Professor Neil Keeble

Emeritus Professor

English Studies University of Stirling, Stirling, FK9 4LA

Professor Neil Keeble

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About me

Neil Keeble was appointed to Stirling in 1974 as a lecturer in English Studies, and was subsequently Professor of English Studies (1995), Deputy Principal (2001) and Senior Deputy Principal from 2003 until his retirement in 2010.

His research interests lie in English cultural history (and especially literary and religious history) of the period 1500-1725, in particular: (i) the Puritan tradition (Baxter, Bunyan, Cromwell, Fox, Marvell, Milton); (ii) prose (fictional and non-fictional); (iii) the Civil War and English Revolution; (iv) constructions of woman and writing by women; (v) the Restoration; (v) early modern print culture.

His publications in these fields include studies of Richard Baxter: Puritan Man of Letters (1982), The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in later seventeenth-century England (1987), The Restoration: England in the 1660s (2002) and a two-volume Calendar of the Correspondence of Richard Baxter (1991; with Geoffrey F. Nuttall). He has edited John Bunyan: Conventicle and Parnassus – tercentenary essays (1988), The Cultural Identity of Seventeenth-century Woman: a reader (1994), the Cambridge Companion to Writing of the English Revolution (2001), John Bunyan: Reading Dissenting Writing (2003), 'Settling the Peace of the Church': 1662 Revisited (2014), Textual Transformations: Purposing and Repurposing Texts from Richard Baxter to Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Essays in Honour of Isabel Rivers (2019, with Tessa Whitehouse), and editions of texts by Richard Baxter and Lucy Hutchinson (both in Everyman’s Library), John Bunyan (in the World’s Classics), Andrew Marvell (for Yale University Press), Daniel Defoe (for Pickering & Chatto) and John Milton (for Oxford University Press). He has contributed eighty or so essays and articles to journals, symposia and reference works, including twelve pieces (one a 14,000 essay on Richard Baxter) to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (of which he was an associate editor).

Professor Keeble was lead editor of Oxford University Press's a five-volume scholarly edition (the first) of Richard Baxter's Reliquiae Baxterianae ( 2020), with John Coffey, Tim Cooper and Tom Charlton).