Ryan Perry
Dr Ryan Perry
Dr Ryan Perry is the Principal Investigator for a large grant funded by the Leverhulme Trust, Whittington's Gift: Reconstructing the Lost Common Library of London's Guildhall (2020-2024). The project is being co-investigated by Dr Stephen Kelly (Queen’s University, Belfast) and researched by two PDRAs, Dr Hannah Schuhle-Lewis (Kent) and Dr Natalie Calder (QUB).
Ryan joined the University of Kent in September 2011 after researching as a PDRA in the School of English, Queen’s University of Belfast where he worked on two large AHRC-funded projects; most recently, ‘Geographies of Orthodoxy’ and previously, as a research associate on the ‘Imagining History’ project. It was at Queen’s where Ryan completed his PhD on ‘The Cultural Locations of Handlyng Synne’, examining the reading and production contexts for Robert Mannyng of Brunne’s entertaining handbook on sin. He teaches medieval and early modern literature in the School of English and the Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies where he acted as co-Director between 2016 and 2020.
About the event
This lecture will introduce John Colop, a man from fifteenth-century London who was at the centre of the 'Common Profit' scheme, a phenomenon whereby religious books, often containing rather exclusive texts, were made to be circulated amongst a community of mixed-gender London readers – 'man or woman, as long as the book endureth'. This lecture will reveal who the enigmatic John Colop was, and why his particular set of skills allowed him to stand at the head of this innovation in the history of textual transmission in the age before print.
A link to Ryan's eBook is available here
Ryan Perry
