Rate My Professor Barbara Ravelhofer

Prof. Ravelhofer’s research centres on English Literature and Renaissance Studies, with particular emphasis on European spectacle from the Middle Ages to the seventeenth century, editing and book history in comparative perspective, and oral forms of literature. Her monograph The Early Stuart Masque: Dance, Costume, and Music (Oxford University Press, 2006) analyses illusionistic theatre of the Renaissance, professional ballet, theatre management, and dramatic performance at the early Stuart court, utilising extensive documentary evidence from productions in England, France, Italy, Germany, and the Ottoman Empire. She edited the French dance treatise Louange de la danse (2000), James Shirley and Early Modern Theatre: New Critical Perspectives (Routledge, 2016), and co-edited English Historical Drama, 1500-1660: Forms Outside the Canon (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Key articles include “Shakespeare and Dance” (Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 2021), “Censorship and Poetry at the Court of Charles I: The Case of Georg Rodolf Weckherlin” (English Literary Renaissance, 2013), and “Burlesque Ballet, a Ballad and a Banquet in Ben Jonson’s The Gypsies Metamorphos’d (1621)” (Dance Research, 2007). She leads the AHRC-funded James Shirley Project as Principal Investigator and contributes to Records of Early English Drama: The North-East. Her current book project examines English court theatre, iconoclasm, and the dawn of the Civil War.