Anthony Ossa-Richardson is Lecturer in Early Modern Literature in the Department of English Language and Literature at University College London. His research encompasses a range of periods and disciplines—he has written essays on such odd topics as the study of pagan religion in the Renaissance; the science of sneezing in early modern England; the psychiatric and demonological beliefs of Victorian asylum chaplains; the theory of relics on the cusp of the Enlightenment; the early novelist Thomas Nashe and the didactic poet Sir John Davies; the metaphorics of the mind in late Cartesian philosophy; the madcap scheme for world peace dreamt up by a De Beers office clerk in early twentieth-century South Africa; humanist imitations of the Greek satirist Lucian; the editing, translation, interpretation and literary criticism of the Bible; the limits of the concept of allegory; and the architecture of postwar British university campuses.
His major project for the past few years has been his second monograph (published in May 2019), A History of Ambiguity—an account of the ways in which readers and critics from antiquity to the twentieth century have posited, denied, conceptualised and argued over the existence of multiple meanings in texts; it covers ten interconnected episodes in the histories of law, literary criticism, philosophy, rhetoric and biblical exegesis.
Finally, alongside these individual projects, he is currently translating (with Dr Richard Oosterhoff, University of Edinburgh), the first book about Africa published in Europe, the Cosmography and Geography of Africa, by the Moroccan diplomat al-Hasan al-Wazzan, better known as Johannes Leo Africanus. This work was written in Italian in the 1520s and first published in 1550, although the printed version is considerably different from the original manuscript, on which our work is based. The translation is contracted with Penguin Classics and will probably be out in late 2022.
PAPER: “Cosmographical Performance”
OBJECT: A Geographical History of Africa, written in Arabicke and Italian by Iohn Leo a More … collected and translated by Iohn Pory (London, 1600). [From the John Hay Library’s George Earl Church Collection, Call No. Gow L55]