Abigail Hayton

I hold a B.A. in History (Queen Mary, University of London) and an MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History (Jesus College, Cambridge) and for the past four years I have been teaching History and Politics at Magdalen College School, Oxford. I have been tempted back to university by the Collaborative Doctoral Award, 'Jewish Books and their Readers in Early Modern Cambridge'. This award will allow me to pursue my lifelong (or since primary school) love of all things Early Modern and build on excellent recent research in the History of Scholarship, which concerns the impact of advances in Philology and Classical scholarship upon Theology. I am pursuing a series of questions relating to the 'decline' of polyglottal biblical scholarship in the aftermath of the wars of religion, which I aim to show is as a result of the acceleration of its 'daughter disciplines', Comparative History, Comparative Religion and Anthropology, all of which, I argue grow out of the historicisation of the biblical text, by polyglottal scholars of the later Reformation and early Enlightenment.