Rachel E. Holmes
Dr Rachel E. Holmes was awarded her PhD, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, by St Andrews in 2014. Since then, she has been a Research Associate at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (CRASSH) and the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge, a Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Cambridge, and a Lecturer in Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature at University College London. She rejoins Wolfson in September 2022 as College Assistant Professor, Director of Studies, and Fellow in English.
Her doctoral work became her first book project, Clandestine Contracts: Marriage, Law, and Literary Adaptation in Early Modern Europe, completed with the aid of a Philip A. Knachel Fellowship from the Folger Institute and a Laura Bassi Scholarship. Clandestine Contracts draws on original-language literary and legal sources in English, Spanish, Italian, French, and Latin, to trace the journey across the early modern world of selected tales of clandestine marriage, the medieval institution of Christian marriage undertaken outside the recognition of legal authorities. Increasingly the object of anxiety and renegotiation in early modern Europe, clandestine marriage proliferated in literature of the period. Clandestine Contracts shows that the relationship between versions of its focal tales is shaped in part by legal anxieties about clandestine marriage and thereby demonstrates the centrality of legal questions to transnational literary adaptation. In doing so, Clandestine Contracts illustrates that legal sources are not simply another historical lens through which to engage with early modern literature but are instead a determining factor in literary representation.
To date, Rachel’s published work has been featured in Studies in Philology, Forum for Modern Language Studies, Renaissance Studies, The New Rambler, and contracted for edited volumes with Edinburgh, Oxford, and Cambridge University Presses. Broadly interested in literary and legal structures and processes of knowing, its subjects have included, for example, the threatening contractual agency of the early modern widow, truth-seeking and the effects of rhetorical vividness in literature, law, and emotion, and teaching social justice through Shakespeare.
She is currently working on her second monograph project, Rape Myths: Representing Consent and Culpability, 1275–1736, which addresses concerns crucial to both the early modern world and our present moment. Exploring the early modern roots of contemporary Anglo-American laws governing sexual transgressions, this book charts a transnational transformation in the representation of rape—figured through shifts in inwardness and intention in literature—from a medieval emphasis on rape as a form of theft to one increasingly concerned with personhood.
Alongside this monograph, she is writing a number of shorter pieces. The first of these, ‘Rome, 1612: The Precedence of “Chast Lucretia”’, is a forthcoming chapter (OUP) and part of her collaboration on the European Research Council project TextDiveGlobal which explores literary and legal ideas of precedence. She is also reflecting in other pieces on early modern women and law, the dramatic potential and legal engagements of the dialogic form of early modern language manuals, genre as a jurisdictional space, and on Shakespeare’s legal philology. As Series Co-Editor of Crossroads of Knowledge in Early Modern Literature (Palgrave), she is also working with Subha Mukherji on the volume Law and Poetics in Early Modern England and Beyond. Pedagogically, she has further research interests in sustainable study habits and the place of wellbeing in productivity.
Her doctoral work became her first book project, Clandestine Contracts: Marriage, Law, and Literary Adaptation in Early Modern Europe, completed with the aid of a Philip A. Knachel Fellowship from the Folger Institute and a Laura Bassi Scholarship. Clandestine Contracts draws on original-language literary and legal sources in English, Spanish, Italian, French, and Latin, to trace the journey across the early modern world of selected tales of clandestine marriage, the medieval institution of Christian marriage undertaken outside the recognition of legal authorities. Increasingly the object of anxiety and renegotiation in early modern Europe, clandestine marriage proliferated in literature of the period. Clandestine Contracts shows that the relationship between versions of its focal tales is shaped in part by legal anxieties about clandestine marriage and thereby demonstrates the centrality of legal questions to transnational literary adaptation. In doing so, Clandestine Contracts illustrates that legal sources are not simply another historical lens through which to engage with early modern literature but are instead a determining factor in literary representation.
To date, Rachel’s published work has been featured in Studies in Philology, Forum for Modern Language Studies, Renaissance Studies, The New Rambler, and contracted for edited volumes with Edinburgh, Oxford, and Cambridge University Presses. Broadly interested in literary and legal structures and processes of knowing, its subjects have included, for example, the threatening contractual agency of the early modern widow, truth-seeking and the effects of rhetorical vividness in literature, law, and emotion, and teaching social justice through Shakespeare.
She is currently working on her second monograph project, Rape Myths: Representing Consent and Culpability, 1275–1736, which addresses concerns crucial to both the early modern world and our present moment. Exploring the early modern roots of contemporary Anglo-American laws governing sexual transgressions, this book charts a transnational transformation in the representation of rape—figured through shifts in inwardness and intention in literature—from a medieval emphasis on rape as a form of theft to one increasingly concerned with personhood.
Alongside this monograph, she is writing a number of shorter pieces. The first of these, ‘Rome, 1612: The Precedence of “Chast Lucretia”’, is a forthcoming chapter (OUP) and part of her collaboration on the European Research Council project TextDiveGlobal which explores literary and legal ideas of precedence. She is also reflecting in other pieces on early modern women and law, the dramatic potential and legal engagements of the dialogic form of early modern language manuals, genre as a jurisdictional space, and on Shakespeare’s legal philology. As Series Co-Editor of Crossroads of Knowledge in Early Modern Literature (Palgrave), she is also working with Subha Mukherji on the volume Law and Poetics in Early Modern England and Beyond. Pedagogically, she has further research interests in sustainable study habits and the place of wellbeing in productivity.
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Selected Publications by Rachel E. Holmes
Contributors: Todd Butler, Andrea Frisch, Rachel E. Holmes, Toria Johnson, Michael Scham, Richard Stacey, Jackie Watson
Selected Talks by Rachel E. Holmes
Among these stories that turn on sexual matters is a lengthy narration of an encounter between Gerardo and Clara in which Clara is said to have ‘pretended a rape’. Or at least that is how Digges frames it. Reading English and Spanish versions of the tale comparatively reveals that Clara’s accusation and the story of the encounter diverge in certain respects. This paper is interested in the reframing of this narrative, and in the rhetorical differences between Spanish and English versions as an exploration of the story’s dialogue with each respective national legal context. By combining literary critical and legal historical methodologies with the methods employed by cultural-legal historians such as Laura Gowing, then, my argument marries close textual analysis and attention to genre to a consideration of broader cultural-legal implications. I am particularly interested here in the historical and cultural specificity of the linguistic and rhetorical tropes used in each case to discredit Clara, and to dismiss her as ‘that rauenous viper,’ and in mapping these tropes onto those of early modern English and Spanish court records.
A running theme throughout this roundtable discussion will be the role of literature in representing, mediating, and intervening in broader cultural debates about the relation between risk and knowledge. In particular, we will highlight the capacity of literary texts to translate concepts and practices associated with epistemological risk and risk-management (for example, conjecture, probabilism, or insurance) into the human realm, and to vividly portray their affective implications for individuals and societies.
Whilst we are interested in exploring what consideration of epistemic risk can reveal about the relation between apparently distinct fields of knowing in early modern England, we are also eager to probe at the disciplinary boundaries within which we operate as 21st-century scholars. We expect the discussion to grapple productively and self-reflexively with the different disciplinary expectations and methods which we bring to the study of early modern cultures of knowing, and we will invite contributions on this topic from representatives of other disciplines within the audience.
Format:
• Four 10 minute position papers by participants, each highlighting the relationship between risk and knowledge in early modern law, theology, natural philosophy, and economics, respectively. Each talk will focus on a short extract from a key text, which will be circulated to the audience as a handout
• 10 minute response from chair (Dr Richard Oosterhoff)
• 40 minutes for questions and discussion including the audience, led by chair
Contributors: Todd Butler, Andrea Frisch, Rachel E. Holmes, Toria Johnson, Michael Scham, Richard Stacey, Jackie Watson
Among these stories that turn on sexual matters is a lengthy narration of an encounter between Gerardo and Clara in which Clara is said to have ‘pretended a rape’. Or at least that is how Digges frames it. Reading English and Spanish versions of the tale comparatively reveals that Clara’s accusation and the story of the encounter diverge in certain respects. This paper is interested in the reframing of this narrative, and in the rhetorical differences between Spanish and English versions as an exploration of the story’s dialogue with each respective national legal context. By combining literary critical and legal historical methodologies with the methods employed by cultural-legal historians such as Laura Gowing, then, my argument marries close textual analysis and attention to genre to a consideration of broader cultural-legal implications. I am particularly interested here in the historical and cultural specificity of the linguistic and rhetorical tropes used in each case to discredit Clara, and to dismiss her as ‘that rauenous viper,’ and in mapping these tropes onto those of early modern English and Spanish court records.
A running theme throughout this roundtable discussion will be the role of literature in representing, mediating, and intervening in broader cultural debates about the relation between risk and knowledge. In particular, we will highlight the capacity of literary texts to translate concepts and practices associated with epistemological risk and risk-management (for example, conjecture, probabilism, or insurance) into the human realm, and to vividly portray their affective implications for individuals and societies.
Whilst we are interested in exploring what consideration of epistemic risk can reveal about the relation between apparently distinct fields of knowing in early modern England, we are also eager to probe at the disciplinary boundaries within which we operate as 21st-century scholars. We expect the discussion to grapple productively and self-reflexively with the different disciplinary expectations and methods which we bring to the study of early modern cultures of knowing, and we will invite contributions on this topic from representatives of other disciplines within the audience.
Format:
• Four 10 minute position papers by participants, each highlighting the relationship between risk and knowledge in early modern law, theology, natural philosophy, and economics, respectively. Each talk will focus on a short extract from a key text, which will be circulated to the audience as a handout
• 10 minute response from chair (Dr Richard Oosterhoff)
• 40 minutes for questions and discussion including the audience, led by chair
There will be a conference on the final strand of the project, Law, Monday 2 July - Wednesday 4 July 2018. Details to follow.
Previous events:
Crossroads of Knowledge: Literature and Theology in Early Modern England, Fitzwilliam College – Saturday 14 February 2015
Crossroads of Knowledge: Knowledge, Belief and Literature in Early Modern England, Trinity Hall - Thursday 7 May - Friday 8 May 2015
Interdisciplines: Drama, Economics and Law in Early Modern England, Fitzwilliam College - Saturday 17 October 2015
Change and Exchange, Trinity Hall - Friday 29 April - Saturday 30 April 2016
Matter at the Crossroads: Literature and Natural Philosophy in Early Modern England, Trinity Hall - Friday 25 November 2016
Crossroads of Knowledge: Early Modern Literature and Natural Philosophy, Alison Richard Building - Friday 3 March - Saturday 4 March 2017
Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme
(FP7/2007–2013) / ERC grant agreement no. 617849.