Susan Manning Postdoctoral Fellow, August 2020 - May 2021
IASH Biography
Gašper Jakovac is a cultural and literary historian of the early modern period. His research focuses on early modern drama, performance, popular culture, and religious politics in Protestant England. He completed his PhD in English Studies at Durham University, where he was a member of the AHRC-funded Records of Early English Drama North-East project (2014–2018). Recently, he was a David Walker Memorial Fellow in Early Modern History at the Bodleian Library (Oxford) and a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute (Florence).
Gašper is currently working on a monograph project, provisionally entitled ‘Entertainment and Performance in the English Catholic Community, 1558–1660’. Focusing on English provincial society, the book considers how Catholics, a persecuted religious minority at the time, used performative entertainment, such as drama, dance, music, equestrian sports, and traditional ceremonies, to negotiate their place in a hostile society and to articulate specifically Catholic values, anxieties, hopes, and beliefs.
Susan Manning Postdoctoral Fellow, August 2020 - May 2021.
Project: ‘Christmas in Purgatory: The History of Purgatory and Catholic Performance Culture in Protestant England’
At IASH, Gašper plans to complete a scholarly edition of Robert Owen’s manuscript play The History of Purgatory (British Library, Add. MS 11427), a unique example of Catholic vernacular drama from the early seventeenth century, which is to be published by the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies (University of Toronto). During his stay in Edinburgh, Gašper will also consult a number of Scottish Catholic sources, particularly in the National Library of Scotland and the Scottish Catholic Archives (Aberdeen).
Recent publications
‘The Catholic Country House in Early Modern England: Motion, Piety and Hospitality, c.1580–1640’, in Kimberley Skelton (ed.), Early Modern Spaces in Motion: Design, Experience and Rhetoric (Amsterdam University Press). Forthcoming.
‘“What huntinges & matches have beene of late appointed”: Northern Catholics, Equestrian Sports, and the Gunpowder Plot’, John McKinnell and Diana Wyatt (eds.), Early Performers and Performance in the North East of England (ARC Humanities Press). Forthcoming.
Co-authored with Mark Chambers, ‘Welcoming James VI & I in the North-East: Civic Performance and Conflict in Durham and Newcastle’, Medieval English Theatre, vol. 41 (2020), 84–133.
‘A Dancer Made a Recusant: Dance and Evangelization in the Jacobean North East of England’, British Catholic History, 34/2 (2018), 273–303.