and the director Alasdair Hunter, resulting in What Country Friends Is This? a work combining research on early modern touring players with experiences of members of the city's Polish community, that featured in the Silver City Stories festival. Reimagined with the writer Lesley-Anne Rose of Open Road Productions, and funded by Creative Scotland, it was performed at Footdee Community centre in 2019. A new collaboration with Alasdair Hunter, used lockdown recorded performances of letters from the plays of Shakespeare and early modern culture, as part of a reflection on absence, isolation, and the place of theatre under the title A Merry Note. You can see clips of the performed letters recorded in isolation here.

Teaching Responsibilities

EL2011: Encounters with Shakespeare

EL30CP: Page and Stage: Renaissance Writing, 1500-1640

EL40AD: Staging the City: Renaissance Urban Drama

EL5590: Locations and Dislocations: The Role of Place in Literature