Edward Taylor

I work on political communication and political culture in early modern Britain and Europe - in both print and manuscript, and both English and Latin.

My PhD was about the development of comment on the news (rather than the news itself) published through the serial press in Britain, 1641-c.1730. I subsequently worked on topical and political Latin poetry, especially as circulated through manuscripts, in and around Britain, c.1550-1720.

My new, Leverhulme-funded project at Birmingham, 'Bilingual News: Latin and Vernacular Media in Early Modern Britain, c.1580-1730', is about the wider phenomenon of Latin news and comment as part of multilingual news cultures in a similar period.

My BA in History and MPhil in Early Modern History at Clare College, Cambridge (2008-2012) first spurred my interest in early modern political culture and communication. This evolved into my PhD project at the University of Warwick, ‘Commenting on the News: The Serial Press and Political Culture in Britain, c.1641-1730’ (2015-2019, supervised by Professor Mark Knights), which examined the growth of comment and opinion in the early British press and its relationship with the development of party politics.

Separately, I also developed an interest in early modern Latin (or ‘neo-Latin’), beginning with a Graduate Diploma in Classical Studies at KCL (2013-2014) and continuing alongside my PhD. I was then fortunate to be able to combine this with the themes of my doctoral work through a postdoctoral fellowship (2019-2021) on the Leverhulme-funded project ‘Neo-Latin Poetry in English Manuscript Verse Miscellanies, c.1550-1700’ (UCL, PI Dr Victoria Moul), working on topical and political Latin verse and its place in political culture.

My project at Birmingham, 'Bilingual News: Latin and Vernacular Media in Early Modern Britain, c.1580-1730', also funded by the Leverhulme Trust, began in 2024. This builds on my previous work to examine the wider phenomenon of news and comment written and circulated in Latin in early modernity. Among other themes, I am exploring how Latin operated within multilingual and international news cultures, and how Latin both restricted (to a Latinate minority) and expanded (across borders) access to political information.

I have also worked or volunteered in various libraries and heritage institutions, including the British Library, Dr Williams’s Library, Hampton Court Palace, the House of Lords Library, Lambeth Palace Library and the Parliamentary Archives, on projects relating to early modern politics, religion and the book and on the cataloguing and care of early modern printed and manuscript materials.