I studied French at University College London and the University of Cambridge. I was a lecturer at the University of Sheffield for four years before coming to King’s in 2006.

Research Interests and PhD Supervision

• Early modern literature and thought
• Early modern women’s writing
• Montaigne
• Marguerite de Navarre

I work on early modern literature and thought, with a particular interest in deviant speech and language. My first book, Poisoned Words: Slander and Satire in Early Modern France, explored reputation and constructions of subjectivity and identity in the context of wounding language.

My second book, The Unbridled Tongue: Babble and Gossip in Renaissance France, looked at forms of excessive speech – babble, gossip and rumour – and why they were considered so personally and politically dangerous in the sixteenth century. This book came out of the AHRC-funded project Gossip and Nonsense in the French Renaissance. 

My most recent book, Marguerite de Navarre: A Critical Companion, is a critical introduction to Marguerite de Navarre’s writing, exploring the historical, political, and cultural contexts of her poetry, plays, and diplomatic letters alongside her best-known work, The Heptameron. I have also worked on obscenity, scandal, censorship, rhetoric, and women’s writing in the early modern period. I'm currently working on languages of dissent and concord in sixteenth-century France and am PI on the AHRC-funded project Multilingual Early Modern London 1547-1714.

Teaching

I teach on a variety of BA and MA modules in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures on early-and pre-modern literature and culture, and on language and translation modules. 

Expertise and Public Engagement

Collaborative art projects

The Spinning Stories project, with artist Clare Qualmann, explores the places people talk and why they tell stories. 

The Chinese Whispers project, also with Clare Qualmann and part of the AHRC-funded Gossip and Nonsense project, investigates ideas of rumour and the descent of sense into nonsense through performances of the parlour game.

‘Waiting …. In a Hairdressers’ is a podcast by poet Malika Booker about things overheard in a hairdresser’s on the Walworth Rd.

Podcasts and radio

Radio 4’s Something Understood on gossip, rumour and the ‘Chinese Whispers’ project.

Radio 3’s Arts and Ideas podcast on early modern news and gossip. 

Radio 3’s Free Thinking on the value of gossip. 

Susannah Lipscomb's Not Just the Tudors on Marguerite de Navarre

Radio 4's In Our Time on Marguerite de Navarre

 

Selected Publications

Marguerite de Navarre: A Critical Companion (Cambridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2022)

The Unbridled Tongue: Babble and Gossip in Renaissance France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016)

Poisoned Words: Slander and Satire in Early Modern France (Oxford: Legenda, 2006)

‘Disinformation and Discrimination in Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron (1559) and Sixteenth-Century News Culture’, Past and Present 257 (2022), 172-200

‘Apothecaries’ Cornets: Books as Waste Paper in the Renaissance’, MLN 133 (2018), 891-913