Dr Harry Spillane

Munby Fellow in Bibliography 2024-25

Division: Special Collections

Department: Rare Books and The Bible Society

Email: hjms4@cam.ac.uk

X: @SpillaneHarry

Harry Spillane is the 2024-25 Munby Fellow in Bibliography at Cambridge University Library and a Research Fellow at Darwin College.

Prior to taking up the Munby Fellowship in October 2024, Harry combined a Visiting Fellowship at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, with teaching roles at Cambridge colleges, most recently Newnham (as Director of Studies) and Downing (as Bye-Fellow). He completed his PhD in History at Cambridge in 2022 and had previously taken the MPhil in Early Modern History (2017-18). Harry had previously received a First-Class BA (Hons) in History from the University of Oxford (2014-17). He received the Cambridge University Library Gordon Duff Prize for Bibliography in 2021

Munby Fellow Project

‘Collecting and Correcting: Histories of the English Bible and the Bible Society Collections’

Harry’s Munby Fellowship research project, entitled ‘Collecting and Correcting: Histories of the English Bible and the Bible Society Collections’, explores how Bibles were collected, edited and reshaped in the centuries after they were printed. It uncovers how material was added and removed from copies by scholars and collectors in search of ‘perfect copies’. As such, it asks what a ‘perfect’ bible copy might mean and interrogates how collecting habits have shaped the way that we see the history of English bibles. Ultimately, the project raises important interdisciplinary questions about the long-life of texts and how they change over time, both purposefully and consciously, as well as organically and unconsciously.

Affiliated organisations

• Darwin College

Publications

Books

• Printing the English Bible from Tyndale to King James (Bodleian Library Press, forthcoming, 2026).

Articles

• ‘Debating Biblical Translation in Late Elizabethan England’, The Historical Journal (Forthcoming, 2025).
• ‘“A Matter Newly Seene”: The Bishops’ Bible, Matthew Parker, and Elizabethan Antiquarianism’, Reformation, 27:2 (2022), 107-24.
• ‘Eucharistic Devotion and Textual Appropriation in Post-Reformation England’, The Seventeenth Century, 36:6 (2021), 869-92.

Reviews

• Review of How the English Reformation was Named: The Politics of History, c. 1400-1700, by B. Guyer, Ecclesiology, 20:1 (2024), 105-8.
• Review of Paratexts of the English Bible, 1525-1611, by. D Shuger, in The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 74:3 (2023), 670-71.
• Review of Five London Parishes in the Reformation, by G. Gibbs, in Reformation and Renaissance Review, 22:3 (2020), 256-57.
• Review of Stuart Succession Literature, Moments and Transformations, P. Kewes and A. McRae (ed.), in The Journal of Royal Studies, 6:1 (2019), 123-25.
• Review of Elizabethan Publishing and the Making of Literary Culture, by K. Melnikoff, in The Sixteenth Century Journal, 50:4 (2019), 1304-6.
• Review of Edwin Sandys and the Reform of English Religion, by S. Bastow, in The Sixteenth Century Journal (Forthcoming, 2024).