Dr Flynn Allott

About

I recently completed my DPhil at Oriel College, where I wrote an AHRC-funded thesis entitled ‘Cartography and the Craft of Seventeenth-Century Prose’. I completed an MSt in English (1550-1700) at Oriel too, funded by the English Faculty’s Violet Vaughan Morgan Studentship. My BA was completed in 2019 at University College London.

My thesis looked at how Francis Bacon, Robert Burton, Thomas Fuller, and John Aubrey were all influenced in their writing by a specific model of teaching geography and mapping employed at the English Universities across the century, a model which understood geography as a species of mental discipline, taught in order to train students in responding intelligently and prudentially to the difficulties of worldly circumstance. Much of this research involved spending time with dry-as-dust Latinate textbooks on geography, but I maintain interests throughout the early modern period. These include the history of science; the history of scholarship; the popular response to learned and academic cultures; and the study of material texts. I am presently turning my thesis into a monograph.

Teaching

English FHS Paper III (1550-1660)

Publications

‘A Defence of Humanist Geography at the University of Douai: The Preface to James Cheyne’s De geographia libri duo (1576)’, Lias (2026, forthcoming). 18,000w.

'The Fate of Philologus: Learning and Prattle in Early Modern Religious Dialogue’, The Seventeenth Century 40.1 (2025), 59–85. 15,000w.

'Renaissance habitus: Three Books on Early Modern Pedagogy and Literature’. COMITATUS: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 55 (2024): 247-62. 6,000w.

‘Material Metaphors for Literary Form: Robert Burton’s ‘Perused’ Copy of Theatrum Urbium Italicarum (1599)’. Renaissance Studies 38.2 (2023). 9000w.