Dr. Elizabeth Spiller

Professor of English — 323 Williams Building
espiller@fsu.edu
English Department Profile

Elizabeth Spiller, B.A. Amherst College (1987), A.M. and Ph.D. Harvard University (1990, 1995). Professor Spiller specializes in early modern literature and culture, with special emphasis on literature, science and other early modern knowledge arts. Professor Spiller brings research and teaching interests in both the history of reading and the connections among science, technology, and culture to the interdisciplinary History of Text Technologies Program under FSU's Pathways of Excellence initiative.

She is the author of Science, Reading, and Renaissance Literature: The Art of Making Knowledge (Cambridge University Press, 2004), an interdisciplinary study of the mutual invention of fact and fiction during the early modern period. She also brings her interests in science, print culture, and early modern reading practices to her two-volume edition, Seventeenth Century English Recipe Books: Cooking, Physic and Chirurgery in the Works of Elizabeth Grey and Alethea Talbot (Ashgate Press, Early Modern Englishwomen, 2008) and Seventeenth Century English Recipe Books: Cooking, Physic and Chirurgery in the Works of Queen Henrietta Maria and Mary Tillinghast (Ashgate Press, Early Modern Englishwomen, 2008). These volumes integrate both textual studies and intellectual and philosophical context to provide an introduction to the history of food and physic in early modern culture.

She recently held an NEH to support research on a new book, Reading in Color: Race, Romance, and the Complexion of Early Modern Print Culture. This book focuses on printed romances from the period after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, including those by Montalvo, Ariosto, Cervantes, Heliodorus, Shakespeare, Sidney, Wroth, and Cavendish. This project looks at how print culture encouraged reading practices that aligned with early modern attitudes toward racial and ethnic identity.

Professor Spiller has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Newberry Library, the Mellon/Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the Fulbright Foundation, among others. Her work has been published in such journals as Renaissance Quarterly, SEL, Criticism, Modern Language Quarterly, Renaissance and Reformation and Renaissance Drama. She is an incoming editor of The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies and is an Editorial Board Member of the new History of Text Technologies series being published by Palgrave Press. Her course offerings include: Reading: History, Theory, and Practice; After Gutenberg: Science, Technology, and the Inventions of Print Culture.

REPRESENTATIVE PUBLICATIONS:

Books and Editions

Science, Reading, and Renaissance Literature: The Art of Making Knowledge, 1580-1670 (Cambridge University Press, 2004).

Reviews of Science, Reading, and Renaissance Literature: Times Literary Supplement 5292 (Sept. 3, 2004): 30; SEL 45.1 (2005): 238-39; Renaissance Studies 19.4 (2005): 566-68; Sixteenth Century Journal 36.4 (2005): 1138-39; Renaissance Quarterly 58.3 (2005): 1004-6; Isis 96.2 (2005): 273-75; Minerva 44.1 (2006); Notes and Queries 52.3 (2005): 412-14; Annals of Science 63.1 (2006): 129-32; Anglia 123.4 (2005): 732-5; Literature Compass 3 (2006): 1-25 (review essay); Cahiers Elisabethains 66 (2004): 93; Early Science and Medicine 11.2 (2006): 242-44; Modern Language Review 101.3 (2006): 819-20; Journal of British Studies 45.1 (2006): 632-34; Renaissance and Reformation 28.1 (2004): 113-15; Clio 36.2 (2007): 264-69; British Society for Literature and Science 2009.

Seventeenth Century English Recipe Books: Cooking, Physic and Chirurgery in the Works of Elizabeth Grey and Alethea Talbot (Ashgate Press, Early Modern Englishwomen, 2008).

Seventeenth Century English Recipe Books: Cooking, Physic and Chirurgery in the Works of Queen Henrietta Maria and Mary Tillinghast (Ashgate Press, Early Modern Englishwomen, 2008).

Articles and Essays

Women's Printed Recipe Books, The Oxford Handbook of Literature and the English Revolution, ed. Laura Knoppers (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, under contract, 2010).

Situating Prospero's Art: Shakespeare and the Making of Early Modern Knowledge. South Central Review, special issue on Shakespeare & Science, ed. Carla Mazzio, vol. 26.1 (2009): 24-41.

Recipes for Knowledge: Maker's Knowledge Traditions, Paracelsian Recipes and the Invention of the Cookbook, 1600-1660. In Joan Fitzpatrick, ed., Renaissance Food: Cultural Readings and Cultural Histories (Ashgate Publishing, forthcoming, 2009/2010.

"Searching for the route of inventions": Retracing the Renaissance Discovery Narrative in Gabriel Garcia Marquez. In Harold Bloom, ed., Modern Critical Interpretations: Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude (Chelsea House, 2003), pp. 49-70.

"Departing from the Earth with Such Writing": Johannes Kepler's Dream for Reading Science. Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Reformé 23.2 (2001): 5-28.

Speaking for the Dead: King Charles, Anna Weamys, and the Commemorations of Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia. Criticism 42.2 (2000): 229-51.

Fulke Greville's Counsel: Transforming the Jacobean "Nourish Father" through Sidney's "Nursing Father." Studies in Philology 97.4 (2000): 432-52.

Reading Through Galileo's Telescope: Margaret Cavendish and the Experience of Reading. Renaissance Quarterly 53.1 (2000): 192-221.

Poetic Parthenogenesis and Spenser's Idea of Creation in The Faerie Queene. SEL: Studies in English Literature 40.1 (2000): 63-79.

Cervantes avant la Lettre: The Material Transformation of Romance Reading Culture in Don Quixote. MLQ 60.3 (1999): 295-319.

"Searching for the route of inventions": Retracing the Renaissance Discovery Narrative in Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Clio 28.4 (1999): 375-98.

Sighting Utopia in the Lens: Reading Praxis in Johannes Kepler and Margaret Cavendish. Jx: A Journal of Criticism and Culture 4.2 (1999): 179-201.

From Imagination to Miscegenation: Race and Romance in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. Renaissance Drama 29 (1998): 137-64.

(Co-Author, Timothy L. Parrish). A Flute Made of Human Bone: Blood Meridian, Unhorsed Saxons, and the Survivors of American History. Prospects 23 (1998): 255-75.