Dr Rachel Adcock
- Title
- Senior Lecturer in English Literature
- Location
- CBB2.057
- Role
- Humanities Employability Lead
- Phone
- 01782 733144
- r.c.adcock@keele.ac.uk
Biography
Before joining Keele in January 2015, I studied and worked at Loughborough University, where I obtained my doctorate in 2011. My thesis focused on seventeenth-century women’s religious writings, particularly the life-writings and prophecies of Baptist women and the role of these writings in seventeenth-century dissent. This research was published by Ashgate Press in 2015 and was nominated for the Richard L. Greaves prize by the International John Bunyan Society in 2016.
I continue to work on seventeenth-century Protestant dissenting communities, ritual and memory, and early-modern women’s writing. I am also an experienced textual editor, producing a teaching edition of seventeenth-century women’s writing in 2014, and contributing editions of two plays to the new eight-volume edition of Aphra Behn’s works with Cambridge University Press.
I would welcome PhD applications to work in any of these areas and seventeenth-century literature and culture more generally.
Research and scholarship
My research centres on women’s textual participation in seventeenth-century dissenting communities, particularly the function of women’s religious treatises, spiritual testimonies, and prophecies in early Baptist congregations. I completed my AHRC-funded PhD on this topic in 2011 and the revised version of this research was published by Ashgate Press in 2015: Baptist Women’s Writings in Revolutionary Culture, 1640-1680. Some of this research appeared in article form in The Seventeenth Century, Prose Studies, and Notes and Queries, and was the focus of a display at the Devon Heritage Centre. My work on the Devon Baptist, Deborah Huish, has since appeared on the National Trust’s webpage for Loughwood Baptist Church, South Devon, where she worshipped.
I am also interested in seventeenth-century dissenting culture more generally, particularly the role of ritual in the formation of dissenting communities. I am involved in the Dissenting Experience project, which aims to catalogue and encourage further study into seventeenth-century church books. I also sit on the Executive Committee for the International John Bunyan Society as European Treasurer and am Co-Editor of the Society’s journal, Bunyan Studies: A Journal of Reformation and Nonconformist Culture.
I also remain committed to the recovery and exploration of early-modern women's writing. In 2014 I co-edited Flesh and Spirit: An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Women’s Writing (Manchester University Press) which was concerned with exploring the relationship between spiritual and corporeal understandings of religious experience. I am also editing two Exclusion Crisis plays for the new eight-volume, original spelling edition of The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Aphra Behn (Cambridge University Press). In 2021, Volume IV, which contains my edition of Behn’s The City-Heiress, won the Josephine Roberts Award for a Scholarly Edition, presented by the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender.
Teaching
I am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and since 2018 I have been the Careers and Employability Lead for the School of Humanities. I have been running work placement modules in the School since 2016 and much of my teaching seeks to support students in recognising how their degree skills can be utilised in the world outside academia. In 2022 I was awarded Keele University TIPS project funding (with Jonathon Shears) to develop a framework for supporting authentic assessment in the School through a project with Tatton Park Library.
In the 2022-23 academic year I am convening:
Level 5:
ENG-20064 Literature and Social Change
ENG-20055 Work Placement for Humanities Students
Level 6:
ENG-30088 Work Placement for Humanities Final-Year Students
Level 7:
ENG-40057 Work Placement for Humanities Postgraduates
I also contribute teaching to Reading Literature, Texts and Contexts, Methods and Approaches, The Renaissance: Shakespeare and Beyond, English Dissertation, and Criticism, Analysis, Theory.
When I am not on research leave, I teach a research-led Level 6 module: ENG-30077 Gender and Power in Restoration Literature.
Selected Publications
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2023. Review: David Parry, The Rhetoric of Conversion in English Puritan Writing from Perkins to Milton. The Glass.
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Review: The Passion of Anne Hutchinson: an extraordinary woman, the puritan patriarchs, and the world they made and lost. Baptist Quarterly, 1-2. doi>
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Sutton, Katherine. In The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Early Modern Women's Writing. Palgrave Macmillan. doi>
Full Publications Listshow
Books
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2015. Baptist Women's Writings in Revolutionary Culture, 1640-1680. (1st ed.). Routledge. doi> link> full text>
Journal Articles
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2023. Review: David Parry, The Rhetoric of Conversion in English Puritan Writing from Perkins to Milton. The Glass.
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Review: The Passion of Anne Hutchinson: an extraordinary woman, the puritan patriarchs, and the world they made and lost. Baptist Quarterly, 1-2. doi>
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2020. Baptist Identities Reconsidered (Review Article). Bunyan Studies: A Journal of Reformation and Nonconformist Culture, 119-124, vol. 24.
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2020. Developing Graduate Skills through Studying Seventeenth-Century Literature: Some Reflections. The Journal of Academic Development and Education, vol. 12. doi> link> full text>
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2019. Review: Witness, Warning, and Prophecy: Quaker Women’s Writing, 1655–1700. Teresa Feroli and Margaret Olofson Thickstun, eds. The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series 60. Renaissance Quarterly, 722–723, vol. 72. doi>
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2018. Review: Women’s Prophetic Writings in Seventeenth-Century Britain by Carme Font (Palgrave, 2017). Women's Writing. doi>
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"'Jack Presbyter in His Proper Habit": Subverting Whig Rhetoric in Aphra Behn's The Roundheads (1682)'. Women's Writing, 34-55, vol. 22(1). doi> full text>
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2014. Review: Staging Women and the Soul-Body Dynamic in Early Modern England, Sarah E. Johnson (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014). Early Modern Studies Journal, vol. 6.
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2013. ‘“In order to spirituall good the body often afflicted”: Bodily Affliction in Lady Mary Carey’s Conversion Narrative (1649-57)’. The Glass, 18-29, vol. 25. link>
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2012. Review: A Company of Women Preachers: Baptist Prophetesses in Seventeenth-Century England, a Reader, ed. by Curtis W. Freeman (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2011). The Seventeenth Century, 237-238, vol. 27. full text>
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2011. '"As Shee Preachers Hold Forth Christ": Sara Jones's Challenge to Episcopacy, The Relation of a Gentlewoman (1642)'. Prose Studies: history, theory, criticism, 1-18, vol. 33(1). doi> full text>
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2011. ‘"Like to an anatomy before us": Deborah Huish's Spiritual Experiences and the Attempt to Establish the Fifth Monarchy'. The Seventeenth Century, 44-68, vol. 26(1). doi> full text>
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2011. ‘“Gather up the Fragments, that nothing be lost”: “Memorable” Women’s Conversion Narratives’. Early Modern Women: an interdisciplinary journal, 209-216, vol. 6.
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2010. 'Anne Venn's A Wise Virgin's Lamp Burning (1658) in the Household of Anne Dunch, Sister-in-law to Richard Cromwell'. Notes and Queries: for readers and writers, collectors and librarians, 501-503, vol. 57(4). doi> full text>
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2009. ‘“A Good Example to Women”: The Biographer’s Presence in mid-Seventeenth-Century Women’s Conversion Narratives’. The Glass, 11-19, vol. 21.
Chapters
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Sutton, Katherine. In The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Early Modern Women's Writing. Palgrave Macmillan. doi>
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Beaumont, Agnes. In The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Early Modern Women's Writing. Palgrave Macmillan. doi>
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2020. Believers’ Baptism, Commemoration, and Communal Identity in Revolutionary England. In Memory and the English Reformation. Cambridge University Press. doi> link> full text>
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2016. Entries on Margaret Baxter, Anna Trapnel, and other dissenting women. In A Biographical Encyclopedia of Early Modern Englishwomen Exemplary Lives and Memorable Acts. Levin C, Bertolet AR, Carney JE (Eds.). Routledge.
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2015. 'Egerton, Sarah Fyge', 'Rowe, Elizabeth Singer', 'Chudleigh, Lady Mary', and 'Hutchinson, Lucy'. In The Encyclopedia of British Literature 1660 - 1789 Set. Day G and Lynch J (Eds.). John Wiley & Sons. link>
Other
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2021. Aphra Behn's The City Heiress. In The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. IV: Plays 1682-96 (General eds. Mel Evans, Elaine Hobby, Gillian Wright, Claire Bowditch). doi> link> full text>
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2016. A Spur to Lukewarm Spirits: The ‘Proceedings Book of Meetings in East Devon, chiefly at Loughwood, 1653-1795’. link>
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2014. Flesh and Spirit: An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Women's Writing. link>
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2013. National Trust information sheets on Loughwood Baptist Church, Devon. link>
School of Humanities
Chancellor's Building
Keele University
Staffordshire
ST5 5AA
Tel: +44 (0) 1782 733109
Head of School
Dr Nick Seager
Room: CBB1.038 (Chancellor's Building, 'B' Extension)
Tel: +44 (0) 1782 733142
Email: n.p.seager@keele.ac.uk
School and college outreach
Tel: +44 (0) 1782 734009
Email: outreach@keele.ac.uk