We are happy to announce Big Renaissance Books – a new reading group dedicated to long, important early modern works that are not often read in full (or at all). We will meet three times a term for an informal discussion as we work through these texts as a group.

As our first text, we picked Du Bartas’s Divine Weeks in Josuah Sylvester’s seventeenth-century translation, helpfully available online in the OUP edition edited by Susan Snyder: www.oxfordscholarlyeditions.com/display/10.1093/actrade/9780199696864.book.1/actrade-9780199696864-book-1

A retelling of the creation of the world according to Genesis that predates Milton’s by almost a century, Du Bartas’s epic poem had been widely read and admired before it was all but forgotten.

Meetings will take place on Thursday of Week 3 from 5 to 6pm at the Hawkins Room in Merton, and on Fridays of Weeks 5 and 7 from 4 to 5pm in Room 10.424 at the new Schwarzman building. The reading for the first session, to be done in advance, are Days 1–3 of the First Weeke (pp. 111–205).