Emma Bartel

Please tell us about your research project.
I'm currently writing a doctoral thesis titled 'Women's interpretive engagement with the art of meditation in seventeenth-century England' under the supervision of Pr. Line Cottegnies at Sorbonne Université. I'm spending most of my time in Oxford at the Weston Library looking at early modern manuscripts of meditations, miscellanies and annotated printed books of meditations. I am trying to track women's participation in an English Protestant tradition of meditation by looking at how they interacted with contemporary meditative theory and practice. This entails studying gendered discourse surrounding meditation and situating  women's reading and writing practices within a meditative framework. I am also interested in the reception of women's devotional writing and have been looking at how women's written meditations might have been used, read and studied as profitable devotional material during the period.

Could you please tell us a bit more about your scholarship/exchange programme?
I am staying at the Maison Française in August 2022 thanks to their monthly scholarship.

First impressions of Oxford/the University?
I had been to Oxford before as a visiting student at St Hilda's College in 2017-18. It is fantastic to be back in a city that feels like home to me and has a wonderful community of early modernists who are always happy to meet up and share their ideas. There is always 'a stone to unturn' and unexpected discoveries to make at the Bodleian or in a museum - or in one of Oxford's historic pubs or cafes which play host to a variety of charming and eccentric characters. My most recent discovery was a very small sundial with a beautiful engraving of Judith beheading Holofernes at the History of Science Museum.