Ms Olivia Formby

BA(Hons), MPhil (Qld)

Research Fellow

Biography

My research as an early modern historian springs from the intersections of the histories of religion, medicine, and the emotions in sixteenth and seventeenth-century England. I am interested in developing new understandings of how ordinary people and often ‘silent’ social categories, like children, experienced the upheavals and continuities of this period, within their families and wider communities. I have presented my research at academic conferences in Australia, Germany, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, as well as translated its findings on invited occasions for undergraduate and secondary teacher audiences. I co-hosted ‘Age and Health, 1500-1800’ postgraduate and ECR conference (St John’s College, 24 June 2024). My work has been published in The Seventeenth Century and Historical Research journals.

I came to Cambridge in 2021 as a Cambridge Australia Poynton International Scholar to undertake my PhD at St John’s College under the supervision of Professor Alexandra Walsham. My dissertation, entitled ‘Infants’ Emotions in Early Modern England’, uses medical and religious literature as well as life writings to shed new light on how the youngest people of the past were imagined and sensed as emotional, spiritual, and social actors. This research reveals the infant to be more complicated, socially integrated, and agentic than previously considered by historians.

I completed my undergraduate studies and MPhil at the University of Queensland where I was awarded a University Medal and the History Honours Research Prize. My MPhil project, entitled ‘Emotional Communities of Plague in Early Modern England, 1631-38’, was funded by an Australian Postgraduate Award and the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions.

Research

At Emma, my new project is ‘Children’s Language Development in Early Modern England’. This is an opportunity to draw out some of the most fascinating threads in my doctoral research about the nature of language and the affective power of sound. I will examine contemporary theories about language development symbiotically with young children’s lived experiences of speech delay, impediment, and absence, to enliven our understanding of what it meant to be a developing human in early modern England.

Journal Articles

Formby, Olivia. 'Crying in the Womb: Emotions, Sound, and Personhood in Early Modern England'. Cultural and Social History, early open access https://doi.org/10.1080/14780038.2024.2420427.

Formby, Olivia. '"Woe unto us": Divine Wrath and Godly Sorrow in an English Plague Sermon (1637)'. The Seventeenth Century 37, no. 3 (2022): 351-70.

Formby, Olivia. 'The Emotional Evidence of Early Modern English Plague Wills'. Historical Research 94, no. 266 (2021): 782-805.

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