Dr Felicity Green (MPhil PhD)

Senior Lecturer

Biography

Background

I was born in London and raised in France, before returning to the UK to pursue my studies in History at the University of Cambridge. I obtained my PhD at Cambridge in 2010, and was appointed to a Research Fellowship there in 2009. I have also held short-term fellowships at the Swedish Collegium of Advanced Study (Uppsala) and at the Huntington Library. I came to Edinburgh in September 2012 to take up a Chancellor’s Fellowship in History. I became a Lecturer in 2017 and was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2020. 

Undergraduate teaching

  • Montaigne and the Late Renaissance (Honours elective)

  • Rational Animals: Human Nature in Early Modern Thought (special subject) 

Postgraduate teaching

  • Myth and the History of Scholarship in Early Modern Europe 
  • A Voice of Her Own: Women in Early Modern Intellectual History

Open to PhD supervision enquiries?

Yes

Areas of interest for supervision

I welcome enquiries from students interested in pursuing PhD research in most areas of British and European intellectual history, c. 1500-1700. 

Current PhD students supervised

Xiao, Zhibai - PhD - Liberty and law in the political thought of the English civil wars - Primary

Milevsky, Moshe - PhD - The Jewish wars of chronology - Primary

Past PhD students supervised

Kent, Emily - PhD - Cloistered Science: The Monastic Learning of Marin Mersenne (1588- 1648) - Secondary

Fellows, Edward - PhD - Doubtful Disputations: Controversies in Philosophical Theology Circa 1700 - Secondary 

Hsu, Chao-Chi - PhD - The Freedom and Authority of Conscience: Religion and Politics in the Thought of Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1582-1648) - Secondary - link

Research summary

Places: 

  • Britain & Ireland
  • Europe

Themes: 

  • Culture
  • Ideas
  • Language & Literature

Periods: 

  • Early Modern

Research interests

I work on early modern European intellectual history and the history of knowledge, with an emphasis on the late 16th and early 17th centuries.

Current research interests

The main focus of my current research is a project entitled Myth before the Enlightenment, examining how scholars and writers in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe grappled with the literary, cognitive and religious dimensions of pagan mythology (both ancient and contemporary). I am especially interested in exploring how ideas about language, and the role of language in underpinning idolatry, shaped these scholarly encounters with paganism. I am also, in parallel, interested in early modern ideas about animal, human and artificial minds, and particularly in writing about deafness, and the light it sheds on the relationship between thought and language.

Past research interests

My previous research centred around the French humanist and writer Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), and the role that a preoccupation with personal freedom played in shaping his interest in the self.

Affiliated research centres

  • Centre for Medieval & Early Modern Studies

The list below is a subset of the information held on the University of Edinburgh PURE system, and includes Books, Chapters, Articles and Conference contributions. For a full list, including details of other publication types (e.g. reviews), please see the Edinburgh Research Explorer page for Dr Felicity Green.

Books - Authored

Green, F. (2012) Montaigne and the Life of Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Articles

Green, F. (2020) Freedom and obligation in Locke's account of belief. British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 28(1), pp. 69-89DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/09608788.2019.1577216

Chapters

Green, F. (2022) Freedom without Republicanism: The case of Montaigne. In: Dawson, H. and de Dijn, A. (eds.) Rethinking Liberty before Liberalism. Cambridge University Press, pp. 17-37DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108951722.003

Green, F. (2020) Demonology and scepticism in early modern France: Bodin and Montaigne. In: Goodare, J., Voltmer, R. and Willumsen, L. (eds.) Demonology and Witch-Hunting in Early Modern Europe. RoutledgeDOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003007296

Green, F. (2013) Montaigne's Soul. In: Cummings, B. and Sierhuis, F. (eds.) Passions and subjectivity in early modern culture. Ashgate Publishing, pp. 95-112

Green, F. (2013) Freedom and self-possession: The case of Montaigne's Essais. In: Skinner, Q. and van Gelderen, M. (eds.) Freedom and the Construction of Europe: Volume 2: Free persons and free states. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 27-45

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