Dr Kathryn James

Munby Fellow 2015-16

Kathryn James is the Curator for Early Modern Books and Manuscripts & the Osborn Collection at Yale’s Beinecke Library, where she has worked since 2005. She completed her doctorate in early modern British history at Oxford University (2000) and her Master’s of Library and Information Science at the University of Pittsburgh (2005). She is a Lecturer in the Yale History Department and the co-chair of the Yale Program in the History of the Book.

Munby Fellow project: John Strype's study of Matthew Parker and the Parker Library

Her project for the Munby fellowship was 'John Strype's study of Matthew Parker and the Parker Library', part of a larger project entitled 'Reading the Dissolution: loss and the English imagination'. In a series of five case studies, from Humfrey Wanley’s encounter with the Beowulf manuscript through Edmond Malone’s refutation of William Henry Ireland’s Shakespeare forgeries, the project explored the long response to the dissolution of the monastic collections, and the ways in which loss, real and imagined, has been a method of canon formation in English Literature.