My research interests are in the literature, history and culture - in French and in Latin, in texts and in images - of Renaissance France, especially in relation to the classical world. I am particularly interested in themes of transgression and restraint. My recent work has focused on areas such as:
- attitudes in early modern Europe to alcohol, to vileness, to women and sexuality, and to theft;
- literary and artistic representations of the atrocities committed during the French religious wars;
- (as part of a wider research network) obscenity.
A recurrent motif in my work is birds, as light and inconsequential figures that can nevertheless carry some weighty themes. My current book-length project, Flights of Fancy: Avian Themes in Renaissance France, examines the relationship between ornithological knowledge and the imaginative representation of sixteenth-century birds and of what they can symbolise.
