Jenny Mann’s book, Outlaw Rhetoric: Figuring Vernacular Eloquence in Shakespeare’s England (forthcoming Cornell University Press), argues that the translation of classical rhetoric into the everyday vernacular becomes a means of literary invention in the sixteenth century. Reading rhetorical handbooks alongside plays, poems, and prose romances, it shows how the translation of Greek and Latin figures of speech into English functions as a plot generator, turning classical figures of transport and exchange into native stories of fairies and Robin Hood. Her next project, Frustrating Voyeurism in the English Renaissance, explores how vernacular poetry resists the impulse towards visual observation that dominates early modern works of medicine and natural philosophy. This project will attempt to revise our understanding of the rise of empiricism, exposing competing ways of “seeing” in the discourses of science and letters.