Kristine L. Haugen's Research
My research has ranged broadly in European intellectual history of the early modern period, that is, from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Where my specific interest in literary humanism is concerned, I have published articles on literary aesthetics, the pursuit of literary history, the historical exegesis of poetry, and the interfaces between poetry and philosophy. Early modern practices of interpretation more broadly defined are the subject of articles on the theological Trinity doctrine and on the interpretation of prophecy. And I have examined the institutional settings of early modern intellectual work -- above all, the university -- in order to understand how scholars studied, competed, and collaborated.
All of these concerns shaped my first book, Richard Bentley: Poetry and Enlightenment (Harvard, 2011), in which I hold up to the light one of the most mercurial and brilliant figures in the history of European scholarship. Abrasive, arrogant, and widely ridiculed by his English contemporaries, Bentley (1662-1742) was simultaneously Europe's most famous classical scholar. His multifarious projects reveal his attempts to escape from the relatively obscure ecclesiastical scholarship that held sway in the England of his youth and to turn toward more accessible, attractive forms of publication. If Bentley's methodological innovations were less dramatic than those of other humanists, he nonetheless transformed scholarship in England and galvanized his contemporaries abroad: both his strengths and his glaring missteps discernibly belonged to the early Enlightenment.
In the future, I plan to transpose similar questions into an earlier period, producing a new account of Italian and French literary theory from the recovery of Aristotle's Poetics in the Quattrocento to the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns. At present, however, I am examining intellectual work as it was pursued in an altogether different institution: the early modern prison. My current book project on Intellectuals in Prison from Marco Polo to Nelson Mandela devotes very careful attention to early modern Europe: during that period, elites and specifically intellectuals were regularly imprisoned by absolute monarchs and hardened republican regimes. With remarkable frequency, these learned inmates also managed to write substantial works of scholarship, philosophy, and poetry while confined. Some prisoners radically changed their scholarly habits as the result of privation; others, somewhat improbably, proceeded as if nothing had altered; and some seem to have taken imprisonment as an occasion for wholesale reassessment and surprising intellectual change. I carry this story forward through the eventual decline in the imprisonment of elites in Europe, the simultaneous rise of public articulation of human rights and the freedom of expression, and the new social identification of the prison in the West as an institution for the criminal and the unwashed. On an even more general plane, the story of intellectuals in prison forms a remarkable case study for the interaction of individuals, institutions, and durable social habits and identities. I welcome suggestions from any quarter about early modern prisoners I may have missed so far.
Last updated: January 10, 2011 14:47
