Professor Peter Davidson

I am Senior Research Fellow at Campion Hall, where I am also curator of the college art collection.  I have interests in textual criticism and the history of the book; in the relation of literature and the visual arts; in baroque as an international phenomenon, and in the cultures of post-reformation Catholicism. I also have interests in Scottish literature, and in environmental humanities (The Last of the Light: about twilight, published in 2015.)

I took part in the collaborative edition and translation of the catalogue of Athanasius Kircher’s museum – The Most Celebrated Museum of the Roman College, published in 2015. I have published recently on recusant Catholic material culture, on early modern Scottish libraries, and on aspects of seventeenth century antiquarianism, and am working collaboratively on an edition of John Aubrey’s book of drawings (Bodleian MS Aubrey 17.)

My main focus is the edition of the complete works (verse and prose, Latin and English) of the Elizabethan poet S. Robert Southwell SJ, and I am also attempting a reconstruction of a sumptuous “lost” book from the circle of Piranesi in Grand Tour Rome, James Byres’s Hypogaei or sepulchral caverns of Etruria.