Dr Rowan Tomlinson

Tel: +44 (0)117 928 8091

Fax: (0117) 3318010

Email: Rowan.Tomlinson@bristol.ac.uk

Research Publications

Office hours: Mondays at 2pm and Thursdays at 11.45am

Research

Rowan Tomlinson is a specialist in Renaissance literature and culture. She has a particular interest in the poetics and politics of French vernacular writing in the sixteenth century and in the interactions during the early modern period – before the creation of the ‘two cultures’ – between the literary and other disciplines (natural history, philosophy, medicine). Her forthcoming book, Inventive Inventories: Language, Literature and the Natural World in Renaissance France (Oxford University Press), examines the productive relationship between natural history and literature in poetry and prose by authors including Rabelais, Scève, Montaigne, and Du Bartas.

Her new research project is looking at the status and function of the figure of the artisan in sixteenth-century culture. Exploring writing by practising artisans (a potter, a midwife, an apothecary) as well as the representation of craftsmen and women by non-artisans (authors including Rabelais, Ronsard, Montaigne, and Béroalde de Verville), the project seeks to investigate the political and confessional resonances of artisanship in the period as well as its relationship to conceptions of authorship and readership. A parallel area of interest is the influence and reception of Pliny the Elder’s concept of historia in the Renaissance, and, more broadly, the role of translation in early modern culture.

Teaching

Rowan offers two units directly linked to her research interests, Introduction to French Renaissance Culture and Identity and Conflict: The Poetics and Politics of French Renaissance Writing. These units prioritise detailed engagement with primary texts as a means of learning about the cultural contexts in which Renaissance writing was produced. However, this concern with the historical particularity of the early modern is underscored by a constant consideration of the ‘timeless’ issues facing the student of literature (why do we study literature; what do we understand by the ‘literary’; where does the ‘meaning’ of a text lie?), as well as by a belief in the importance of foregrounding and questioning our own methods of reading past cultures (how do we as contemporary readers read the early modern?).

She also teaches translation and composition and contributes to the first-year Introduction to Literature course.

Biography

Before her appointment in October 2011 to a Lectureship at Bristol, Rowan held an early-career post (as Fellow and Tutor in French) at New College, University of Oxford, where she also read for her undergraduate degree in French and English and pursued postgraduate studies (including a year spent as an English assistant at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Lyon). She came to Oxford from a Brighton state school and is active in promoting languages in the state-school system.

Publications:

• (forthcoming, 2013), Inventive Inventories: Language, Literature and the Natural World in Renaissance France (OUP)
• (forthcoming, 2013), ‘Anecdote, example, and invention: the deaths of Pliny the Elder’, in Method and Variation: Narrative in Early Modern French Philosophy, edited by Emma Gilby and Paul White (Legenda)
• (forthcoming, 2012), ‘‘Plusieurs choses qu’il n’avoit veuës’: translating Pliny the Elder in the Renaissance’, in The Culture of Translation in Early Modern England and France, 1500-1660, special issue of Translation and Literature edited by Tania Demetriou and Rowan Tomlinson
• (May 2012), Emily Butterworth and Rowan Tomlinson, ‘Scandal’, in Renaissance Keywords, edited by Ita MacCarthy (Legenda)
• (Autumn 2010), ‘Intelligible sans discipline: enumeration, observation, and communication in Montaigne’s ‘Apologie de Raymond Sebond’’, in Stephen Bamforth (ed.), Nouveaux départs:  Studies in honour of Michel Jeanneret, Nottingham French Studies, 49:3, Autumn 2010, 87-109
• (2007), ‘The limits of textual dissection: the case of Quaresmeprenant in Rabelais’s Le Quart Livre’, in Thomas Baldwin, James Fowler and Shane Weller (eds), The Flesh in the Text (Oxford, Bern, Berlin: Peter Lang, 2007), pp. 21-38

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