Our staff
Dr Gillian Spraggs
Role: Visiting Fellow
Email: G.M.Spraggs@lboro.ac.uk
I am interested in the cultural and literary history of crime, particularly highway robbery and banditry. I am currently working on a book on the highwaymen of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England.
My previous book Outlaws and Highwaymen. The Cult of the Robber in England from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century (London, Pimlico) was published in 2001. It charts the cultural history of the highway robber from the earliest English outlaw legends to the nineteenth-century novel. It includes chapters on the medieval Robin Hood tales, the figure of Falstaff in Shakespeare's Henry IV plays, and John Gay's ballad opera The Beggar's Opera. A companion website containing a collection of source documents is online at www.outlawsandhighwaymen.com.
Forthcoming essay:
'Bulla Felix: a Roman Robin Hood' in Outlaws, Exiles and Heroes: History and Literature through the Ages, ed. David Hepworth (Windbrook Publishing)
Some recent talks and conference papers:
2007 'Bulla Felix: a Roman Robin Hood' (20 July, Conference of the International Association of Robin Hood Studies at Plas Gregynog, Powys, Robin Hood, Crime and Bandits)
2007 'Trouble in Turnmill Street' [the history of Elizabethan and Jacobean Clerkenwell from archive material, including the Middlesex Sessions records] (24 April, Criminal Londoners event, London Metropolitan Archives)
2004 'James Hind, Highwayman and Royalist: the Making of a Legend' (15 September, Loughborough University conference, Leviathan to Licensing Act [1650-1737]: Theatre, Print and their Contexts)
Poetry
I have published a number of poems and translations. In 1998 I edited the anthology Love Shook My Senses: Lesbian Love Poems (London, The Women's Press).
Creative writing
In 2005, with Deborah Tyler-Bennett, I wrote 'Creative Writing in Museums', a web-based course for the adult learning section of the V&A website.