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Prof Sue Wiseman

Positions held:
  • Professor of Seventeenth Century Literature, School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication
  • Research

    Research

    Research overview

    Sue Wiseman’s research interests are in Renaissance and
    seventeenth-century writing and culture.

    At present she is researching non-elite writing in seventeenth century England.

    Specific current interests iclude the places of the 'English Renaissance' Ìý- from the elites and yeomen of Derbyshire to the widows of Shoreditch as
    suggested by literature, culture and material evidence.

    She is interested in the literature of change and transformation;
    women's writing; writing of the early seventeenth century and writing
    of the Civil War and the writing of 'love'and on London.

    She has recently written on topics including the captivity narrative, complaint, the literary and legal generation of the idea of the 'gypsy'; wolf-transformation, wild children.

    In recent publications she has discussed writers including Katherine
    Austen, John Donne, Elizabeth Delaval, Celia Fiennes, Mary Rowlandson, John Eliot Lodowick Muggleton.

    She is PI on the project Written Worlds.

    .

  • Supervision and teaching

    Supervision and teaching

    Supervision

    Supervisions within ÌÇÐÄlogoÈë¿Ú:
    14

    Sue Wiseman has experience of supervising to completion Phds on love
    elegy; sixteenth- and seventeenth-century drama and theatre; the popular discourse of the supernatural; the
    writing of death; women's poetry of the Renaissance and
    seventeenth-century; the writing of civil war. the psalms.

    She welcomes both proposals grounded in literary studies and thoseÌýbuilding outwards from such study towards other disciplines and areas.

    Current doctoral researchers

    • TORBEN LUND
      Nature of supervision:
      JOINT PRINCIPAL SUPERVISOR
      Title of thesis:
      How portraiture can explore the fashioning of Protestant Identity in the sixteenth century: a comparative study of England, Denmark-Norway and Sweden.
    • MELISSA MARSH
      Nature of supervision:
      PRINCIPAL SUPERVISOR,
      Title of thesis:
      The Psalms in Seventeenth Century Experience
    • ANDREW REGAN
      Nature of supervision:
      JOINT PRINCIPAL SUPERVISOR,
      Title of thesis:
      The Reception of Classical Texts in the Works of Robert Burton and Sir Thomas Browne

    Doctoral alumni since 2013-14

    • JANE BASSETT
      Nature of supervision:
      Principal Supervisor
      Title of thesis:
      Elegy and the Politics of Grief
      Description:

      My thesis asks what it meant to write elegy over the years 1640 to 1670, in an England shaken by the dramas of the Civil Wars, the regicide and the moves from monarchy to Commonwealth and Protectorate and back. Men and women writers from all sides of the political divides drew on different elegiac traditions and conventions over this period to mourn their dead, and how they used and transformed elegy as the political and military crisis in English society deepened and bitterness and anger intensified will be explored and evaluated in the light of extended critical debate as to how and in what ways elegy changed over this time, and the extent to which it survived as a genre under such pressures.

      The first chapter is concerned with how elegy developed over the period between 1641 and the end of 1648 as the Civil War ended and the trial and execution of Charles I neared. It asks how and in what ways elegists, both Royalist and Parliamentarian, drew on the traditions of public funeral elegy that had developed following the deaths of Sir Philip Sidney in 1586 and Prince Henry in 1612. It is argued that the polarisation and bitterness engendered by the Civil War led to many of the conventions of elegy and memorial writing being placed under increasing pressure, but that ultimately elegy’s flexibility as a genre sees its survival. The chapter is organised around three key sets of events: 1641 to 1642, as the country moved towards Civil War; 1646 and theÌýÌýdeath of the Earl of Essex; 1648 and the deaths of royalist martyrs Lucas and Lisle, executed after the siege of Colchester in 1648, and their Parliamentarian counterpart Thomas Rainsborough assassinated two months later. It is argued that all three men are presented as martyrs, and their deaths used to attack their opponents in a highly polemical way.Ìý

      The second chapter explores Royalist funeral elegy written in the wake of the regicide and reflecting the disbelief, rage and grief felt by Royalists. It is organised around detailed consideration of two collections of royalist elegies: the anonymousÌýVaticinium Votivum, andÌýMonumentum Regale,Ìýwhich has been attributed to John Cleveland, and asks what were the purposes of the collators and writers of these elegies and how they used the elegiac forms available to them. The collections are explored in the context of the political polarisation that prevailed at the end of the second Civil War and it is argued that both collections reflect the ways in which funeral elegy had developed over the latter stages of the Civil War and become more polemical and satirical, while still drawing on key conventions such as praise and panegyric and expressions of griefÌý

      The final chapter explores the overtly political elegies of Royalist Hester Pulter and those of republican Lucy Hutchinson, mourning her husband, the regicide John Hutchinson who died in prison in 1664. Both privileged and highly educated women, the chapter considers how their writing was shaped by the constraints placed on women and by the personal and political isolation they both experienced. It asks how and for what purposes they drew on elegiac traditions, including both that of funeral elegy as it had developed over the Civil Wars and English pastoral elegy, and in what ways they could be said to have transformed elegy.Ìý

      Ìý

      Ìý

      Ìý

      Awarded:
      2022
    • SAMANTHA SMITH
      Nature of supervision:
      Principal Supervisor
      Title of thesis:
      The Politics of Publishing: Unlocking Cabala: Mysteries of State and Government 1653-1691
      Awarded:
      2018
    • KIERRI PRICE
      Nature of supervision:
      Joint Principal Supervisor, to
      Awarded:
      2024
    • MASUDA QURESHI
      Nature of supervision:
      Principal Supervisor,
      Awarded:
      2022
    • GEORGINA TREVELYAN-CLARK
      Nature of supervision:
      Joint Principal Supervisor,
      Awarded:
      2025
    • JENNY REID
      Nature of supervision:
      Principal Supervisor
      Awarded:
      2024
    • ROBERT STEARN
      Nature of supervision:
      Principal Supervisor
      Title of thesis:
      Managing Skill, 1680¿1730: Domestic Service and the Forms of Practical Knowledge
      Description:

      This thesis is a study of how skill in the specific realm of service was understood in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Britain. It examines how the aptitudes that were elicited in employers and demanded of servants by domestic service were represented as instances of skill. It demonstrates that in the period 1680–1730, domestic service offered diversely-situated writers ways to think about skill as a component of antagonistic everyday social relations and ways to think about those relations as practice or activity. In doing so, it brings to light a significant thread in the history of skill and identifies hitherto overlooked locations in which discourses and practices of skill may be found. The thesis is divided into five chapters. The first explores how seventeenth- and eighteenth-century handbooks and visual art modelled the qualities of ideal servants. It considers what pleasures employers were afforded by representations and imitations of servants. Chapters two and three, focussing on the manuscript meditations and diaries of Anne, Lady Halkett and Sarah, Lady Cowper, respectively, each offer a case study of how a writer occupying a sometimes compromised position of authority within her household reflected upon skill and service through extensive, recursive life-writing. Chapters four and five return toÌýrepresentedÌýservantsÌýin the context of the expansive imagined geographies of adventure fiction. This popular mode built narratives around the practical knowledge elicited from protagonists by situations of extremity and thus offered a space within which skill and service could be explored. Chapter four examines how, inÌýDefoe’s fictional and didactic works, scenes of management link bodily and social dexterity to ideologies of government, while chapter five explores what can be learned about skill by studying the ways in which narrative and material forms were re-written, adapted, and extended.

      Awarded:
      2022
    • CATRIN GRIFFITHS
      Nature of supervision:
      Principal Supervisor
      Title of thesis:
      Parthenissa and cultural production during the Interregnum: The English heroic romance, 1650-1660
      Awarded:
      2019
    • SUSAN JONES
      Nature of supervision:
      Principal Supervisor
      Title of thesis:
      'The choice in themselves': Piracy, the sea and self-determination in early modern English literature
      Awarded:
      2021
    • EVA-MARIA LAUENSTEIN
      Nature of supervision:
      Principal Supervisor
      Awarded:
      2019
    • REBECCA CLOSSICK
      Nature of supervision:
      Joint Principal Supervisor,
      Title of thesis:
      Staging the Poor Scholar in Elizabethan England
      Awarded:
      2024

    Teaching

    Teaching modules

    • Writing London
    • Creative Arts, Culture and Communication Postgraduate Research
    • Lessons from the Medieval and Early Modern Body
    • Medieval and Renaissance Literatures
    • The Novel: Writing the Modern World
    • Literature, Empire and Race
  • Publications

    Publications

    Article

    • Wiseman, Sue (2023) . Actes des congrès de la Société Française Shakespeare 41, ISSN 2271-6424.
    • Wiseman, Susan J. (2022) . Proceedings of the British Academy 246, pp. 181-200. ISSN 0068-1202.
    • Wiseman, Susan J. (2019) . Textual Practice 33 (8), pp. 1363-1387. ISSN 0950-236X.
    • Wiseman, Susan J. (2019) . Textual Practice 33 (8), pp. 1475-1478. ISSN 0950-236X.
    • Wiseman, Susan J. (2018) . Women's Writing 26 (1), pp. 71-87. ISSN 0969-9082.
    • Wiseman, Susan J. (2017) . Performance Research 22 (3), pp. 61-68. ISSN 1352-8165.
    • Wiseman, Susan J. (2015) . The Seventeenth Century 30 (2), pp. 207-228. ISSN 0268-117X.
    • Wiseman, Susan J. (2015) . Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal 10 (1), pp. 68-92. ISSN 1933-0065.
    • Wiseman, Susan J. (2008) . Renaissance Studies 22 (3), pp. 417-433. ISSN 0269-1213.
    • Wiseman, Susan J. (2008) . Renaissance Studies 22 (3), pp. 295-306. ISSN 0269-1213.

    Book

    • Wiseman, Susan J. (2014) . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9781107041653.
    • Wiseman, Susan J., ed. (2013) . Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. ISBN 9780719090721.
    • Wiseman, Susan J. and Hodgkin, K. and O'Callaghan, M., eds. (2007) . Abingdon, UK: Routledge. ISBN 9780415512428.
    • Hilda Smith, None and Mihoko Suzuki, None and Wiseman, Susan J., eds. (2007) . Pickering and Chatto. ISBN 9781138766273.
    • Wiseman, Susan J. (2006) . Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780199205127.
    • Wiseman, Susan J. and Fudge, E. and Gilbert, R., eds. (1999) . Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 9781349277315.
    • Wiseman, Susan J. (1998) . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521032452.
    • Sanders, J. and Chedgzoy, K. and Wiseman, Susan J., eds. (1998) . Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 9781349267149.
    • Wiseman, Susan J. (1996) . Writers and Their Work Series. Northcote House Publishing. ISBN 9780746309650.
    • Grundy, I. and Wiseman, Susan J., eds. (1992) . Batsford. ISBN 9780713457940.

    Book review

    • Wiseman, Susan J. (2017) .
    • Wiseman, Sue (2016) .

    Book section

    • Wiseman, Sue (2024) . In: Robinson, A. and Grant, C. (eds.) Cultures of London: Legacies of Migration. London, UK: Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 9781350242012.
    • Wiseman, Sue (2023) . In: Scott-Baumann, E. and Clarke, D. and Ross, S.C.E. (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women's Writing in English, 1540-1700. Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780198860631.
    • Wiseman, Susan J. (2020) . In: Ross, S. and Smith, R. (eds.) Early Modern Women’s Complaint: Gender, Form, and Politics. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 225-245. ISBN 9783030429454.
    • Wiseman, Sue (2020) . In: Hopkins, L. (ed.) A Companion to the Cavendishes. Arc Companions. Arc Humanities Press. pp. 373-386. ISBN 9781641891776.
    • Wiseman, Susan J. (2016) . In: Cottegnies, L. and Parageau, S. and Thompson, J.J. (eds.) Women and Curiosity in Early Modern England and France. Intersections. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill. pp. 123-140. ISBN 9789004311831.
    • Wiseman, Susan J. (2015) . In: Smith, S. and Watson, J. and Kenny, A. (eds.) The Senses in Early Modern England, 1558–1660. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. pp. 130-147. ISBN 9780719091582.
    • Wiseman, Susan J. (2014) . In: Wiseman, Susan J. (ed.) Early Modern Women and the Poem. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. ISBN 9780719090721.
    • Wiseman, Susan J. (2011) . In: Suzuki, M. (ed.) The History of British Women's Writing, 1610-1690. History of British Women's Writing. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 114-128. ISBN 9780230224605.
    • Wiseman, Susan J. (2010) . In: Harris, J. and Scott-Baumann, E. (eds.) The Intellectual Culture of Puritan Women, 1558-1680. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 135-149. ISBN 9780230228641.
    • Wiseman, Susan J. (2009) . In: Suzuki, M. (ed.) Anne Clifford and Lucy Hutchinson. Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England, 1550-1700. Farnham, UK: Ashgate. ISBN 9780754661108.
    • Wiseman, Susan J. (2009) . In: Healy, M. and Healy, Tom (eds.) Renaissance Transformations: The Making of English Writing 1500-1650. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press. pp. 192-207. ISBN 9780748638734.
    • Wiseman, Susan J. (2009) . In: McDowell, N. and Smith, N. (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Milton. Oxford Handbooks of Literature. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. pp. 534-546. ISBN 9780199210886.
    • Wiseman, Susan J. (2009) . In: Dimmock, M. and Hadfield, A. (eds.) Literature and Popular Culture in Early Modern England. Basingstoke, UK: Ashgate. pp. 15-28. ISBN 9780754665809.
    • Wiseman, Susan J. (2009) . In: Healy, M. and Healy, T. (eds.) Renaissance Transformation. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press. pp. 192-208. ISBN 9780748638734.
    • Clucas, Stephen (2007) . In: Wiseman, Susan J. and Hodgkin, K. and O'Callaghan, M. (eds.) Reading the Early Modern Dream: The Terrors of the Night. Routledge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. pp. 67-80. ISBN 9780415386012.
    • (2007) . In: Taylor, G. and Wiseman, Susan J. (eds.) Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780199580538.
    • Wiseman, Susan J. (2004) . In: Sheen, E. and Hutson, L. (eds.) Literature, Politics and Law in Renaissance England. Language, Discourse, Society. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 209-235. ISBN 9780333983997.
    • Wiseman, Susan J. (2004) . In: Fudge, E. (ed.) Renaissance Beasts: Of Animals, Humans, and Other Wonderful Creatures. Illinois, USA: Illinois University Press. pp. 50-69. ISBN 9780252028809.
    • Wiseman, Susan J. (2004) . In: Carey, B. and Ellis, M. and Salih, S. (eds.) Discourses of Slavery and Abolition Britain and its Colonies, 1760-1838. Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 45-62. ISBN 9780230522602.
    • Wiseman, Susan J. (2003) . In: Berry, P. and Tudeau, M. (eds.) Textures of Renaissance Knowledge. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. pp. 199-221. ISBN 9780719064647.
    • Wiseman, Susan J. (2003) . In: McManus, C. (ed.) Women and Culture at the Courts of the Stuart Queens. Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 224-244. ISBN 9781403902603.
    • Wiseman, Susan J. (2002) . In: Wiseman, Susan J. and Fudge, E. and Gilbert, R. (eds.) At the Borders of the Human. Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 215-238. ISBN 9781349277315.
    • Wiseman, Susan J. (2001) . In: Womersley, D. (ed.) A Companion to Literature from Milton to Blake. Blackwell Publishing Ltd. pp. 20-37. ISBN 9780631212850.

    Editorial

    • Wiseman, Susan J. (2019) . Textual Practice 33 (8), pp. 1263-1275. Taylor and Francis. ISSN 0950-236X.

    Other

    • Wiseman, Susan J. (2016) . Early Modern Women Research Network.
    • Wiseman, Susan J. (2016) . ÌÇÐÄlogoÈë¿Ú, University of London.