Eloise Davies
I completed my History BA (2016) and MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History (2017) at Peterhouse, Cambridge. Research projects included work on blasphemy legislation in 1690s England and the significance of Catherine of Siena as a political thinker.
My PhD research investigates intellectual connections between England and Venice in the seventeenth century, with a particular focus on the circles of three-times ambassador to Venice, Sir Henry Wotton, and his chaplain, William Bedell.
From January to July 2019 I was based at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice, for archival research. In February 2020 I visited Marsh's Library, Dublin, on a Maddock Research Fellowship. Later in 2020 I will return to Venice for further research funded by the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation.
Thesis title: The Venetian connection in early seventeenth-century England
Supervisor: Dr Richard Serjeantson
Themes: Paolo Sarpi, spiritual versus temporal power, sovereignty, the Jacobean Church of England, women in the history of political thought
Co-supervised an HSPS third-year dissertation on surveillance and the Venetian Council of Ten, 2018–19
- Supervision for Part I: Paper 19/POL 7 – History of Political Thought to c. 1700
- Lecturer and seminar leader, ‘Time’, Part II: Historical Argument and Practice
- I have also taught a Methods class on essay writing (MPhil Political Thought and Intellectual History), a Source class on Religion (Part I: Paper 5 – British political history 1688-1886) and classes of 16–17 year olds at the Sutton Trust Summer School (August 2019 and August 2020)
- Seminar Assistant, Cambridge Political Thought and Intellectual History Seminar, 2017-18
- Convenor, Theories and Methods Graduate Workshop, 2017-18
- Founder and convenor of the Cambridge Spoken Latin Circle (AHRC-funded reading group), 2018-19
- Convenor of a series of Women's History Lunches, to encourage female participation in the history of political thought, 2018–19
- Convenor, 'The Body and Politics', 2019 Cambridge Political Thought Graduate Conference, held 18 March 2019
- Convenor, 'The Patristic Legacy in Early Modern Culture', held 30 September 2019
Pieces for a broader audience include
- 'Honest Men Lying Abroad', London Review of Books blog
- 'William Bedell, Venice and the Irish Language', Marsh's Library blog
- 'Blasphemy: a very modern crime', Ecclesiastical History Society blog
- 'An eighteenth-century solution to Brexit', The British Interest magazine
I also co-presented 'Rome, Liberty, and Rhetoric', an interview with Dr Valentina Arena for Interventions: The Intellectual History Podcast.
Contact
Tags & Themes
Peterhouse, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, CB2 1RD
Key publications
- Eloise Davies, 'Reformed but not converted: Paolo Sarpi, the English mission in Venice and conceptions of religious change', Historical Research (forthcoming 2022) - awarded the 2021 Sir John Neale Prize for Early Modern British History
- Eloise Davies, ‘Catherine of Siena: a Dominican political thinker in fourteenth-century Italy’, Renaissance Studies, 35:2 (April 2021), pp. 237–54
- Eloise Davies, 'English Politics and the Blasphemy Act of 1698', The English Historical Review, 135:575 (August 2020), pp. 804–35
Reviews
- Review of Forbidden knowledge: Medicine, science and censorship in early modern Italy by Hannah Marcus (2020), in The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 72:3 (July 2021), pp. 658–60
- Review of Civil religion and the Enlightenment in England, 1707–1800 by Ashley Walsh (2020), in The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 72:2 (April 2021), pp. 439–41