On Mapping a ‘Global’ Literature: An Interview with Nigel Smith

Republics of Letters features an occasional series of interviews with scholars who have recently been in conversation with the medieval and early modern community at Stanford University. These interviews seek to capture ideas in motion: how current and recent work came to be conceived, how projects develop and change, and how new knowledge emerges into public view. In keeping with the journal’s aim of reflecting on the present moment in our disciplines, these dialogues invite self-awareness, retrospection, and analysis of the relevant fields.

In the following interview, Nigel Smith (William and Annie S. Paton Foundation Professor of Ancient and Modern Literature at Princeton University and former Stanford Humanities Center Faculty Fellow (2020–21)) discusses his current project on the emergence of a ‘global’ literature from early modern trading and colonial encounters with with Benjamin Gee (PhD candidate, Department of English, Stanford University). His is the first detailed literary study of the coming together of different cultures across Europe, Asia, Africa and America from the late medieval to the early modern period. In this interview he describes how his scholarship has developed over the years, from seventeenth century English literature, especially Marvell, Milton and the radical tradition, to his current interest in the prehistory of global literature and the transnational movement of languages in the literary form.

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Benjamin Gee: Your current project belongs to a phase of your career, begun several years ago, in which your work has become more international and comparative. What have been the challenges of this turn? How are the rewards different from the more England-focused scholarship of your earlier career?

Nigel Smith: By far the most significant challenge has been learning new languages or improving the ones I had and becoming competent in reading them in their early modern versions. I’ve learned Dutch, both modern and its early modern versions, and worked on getting better at reading early modern French and German. I’ve begun to be more familiar with Spanish and Portuguese. All of this has taken up a lot of time. I’ve published many articles and several edited volumes but not a monograph between hard covers for ten years, and I’m intending that this investment of time and effort will lead to a considerable multiple-book-length output in the next few years, reflecting my new learning but also still embracing fields I’ve known well for decades.

It takes longer to form critical arguments when more than one language is in play, but for me the result in terms of originality and cultural history bridge-­building is well worth the effort. I’m attempting to document the literary impact of both people and texts as they traveled across borders, as authors became subject to new influences and operated as different kinds of author once abroad, and when texts are circulated, sometimes in translations, in countries different from their place of origin. My interest ranges, for instance, from the work of traveling theater companies across borders, and the reception of John Donne’s poetry in Dutch translation, received with admiration but also criticism by Dutch women poets. I believe I’ve been able to redefine the dimensions of several early modern vernacular literatures, including English and Dutch, by understanding how they are interinvolved in each other. I’ve greatly enjoyed producing new accounts of poems and plays, this time attentive to cross-lingual semantic, syntactic, and prosodic complexity.

It also takes more effort to visit libraries and archives in the countries where those languages are spoken, but entirely possible, even though the internet and digitization have made possible the online access of early modern texts from far-flung places with increasing depth and range. The Dutch are superb digitizers — way ahead of the game until recently. I like travel and have visited libraries and archives in the Netherlands, France, Germany, Denmark, and Spain, as well as the UK and North America in connection with this new work. As my attention now becomes more global, I hope to visit more libraries and archives farther afield around the world, such as in Ghana and Japan.

The cause of this shift in attention is also significant. I believe it was in part the result of moving from Britain to America, and finally leaving behind the particular way I grew up, in a very narrowly English, not even British, sense. It was an outer North London monoglot world, both very insular and still British Empire or Commonwealth focused; membership of the European Common Market, as it was then known, came only halfway through my pre-university education. We studied modern languages and classical languages at school, but it was very bookish, without so much emphasis on spoken language, and, with the exception of German, often dysfunctional. Practical experience of hearing and speaking other languages was very restricted; I didn’t leave England until I was eighteen, and then for just two weeks in France. I had a best friend at secondary school whose mother was a French teacher, but even that proximity didn’t make much difference, and I shunned language learning because it seemed too difficult, although I studied French and German through to the age of sixteen.

It was really when I was out of my immediate roots and in America for good that I began to see many new territories of knowledge and understanding, simply through a world where within the same families more than one language was spoken. In the US within and without the university world, where families might come from many, many different places, there might well be another language spoken in addition to English, or even the faintest trace of another language in the family, and sometimes not much English. That changed my awareness. Of course, many parts of the UK have greatly changed in a similar way in the last few decades, but this was not the case in the area and way in which I grew up in the 1960s and 1970s.

At the same time, when I first came to Princeton in 1999, I was beginning to come to the end of editing Andrew Marvell’s poetry and moving to researching and writing his biography. He had a career as a foreign service specialist alongside Milton, translating documents in and out of English into Latin, French, and other languages. Marvell was much liked by the visiting Dutch diplomats who came through Westminster in the late 1650s, and although they might well have spoken French to each other, if these diplomats didn’t speak any English, he knew Dutch.

I went further into Marvell’s connections, not only with people in places in England, a little bit in Scotland, a tiny bit in Ireland, and a very little bit again in English colonial North America, but much more with various parts of continental Europe, including his two substantial trips away from England: one a “grand tour” of the Netherlands, France, Italy, and Spain in the 1640s, when he was probably the tutor to the son of a great man, and then as the secretary of an embassy that went to Russia. It went as far as Moscow in 1663–64 and returned through the German-speaking world and Scandinavia on the way back. When the rivers between Archangel and Moscow became too frozen, the scores of members of the embassy were carried individually on dog sleds, wrapped up in furs and each with their own bottle of vodka. Although an accomplished Latinist, Marvell faced communication difficulties and dangerous misunderstandings when he met the tsar’s retainers. Such information thrilled me and stretched my imagination: I knew there had to be more material here and there was.

I think the transnational arena is a fruitful place to be. The world’s communication grows across greater distances all the time, and there’s much migration and international movement in the university world. You’re likely to meet international students wherever you are, and there’ll be people who’ve come a long way to be there. The framework of communication and the context of the movement of people in which we now live sit very well with much of the transnational and global literary world of the early modern period. In that world, of course, were the interracial encounters, good and bad, whose consequences we live with today.

BG: One of your fellows at the Stanford Humanities Center, Shu-mei Shih, held the ­fellowship to work on a project defining comparative literature. How did your project connect with hers?

NS: Shu-mei’s work has more or less invented the study of global Chinese literature in the modern period. That is to say, literature written in Chinese, perhaps mostly by people of Chinese ethnic origins, but outside of mainland China. That’s very, very exciting, and so we had a common agenda beyond European nationalism. For me, this involved the new project that I was specifically working on at Stanford Humanities Center: a new global Renaissance book about literary communications between people traveling far distances which, in early modern studies, traditionally means European travelers, Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch global ­traders, and finally the English. But they were not the only travelers, by any means: so many Germans and Poles worked for the Dutch East Indies Company and countless people in what we now call the Global South were transported eastwards and westwards as slaves. The Chinese also traveled great distances, although they tended not to get beyond the west coast of India. There is also in this project a focus upon the indigenous: the literary perspectives of non-traveling people. I think of what I’m doing as trying to provide a prehistory of the global literature we now have in different languages, supported today by the translation industry, and finding evidence of the global movement of these languages in literary form. In all of this, Shu-mei’s intellectual perspectives and her insights were greatly stimulating and helpful to me.

I don’t know what Shu-mei would say to what I’m about to say: I haven’t discussed it with her in any detail. It does seem to me that where you do find mutually influencing bodies of literature in different languages, you are able to talk about dimensions of awareness that may be said to exist outside major patterns of historically determined change or process. The history of colonialism, the relationship between colonialism and capitalism, the history of slavery — all of these well-known dimensions, which we’re still learning more about, belong to a history that can be given a cause, and explaining that causation is the task of the historian. Whereas literary humanists are interested in finding what the evidence that survives tells you in other respects. You could say that we’re anthropologists of the text. And I would like to think that this new project that I’ve begun goes a considerable way toward escaping from purely Western, European paradigms, and both learns from and nourishes Shu-mei’s work.

I spoke with Shu-mei many times in the Center, walked and sometimes rode bikes with her to campus (we lived in adjacent apartments in Peter Coutts Circle), took advice from her, and feel far better informed about the diasporic Chinese interests she has. My wife, Noriko Manabe (born in Japan), and Shu-mei and her husband, Adam Schorr (of Dutch–US parents), enjoyed dining in the area, and I learned here very much about the discipline of East Asian Studies, both through Shu-Mei’s leading position in it and Adam’s interests in medieval Chinese philosophy, the subject area of his PhD. Shu-mei and I plan one day to have a global literature conference in Dili, East Timor.

BG: You’ve already begun to address this subject, but would you also like to give a few words directly to how your project has developed a kind of parallel to the community at the Stanford Humanities Center?

NS: There are very many ways in which I benefited profoundly from spending an academic year at Stanford, and I’m deeply grateful to the Humanities Center for this and its system for selecting fellows with projects that connect productively with each other. The conversations that one has at lunch with the other fellows, including Shu-mei Shih, matter greatly. It’s important to be present in the Center and at lunch several days a week in order to make the community happen. Of those with whom I spoke most, I’d have to single out Lanier Anderson of the Stanford Philosophy Department. He’s written a book on Montaigne which he wanted people to read in manuscript. I was one of those who read it, and that was wonderful and very ­valuable: I learned much. A philosopher talking with enormous clarity about something as difficult, various, and rich as Montaigne is new in several ways and exciting, and it was a privilege to help him reach conclusions about his argument.

Talking to Tanya Luhrmann from the Stanford Anthropology Department about witchcraft, and the presence of what people today call the supernatural, the superrational, and nonrational experiences in their lives, was also very memorable. She’s devoted her scholarly career to researching these phenomena, and it’s truly exciting. It also chimes with the experiences of many people from the early modern period whose autobiographies I’ve written about.

From moment to moment, the thing that I have to say is that the experience was transformative, and much could be done in other humanities research centers, on other campuses or elsewhere, to improve or to catch up in a manner consistent with Stanford Humanities Center. Other crucial Stanford resources matter here, too, such as how the library website works. I felt that technology was really working for the humanities at Stanford, despite the common claim that Stanford is a science and engineering-heavy campus. I was saving about fifteen minutes in every hour using the Stanford library website as compared with any other university or major library website. You could toggle between bibliographies of articles, lists of articles, and lists of books with one click instead of coming out of a library catalog website for books and then going into this or that subject database to get lists of articles. That was enormously advantageous.

With these resources, I learned a lot about Africa, early modern Africa, early modern South Asia, and different parts of early modern East Asia and Southeast Asia very, very quickly. Discovering the Portuguese early modern world in its global extent was memorable in this way. There’s quite a lot of work that’s been translated into English on this subject, more than was the case ten years ago, and much of that has been digitized, so you could pick up books or find ebooks and articles and read them, again quickly, either in Portuguese or English translation.

Another element of profound stimulation was the proliferation of workshops on the Stanford campus. I think most big American universities have programming of different kinds. At 4:30 p.m. on any day, any humanist is spoiled for choice on the Princeton campus during the semester, with several speaker events. The equivalent at Stanford is workshops. You obviously can’t go to every workshop all the time, although I did try something like that at first. I found the discussion in them very stimulating, usually because they were in a field adjacent but not identical to my own. I loved the Poetics Workshop. I went to it whenever I could. I liked going to the CMEMS workshops and seminars, and there was a postcolonial workshop that I went to sometimes, convened by Ato Quayson. There was also a Eurasian Studies workshop, which was relevant to the global Renaissance book, and I went to that a few times and really enjoyed it. It is so fortunate that the Humanities Center is the host for so many different ongoing research groups on campus, so that you can hear talks on a great variety of topics, while there are very many visiting guest speakers, in addition to the regular presentation of work by the fellows at the Center.

Also, people hang around and talk to each other! I don’t know whether it’s because there’s a slightly less frantic pace of life, but I found that people were very willing to meet for coffee, or a drink, or lunch or dinner, that there was no pressure, even if they were teaching or if they had to run off quickly after an hour and fifteen minutes to get to a class or a committee meeting. There was a notable willingness to talk, a delight in conviviality, and that was just wonderful. I sought out people I thought I should talk to (e.g., Alexander Key), and of course I already knew several people in English, foremost among them Gavin Jones, since he was my former undergraduate in Oxford and the very first person I admitted to study English there. Gavin introduced us to an extraordinary noncampus world in Palo Alto and Menlo Park, for which my wife and I are very grateful. We much liked gatherings of these friends, and they became very much a part of our social life and a strong part of the good things in our life that year.

BG: Music has been important in your life and a complement to your scholarly work, which is inspiring for those younger scholars of literature or history who have an interest in music. How would you reflect on your experience with this complementarity?

NS: That’s a great question, and I think it’s a measure of the openness of the Stanford community that I felt able to talk about it, and even to present myself as a musician. That’s pretty much how I began talking to Roland Greene one day, and I thought to myself, “Gosh! You don’t usually do this,” because the people I worked with in the London Boy Singers when I was a teenager were much better than I was. Some of them became professional singers, and I could never have done that — I remain humble about this. Music for me first meant singing and then playing instruments, piano and then guitars, for fun. Although I have a proper classical training, largely in earlier music, polyphony (think Palestrina), I was also involved in recording the soundtrack of the movie version of Jesus Christ Superstar. I thought I was going to be a professional session bass player when I was at high school, I was so interested in playing. But then I discovered literature and that became an obsession. We read James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in the last two years of high school. I became aware that it might be possible to read and think about this exciting literature all day. I’d never read anything like Joyce, and it was a revelation.

Once I got to university, perhaps rather single-mindedly, I tried unsuccessfully to find like-minded people with whom to play and write music. I’d already become quite adept at bass and guitar. It was the seventies, and so to play popular music with expertise, as it were, you were playing jazz rock, fusion, or “progressive” rock. Being British, my friends and I were attracted to progressive rock: elements of symphonic and church music taken into the arena of rock. British bands offering that mode of music at the time included King Crimson (the first band I saw live when still ­thirteen, in 1972), Yes, Genesis, and the still too-little-known but very important Van der Graaf Generator, mostly with literary ambition evident in their lyrics. They mostly commanded stadium audiences across America at that time. That’s what I thought I was going to be part of, but I put music away in order to learn how to be a professor. Yet as I approached the age of forty and the need to play again, music forced its way back into my life.

I enjoyed writing, playing, and recording rock music with the poet Paul Muldoon, a major Irish writer strongly in line with Joyce. We started to collaborate about four years after I came to Princeton. We had two bands in successive order (Rackett [2004–10] and Wayside Shrines [2010–15]), setting, playing, and recording music to lyrics that Paul had specifically written for songs. That became a preoccupying activity from about 2003 to 2015. Thereafter, I haven’t done much new music, as I began to work in earnest on the transnational project.

However, I have an ongoing collaboration with the Princeton composer Andrew Lovett, who is also British, and from the next town to me on the edge of North London. We’ve been putting John Donne’s poetry to experimental soundscapes for a number of years now and have performed them as opportunities have arisen in the Lincoln Center and the Spectrum Live Music in New York and at the Robeson Arts Center in Princeton. We perform occasionally as “Second Flea.”

I was very fortunate to have met Harry Carter at a “nearing-the-end-of-the-­pandemic party.” Mattea Koon put out a call to have the campus Renaissance community gather outside. That’s where I met Harry, and he said he had some contemporary settings of early modern lyrics. So I said, I tell you what, let’s try and record them, and that’s where our band The Unheard Melodies Project began. In the previous quarter, Ana Ilievska (now of Bonn University in Germany), who was a postdoc in the French and Italian Department and the Humanities Center, said, “Oh, you know, Nigel, you’ve got to meet Robert Pogue Harrison.” I already knew about Robert by academic and musical reputation, and we had a fantastic lunch, explored our Iiterary and musical enthusiasms. I did play with him and his brother, Tom, who was in his band Glass Wave. Robert then was always a potential collaborator, and I sought out Harry because Robert suggested that we needed to find a good singer on campus. When, finally, in May we found the time to record one of Harry’s songs, Robert was already in Italy. Instead, we turned to a friend of mine, Tim Hampton, the French Renaissance expert but also well-known Bob Dylan guru, of UC Berkeley. He’s an excellent jazz guitarist and was very happy to play and record with us before I left. Then I returned in early November 2022, and we spent one day rehearsing and then another day recording at Berkeley on November 4, and from that came the EP [extended play] we released about two weeks later (astonishing to me to go at such speed), entitled “The Shortest Day,” and there’s the plug.

The symbiosis between Harry, Tim, and myself seems very good. And so we’re going to do some more work as time permits, expand our repertoire, and play live, and I’m hoping to be present in the Bay Area for a few days after the MLA convention to pursue that goal, and thereafter. As you can see, these musical projects are all concerned to set bona fide poetry to music.

BG: In your view, what have been some of the most salient developments in the early modern field over the past generation? How do you expect the field to change or develop over the medium and long term?

NS: I do find the transnational emphasis, as well as the global dimensions of distant encounters, very important. It hits on themes that right now are very relevant to many people, such as race and ethnic relations, migration. I think that drives a lot of interest, and I’ve pursued it quite naturally myself. I hope I’ve said enough about that above.

The arrival of machine learning, data science, and, before it, digital humanities technology has — and is going to — enhance greatly the way we can present early modern texts in editions in the future and analyze them. The vitality of early modern studies relies upon having interesting texts that are going to inspire people when they read them, and I think of editing projects, some of which are not using the conventional, physically printed book at all, like the Pulter Project, which presents the works of the seventeenth-century poet Hester Pulter, unknown before 1996. It is an excellent reservoir of knowledge that presents her poetry by annotating it on a number of different levels and formats inside one single website, as well as having much critical discussion available therein.

In the first decade of this century, the New Formalism arose as a response and reaction to the New Historicism of the 1980s, which itself was very exciting, and — when developed by charismatic professors like Stephen Greenblatt — very influential. As somebody trained in history as well as literature, I would always ask, to some extent, what’s wrong with the “old historicism”? We’re now back with the historical interpretation of Renaissance literature, but with a renewed stress on racial difference, slavery, and gender and sexual identity in considerably more complex detail than was the case hitherto, and yet without ignoring detailed formal and aesthetic matters. I think old historical methods now powered by digital humanities, and also in the even younger field of data science, new artificial intelligence or machine learning, are going to be an important way in which we can understand the past and make it relevant to the present. This fits well with my abiding concern to find the worthwhile lost voices from the past and make them speak in the present. I also try not to forget the center ground of English literature, as often as possible, in the undergraduate classroom: the matter of the careful reading of literature and the respect we give to the intricate life of words on the page. These new dimensions rejuvenate what we think of as the traditional canon.

BG: You began to address fruitfully the next question when you talked about your move from the United Kingdom to America. Your intellectual career has passed through multiple phases, from your earliest training under the influence of historians to your American period with Princeton at the turn of the century, and now your more expansive present approach. How do you see these phases, and which scholars and books across that time have been especially influential to you?

NS: I’m usual for a literary scholar in being an heir to the traditions of close reading (British Practical Criticism and American New Criticism) but unusual in being so interdisciplinary and formed by different strands of historical study and unusual as a literature-history crossover figure in being so exposed to models in literary and cultural theory on both sides of the Atlantic.

There was a very telling moment in my first week of university with one of the history professors at Hull. His name was H. A. Lloyd., Howell Lloyd. Sadly, he died earlier this year at a very great age. Dr. Lloyd, as he then was, said this to the class, “I’ve just given you a reading list, but you must understand that it is the books that you read at university that you don’t have to read that will probably turn out to be the books that matter most to you.” Later that afternoon, I was brandishing his reading list. I went to get the books from the shelves, and I started looking at the whole shelf, and found a book by Dame Frances Yates; it may have been The Rosicrucian Enlightenment or Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. I thought it was so excitingly wild and bizarre! The history of an alchemical cult sounded amazing. I don’t think I was anywhere near able to understand or make sense of that highly informed Warburg Institute-style intellectual and cultural history, but early modern work had an early origin with me in this moment in October 1977. The rest is history.

There was a secret literary theory society consisting of some younger lecturers, graduate students, and a very few undergraduates (mostly me), which the head of the English Department at Hull would not support because he said it implied criticism of what they were teaching, so he wouldn’t give us a meeting room. Instead, we met in a pub. I read in this group Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault. Foucault became very important to me because he was straddling the literary and the historical, trying to theorize their relationship. That’s what The Archaeology of Knowledge is all about. So, as somebody reading history as well as English, that was really exciting, and I won a Commonwealth Scholarship to study at McGill University in Canada with a Foucault translator, Donald F. Bouchard, who also died not so long ago. He was a Francophonic American who had translated a collection of Foucault’s essays and published them. He’d also written a book called Milton: A Structural Reading, and I think it was the first structuralist account of Milton, so that resonated, too. It was very exciting studying that material in a Francophonic city at the beginning of the 1980s. During the second semester, Bouchard organized a dynamic conference called The Institutions of Literary Criticism, in which many of the leading and emergent North American literary theorists spoke: Stanley Fish, Martin Jay, Richard Macksey, W. J. T. Mitchell, Catherine Gallagher, Catharine Stimpson, Timothy Murray. But I was still an empiricist, and I needed to get into the archive, to go to Oxford. At that time I read an essay by F. W. Bateson, the title of which plays with something Dickens wrote: “Oh God, Oh Montreal, Oh Oxford.” The way seemed clear.

When I arrived at Oxford in the fall of 1981, the very few resident literary theorists in the English faculty were Marxist historicists, as was common with many UK English departments at that time, although there was a small poststructuralist group, the “Derrida reading group,” that would become more influential. The agenda was reading literature in social context and reading literature as a product of the social relations that pertained in a given society or understanding literature’s role as an agent in a historical process. My book about literature in the English Civil War, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660 (1994), is all about the latter, even if the precisely determined historical process of progressive class revolution has not been followed. Marx’s synchronic division of society into different classes, and his insight into the way in which ideology is produced by a society’s socioeconomic makeup, is far more influential. I wrote about the role of journalism and pamphlet literature as an agent of political and social transformation. In this way my work belonged to that tradition of historicist criticism.

Terry Eagleton’s writings and presence also meant a lot in that tradition, and he did write the most influential introduction to literary theory of the 1980s, but I scarcely had anything to do with him. At the same time, in the history faculty, there was the recently retired, extremely influential Marxist historian Christopher Hill (1912–2003). He wrote a lot about literature and influenced many people who were less obviously doctrinaire than the hardcore Marxists. He also had many students who were formidable and innovative early modern historians, all then teaching in Oxford, such as Keith Thomas and Robin Briggs. These connections were very exciting and important, and Hill encouraged me, but he was not my supervisor. My mentor, the senior professor in the early modern period at Oxford, was John Carey, in many ways gently paternal, but profoundly stimulating and knowledgeable, inviting you to think hard about what you were doing and how you wrote about it. He also wrote famously crushing reviews in the Sunday Times as well as sharply observed and often controversial critical books. From him I learned about rigorous critique as well as learning, either from reading him or listening to him engaging with the talks of visiting speakers.

The other influence was the so-called Cambridge School, namely the intellectual historians of the early modern period, who largely were or had begun in Cambridge University: the New Zealander J. G. A. Pocock (1924–2023), who then taught in America, at Washington University in St. Louis, then Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, and also Quentin Skinner and Richard Tuck. These intellectually bold figures modeled a way to think inside the discourses about how a society understood itself in its own moment in time. They were interpreting legal and political theory texts as a kind of “poetry,” an intricate, discursive universe with its own rules, and, in a related way, I’ve made my career by reading texts that were once thought the province only of historians and making literary claims for them. Skinner himself has written widely on literature, not least Shakespeare, from a legal history viewpoint.

At the same time, and both before and beside Hill, and influencing him, and feeding through to me, were a group of church historians, chiefly among them Geoffrey F. Nuttall (1911–2007), who wrote the foundational work on radical Puritanism: this too was profoundly influential on all working on literary Puritanism, e.g., Isabel Rivers, N. H. Keeble, and Johanna Harris, among others, as well as myself. I came to know Geoffrey in his later years and benefited from his connection with continental learning. (He had studied in Germany in the 1930s — he saw Heidegger lecture and make the Nazi salute — after being Hill’s undergraduate contemporary in Oxford; he knew the Dutch scholars and at one point wrote on Dante.)

BG: You coedited a collection of essays on mysticism between the medieval and early modern periods. Do you find that the handling of mysticism by the increasingly fractured religious authorities of post-Reformation Europe has influenced your own broader research and thoughts on censorship with early modern writing?

NS: That volume came out in about 2015, coedited with my colleague Sara (Sally) Poor, of the German Department at Princeton, but once at Stanford in 2008 we organized a conference on Reformation and post-Reformation era mysticism, when it is usually supposed to have waned in the Protestant world. It took a long time for the essays to come together to make a volume, but we were eventually able to put that collection out, addressing that important question: the role of the mystical in modern literary culture. The volume is regarded as quite a game changer. I suppose I encountered mysticism first through popular music, through the interest of bands like the Beatles in Eastern esotericism. That’s where I first came across what we call a mystical tradition, and then I began to read it at university. Figures like Nicholas of Cusa in the apophatic tradition were very exciting to encounter. The mystical tradition’s survival is one of the key ways in which there has been a cross-confessional linkup in the post-Reformation period, and literary modernity is given a crucial part of identity from mysticism. But from the 1660s onward, I would say with the rise of the Pietistic movement in Germany, and its Dutch equivalent, the Nadere reformatie, there’s interest in pre-Reformation spiritual writing, because people felt something was drastically missing from the Lutheran and Calvinist consensuses, especially the former. Mystical writing is a powerful piece of evidence for the survival of things which would otherwise have disappeared with the Reformation and a form of writing that came from ordinary people as well as the highly educated.

BG: What books should we be reading now?

NS: In my field broadly conceived, there’s a lot to be said for Urvashi Chakravarty’s book about servants and English literature, Fictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early Modern England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022). It seems to be getting a lot of attention and galvanizing people. It is a deeply, well-researched historical study and perhaps has affinities with the work of the first half of my career, whereas the equally important, highly competent and exciting Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022) by Noémie Ndiaye investigates the performance of race on stage across English, French, and Spanish drama, and hence is closely in tune with the work I’m doing now.