Dr. Delphine Doucet
Licence, MA, PhD
Lecturer in Early Modern History
Location:
Priestman Building, City Campus
Phone: 0191 515 2633
Email:
delphine.doucet@sunderland.ac.uk
Biography
Delphine studied history in Tours, France at the Université François Rabelais until her second year. She then went to Royal Holloway University of London in 2000 to study History through the Erasmus programme where she completed her Licence. She then remained in Royal Holloway for her MA in Renaissance and Early Modern and her PHD under the supervision of Prof. Justin Champion - Jean Bodin's Colloquium Heptaplomeres: Clandestine literature, heterodoxy and the possibility of toleration 1590-1750 - which she completed in 2008.
In the meantime she started teaching in 2003 at Royal Holloway, and in subsequent years in other colleges of the university of London (Birkbeck, and Goldsmith) and held an administrative position in Queen Mary University of London for a project led by Prof. Colin Jones (Leverhulme Funded project Physiognomy: the arts and science of the face, c. 1500-c. 1850 - http://physiognomy.history.qmul.ac.uk). She joined the history team in the Department of Culture in Sunderland in January 2010 where she is now Lecturer in Early Modern History.
Teaching Areas
Early Modern European and British History, History of ideas in early modern Europe and Britain (particular interest in the contacts between France and England).
Research Interests
My work focuses on heterodox thought, and ideas of toleration in the early modern period. It also investigates the circulation of texts and the reception of ideas particularly through the study of clandestine texts circulated from the end of the sixteenth to the eighteenth century.
I consider myself as an historian of ideas and society in Early Modern Europe.
My previous and current research focuses on the early modern corpus of clandestine manuscript literature so far defined by a specific mode of circulation, an heterodox discourse, and a chronological period running from 1600's to 1750's. My doctorate - Jean Bodin's Colloquium Heptaplomeres: Clandestine literature, heterodoxy and the possibility of toleration 1590-1750 - focussed on the clandestine manuscript composed by Jean Bodin: a conversation between seven men of different religions. This text is one of the most significant of the corpus: at least 108 copies survive for the period 1620-1750. It engages with issues central to the conflicts of religious life in the period.
This work allowed me to investigate several aspects of the early modern period in Europe such as the diffusion of ideas, and the influence of the major religious and political events for the creation and diffusion of ideas. Indeed, this text was read across Europe from the late sixteenth century to the Enlightenment, with a particular period of interest from 1650 to 1720. This specific project has instilled in me the desire to further my research in the study of heterodox ideas, the theorisation of ideas of toleration and intolerance, and the means of diffusion of ideas both in print and manuscript in the period from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. My current research project stems from this interests and my study of the clandestine manuscript of the Colloquium Heptaplomeres, and investigates some others of the French clandestine manuscripts first presented by Gustave Lanson at the beginning of the twentieth century. This work attempts comparative studies of the ideas developed in these texts, as well as of their modes of circulation, diffusions and adaptations. The research will contribute to the historiography of sociability and consumption of manuscript texts and heterodox ideas in the Early Modern period, thus contributing to current research on scribal culture, while reassessing their role in the construction of a Radical Enlightenment.
Selected Publications
Following the completion of my Ph.D., I am now preparing a critical bilingual edition (Latin and French) of the text of the Colloquium Heptaplomeres for Honoré Champion as part of their collection Libre pensée et litttérature clandestine (directed by Professor Antony McKenna).
In addition, I am cooperating to a research project that will lead to the publication of a critical English edition of Richard Simon's correspondence with Dr. Nicholas Keene and Prof. Justin Champion (to be published by Ashgate).
