The Society for Renaissance Studies is pleased to announce that its 2025–2026 postdoctoral fellowships have been awarded to Nicole Maceira Cumming and Serin Quinn for projects on the humans, animals and the environment in the Scottish Reformation, and on aphrodisiacs and foodstuffs in early modern England. As always, we received an extremely high number of exceptional applications and we would like to congratulate all applicants on the quality of their research projects.
Nicole Maceira Cumming, ‘Animals, the environment and the “Protestant” worldview in seventeenth-century Scotland, c. 1600-1660’
Nicole Maceira Cumming is a historian of early modern human-animal relationships and the environment. She was awarded her PhD from the University of Strathclyde (undertaken jointly with the University of Glasgow) in 2025. Her doctoral thesis examined the role of hunting and animals in the Scottish court of James VI, c.1579-1603.
Nicole’s SRS postdoctoral project examines the relationship between humans, animals, and the environment in post-Reformation Scotland (c.1600-1660), taking a critical more-than-human approach (which acknowledges human life and society as being deeply interconnected with non-human entities). The project will centre on early seventeenth-century sermons, biblical meditations and commentaries, and Kirk Session (church court) records and will consider how the religious and cultural changes enacted by the Reformation shaped people’s understanding of, and relationship to, the natural world. In doing so, it will address the continuities with pre-Reformation belief and the degree to which a uniquely ‘Protestant’ understanding of nature can indeed be identified. This focus on the religious sphere will allow for crucial insights into the ethical and cosmological views of the time and will also offer vital perspectives for our own age, in which we face climate crisis and an estimated 73% reduction in wildlife population in just half a century (Living Planet Report, 2024).
Serin Quinn, ‘Gluttony and Lust: Foods as Aphrodisiacs in Early Modern England’
Serin Quinn is a food historian, specialising in the socio-cultural and environmental histories of foodstuffs in pre-modern Europe. She completed her PhD at the University of Warwick in 2025, funded by AHRC/Midlands4Cities. The thesis, titled ‘From Xitomatl to Love Apple: The Introduction of the Tomato to England, c. 1500-1800’, used the history of the tomato as a means to explore the impact of the so-called Columbian Exchange on Europe, following the plant from pre-Columbian Mesoamerica through to late Georgian England.
Serin’s project with the Society for Renaissance Studies turns to the history of aphrodisiac-foods in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Aphrodisiacs were foodstuffs that were thought, either through Galenic-Hippocratic humoral theory or folk tradition, to increase the fertility (and thereby sexual drive) of the consumer. These foods, due to their overlapping position within the worlds of consumption, health, morality and sociability, allow us to examine behaviour and belief in the pre-modern world. This research covers both the everyday and illicit sides of early modern aphrodisiacs, studying their presence at banquets, family meals, brothels, and as an ordinary part of diets. It adds to our current sparse understanding of how such foods were viewed and produced in daily life and the agency of the women involved, establishing the lived reality of aphrodisiac consumption in the home and within the social lives of ordinary people. It further asks why contemporaries chose to consume in ways which ran contrary to the ideals of good religious behaviour, and how reference to aphrodisiac-foodstuffs became a way to censure certain groups of society. By examining both ordinary and extraordinary interactions with aphrodisiac-foods, this project provides a well-rounded study of the position of food and drink at the crossroads of religious, medical and culinary worldviews.