Dr Tim Wade
Tim Wade is a College Lecturer and Julian Schild Junior Research Fellow in Early Modern History at Pembroke College, Oxford. His research focuses on the history of the book and the formation of scholarly networks in the sixteenth century. His work to date has been especially concerned with the intellectual effects of the printing press and how mass production, relations with printers and readers, and new editorial methods shaped the habits of Renaissance scholars. Tim was awarded a DPhil from the University of Oxford in 2022 for his research on the reception of Northern Europe’s most famous Renaissance scholar, Desiderius Erasmus. He is now in the process of turning this dissertation into a book and has begun publishing related pieces on English scholars in Italy and the work of Christian Hebraists in the period.
His current project explores the tumultuous relationship between another Renaissance writer, Polydore Vergil, and his European printers. Polydore was a great propagandist for the benefits of print, describing the press as ‘a recent product of godlike genius’. His experiences with the medium, however, were far from straightforward. Several of his works were printed badly or were outcompeted by rival texts. This project examines Polydore’s various efforts to correct and improve his work - and the surprising amount of commentary it produced from printers, rival scholars and the author himself.
I am absolutely delighted to be awarded a Visiting Fellowship. The award will allow me to use the University of Glasgow’s extraordinary collection of Renaissance books and to complete a census of the published writings of Polydore Vergil. Glasgow holds several unique copies of Polydore’s work, either produced by little known printers or annotated by contemporary readers. These are invaluable to my study of Polydore’s relations with print and will form a substantial part of a research article I am writing on his work.
