Dr William Poole

My research lies in early modern literary, intellectual, and scientific history. I also have strong interests in bibliography, palaeography, and the history of libraries.

My current main projects are: 1) a critical history of Oxford books and book economy from c. 1580 to c. 1720; 2) the Protestant inflection of the European reception of Chinese language and history in the early-modern period; 3) the Scottish Neo-Latin poet and Greek scribe Peter Goldman of Dundee (1587/8–1627); 4) the history of Oxford's Anatomy School Museum, c. 1630-1780; and 5) the early modern fantastic voyage and its classical antecedents. I am also editing, separately, the complete correspondences of two important figures of seventeenth-century natural philosophy, Robert Hooke, and John Aubrey. With James Willoughby, I co-edit the Bibliographical Society of London’s quarterly The Library, the world’s leading journal in the field of historical bibliography.

Recent books:

Geometry and Astronomy in New College, Oxford: On the Quatercentenary of the Savilian Professorships, 1619–2019. With Christopher Skelton-Foord et al. Oxford: New College, 2019.

John Milton, Manuscript Writings, vol. 11 of The Oxford Milton. Oxford: OUP, 2019.

John Fell’s New Year Books, 1666–1686. Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, 2018.

Milton and the Making of ‘Paradise Lost’. Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2017.

Some recent articles and chapters:

‘Sir Henry Savile and the Early Professors’, in Oxford’s Savilian Professors of Geometry: The First 400 Years, ed. R. J. Wilson (Oxford, 2021).

‘A lost Chinese inscribed stone, some Old Hungarian script, two notable copies of Angelo Rocca’s Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana (1591), and an addition to John Donne’s library’, The Seventeenth Century 34 (2020).

‘Edward Bernard’s Chinese Map’, The Seventeenth Century 33 (2019).

‘Barton’s Coins: Eighteenth-Century Numismatics in New College, Oxford’, Journal of the History of Collections 30 (2018), pp. 385-93.

‘Early English Sinology 1577-1688’, in Elizabeth Sauer, ed., Emergent Nation: Early Modern British Literature in Transition. 1660-1714 (Cambridge, 2018).

‘Seventeenth-century ‘Double Writing’ schemes, and a 1676 Letter in the Phonetic Script and Real Character of John Wilkins’, Notes & Records of the Royal Society of London 72 (2018).

‘A Royalist Mathematical Practitioner in Interregnum Oxford: The Exploits of Richard Rawlinson (1616–1668)’, The Seventeenth Century 32 (2018).

‘The Letters of Shen Fuzong to Thomas Hyde, 1687-88’, electronic British Library Journal (2015), article 9.

Recent web resources:

Robert Hooke’s Books (http://www.hookesbooks.com/). With Yelda Nasifoglu and Felicity Henderson. Database of library, with extensive introduction and ancillary materials.

For a fuller list of publications see https://www.english.ox.ac.uk/people/dr-william-poole#tab-417236