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Anne Prescott

Senior Scholar and Emerita Helen Goodhart Altschul Professor of English

Department

English, Medieval & Renaissance Studies

Office

408C Barnard Hall

Contact

Anne Lake Prescott, Helen Goodhart Altschul Professor of English, began teaching at Barnard in 1967. In addition to her Barnard and Columbia degrees, she also studied at Radcliffe College and the University of Paris.

A specialist in the English Renaissance, Professor Prescott is affiliated with the comparative literature program and the medieval and Renaissance studies program at Barnard. She is currently working on David in the Renaissance and on Renaissance almanacs and calendars.

Professor Prescott is the co-editor of two Ashgate series of editions of early modern texts by modern women and is co-editor of Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual.

For some years a trustee of the Renaissance Society of America and at one point president of the International Spenser Society, she is currently president of the Sixteenth Century Society. She also serves on the editorial boards for SELAmerican Notes and QueriesThe John Donne JournalThe Sidney JournalRenaissance Studies, and Moreana.

  • Ph.D., M.A., Columbia University
  • A.B., Barnard College

  • English Renaissance
  • Spenser
  • Satire
  • Anglo-French relations
  • Renaissance humanism
  • Women in the early modern period

Renaissance Historicisms: Essays in Honor of Arthur F. Kinney, edited with J. Dutcher (Delaware University Press, 2008)

Approaches to Teaching Shorter Elizabethan Poetry, edited with P. Cheney (MLA, 2000)

Female and Male Voices in Early Modern England, edited with B. Travitsky (Columbia, 2000)

French Poets and the English Renaissance: Studies in Fame and Transformation (Yale University Press, 1998)

Edmund Spenser's Poetry, 3rd edition, edited with H. Maclean (W.W. Norton, 1992)

Imagining Rabelais in the English Renaissance (Yale University Press, 1978)