I am in the final stages of completing a doctoral thesis at New College, Oxford. My thesis is about the emergence of the essay as a genre in English in the early seventeenth century, with particular focus on the work of Sir William Cornwallis the Younger, although I also have a secondary focus on John Florio’s English translation of Montaigne’s Essais. I am especially interested in the relationship between reading and rhetoric, and also in aspects of material book history, in particular early-modern readers’ annotations and commonplace books.