Beatrice Groves

On the undergraduate course, I teach Finals papers (for second and third years) on English Literature 1550-1650, English Literature 1650-1750 and Shakespeare. I have supervised dissertations on topics including Nashe, Shakespeare, Herbert and Mary Sidney.

My research interests are centred on early modern literature and drama. My first book looked at the influence of the Bible on Shakespeare’s plays and my second book explored the writing of the AD 70 destruction of Jerusalem in the early modern period, and the way in which this event shaped English, Protestant identity. My third book (on literary allusion in Harry Potter) was in a very different vein, although still interested in the way texts talk to each other. I am now back in the Renaissance, working on a number of projects centring on Shakespeare and the Bible. This includes a monograph on the cross-over between early modern psalms and sonnets.

Alongside my books, I have published over 20 journal and book articles on subjects ranging from Shakespeare and the ethics of nursing to Eucharistic satire. In 2013, I was awarded the Sixteenth Century Society Literary Prize for my article on Jerusalem in Early Modern English Travel Narratives.

You can find out more about me on Twitter and on my Harry Potter blog

 Literary Allusion in Harry Potter (London: Routledge, 2017)

The Destruction of Jerusalem in Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015)

Texts and Traditions: Religion in Shakespeare 1592-1604 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)

‘Communities of interpretation in Jane Austen and Harry Potter’ in Open at the Close: Literary Essays on “Harry Potter,” edited by Cecilia Konchar Farr (Jackson, Mississippi: University of Mississippi Press, 2022), pp.93-105

‘Questioning the Psalms in Shakespeare,’ in Christian Shakespeare: Question Mark 

A Collection of Essays on Shakespeare in his Christian Context, ed. Michael Scott and Michael Collins (Wilmington, Delaware: Vernon Press, 2022), pp.37-52. 

‘Arthurian education in Harry Potter,’ The Use of English, 71.1 (2019): 50-60

‘Early Modern Tragedy and the Mystery Plays: New Material Evidence’, in Transformations of Tragedy: Christian Influences from Early Modern to Modern, ed. Fionnuala O'Neill Tonning, Erik Tonning and Jolyon Mitchell (Leiden: Brill, 2019), pp.23-43 

 ‘“The ears of profiting:” Listening to Falstaff’s Biblical Quotations’, in Shakespeare and Quotation, eds. Julie Maxwell and Kate Rumbold (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp.60-71

‘England’s Jerusalem and Shakespeare’s Henriad’, in The Bible on the Shakespearean Stage: Cultures of Interpretation in Reformation England, eds. Thomas Fulton and Kristen Poole (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp.87-102

 ‘The Morality of Milk: Shakespeare and the Ethics of Nursing’, in Shakespeare and Renaissance Ethics, eds. Patrick Gray and John D. Cox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 139-58

‘Heraldic Language and Identity in Shakespeare’s Plays’, in Nigel Ramsay, ed. Heralds and Heraldry in Shakespeare’s England (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2014), pp.236-65

‘Pilgrimage in Paradise Lost’, Milton Studies 53 (2012): 127-46