Dr Felicity Green (MPhil PhD)

Senior Lecturer

Biography

Background

I was born in London and raised in France, before returning to the UK to pursue my studies in History at the University of Cambridge. I obtained my PhD at Cambridge in 2010, and was appointed to a Research Fellowship there in 2009. I have also held short-term fellowships at the Swedish Collegium of Advanced Study (Uppsala) and at the Huntington Library. I came to Edinburgh in September 2012 to take up a Chancellor’s Fellowship in History. I became a Lecturer in 2017 and was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2020. 

Undergraduate teaching

  • History in Theory (Approaches to Early Modern Intellectual History)

  • Intellectual History from Antiquity to the Renaissance

Current PhD students supervised

Name - Degree - Thesis topic - Supervision type - Link

Hsu, Chao-Chi - PhD - The Liberty of the People: Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1582-1648) and the Church and State Controversy - Secondary - link

Research summary

Places: 

  • Britain & Ireland
  • Europe

Themes: 

  • Culture
  • Ideas
  • Language & Literature

Periods: 

  • Early Modern

Research interests

I work on early modern European intellectual history, with an emphasis on late 16th century and early 17th century moral and political thought. I am especially interested in the following topics: the history of conceptions of the self or person; the reception and transformation of ancient ethics; the relationship between working methods, literary forms and philosophical ideas; the thought and writings of Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592).  

Current research interests

My current project focuses on representations of the household and household management (oeconomia) in the 16th and 17th centuries. How did early modern thinkers locate the household in the broader landscape of human life and activity? What was the relationship, in their eyes, between the identities and duties of human beings as individuals, members of households, and citizens? My research seeks to answer these questions by connecting discussions of ‘economics’ to developments in the two other branches of ‘practical’ philosophy in this period: ethics and politics. What role does the household play in early modern reflections on the well-lived or well-managed life – a life embedded within the hierarchical yet symbiotic context of the family? Everyday, apparently mundane activities such as account keeping or animal husbandry, I suggest, were often charged with broader, symbolic significance. Household management was closely linked to self-management, serving as both model and metaphor for the prudent dispensation and ordering of body, soul and mind. At the same time, the household provided the link between the individual human being and wider society, mediating between natural and voluntary forms of human association. How were the boundaries between the economic and the political, the domestic and the public, drawn in this period? How did thinkers situate the household, both conceptually and historically, in relation to the commonwealth?

Affiliated research centres

  • Centre for Medieval & Renaissance Studies

The list below is a subset of the information held on the University of Edinburgh PURE system, and includes Books, Chapters, Articles and Conference contributions. For a full list, including details of other publication types (e.g. reviews), please see the Edinburgh Research Explorer page for Dr Felicity Green.

Books - Authored

Green, F. (2012) Montaigne and the Life of Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Articles

Green, F. (2020) Freedom and obligation in Locke's account of belief. British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 28(1), pp. 69-89DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/09608788.2019.1577216

Chapters

Green, F. (2022) Freedom without Republicanism: The case of Montaigne. In: Dawson, H. and de Dijn, A. (eds.) Rethinking Liberty before Liberalism. Cambridge University Press, pp. 17-37DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108951722.003

Green, F. (2020) Demonology and scepticism in early modern France: Bodin and Montaigne. In: Goodare, J., Voltmer, R. and Willumsen, L. (eds.) Demonology and Witch-Hunting in Early Modern Europe. RoutledgeDOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003007296

Green, F. (2013) Montaigne's Soul. In: Cummings, B. and Sierhuis, F. (eds.) Passions and subjectivity in early modern culture. Ashgate Publishing, pp. 95-112

Green, F. (2013) Freedom and self-possession: The case of Montaigne's Essais. In: Skinner, Q. and van Gelderen, M. (eds.) Freedom and the Construction of Europe: Volume 2: Free persons and free states. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 27-45

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