Do you read enviously? Dr. Rebecca Olson shares her in-progress investigation of the prevalence of envy in prefaces to literature printed in 16th century England. She finds that these texts’ manipulation of Classical envy—including the envious Evil Eye—was implicated in the period’s larger fantasy of political commonwealth and also set the stage for modernity’s ongoing failure to acknowledge the social repercussions of “private” acts of reading.

Rebecca Olson is an Associate Professor in the School of Writing, Literature, and Film. She is the author of Arras Hanging: The Textile That Determined Early Modern Literature and Drama, as well as articles on Shakespeare, early modern textiles, and the teaching of early British literature. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in journals including PMLA, Word & Image, and Modern Philology, and she recently oversaw the production of a student-edited, free, online textbook edition of Romeo and Juliet. Her ongoing research interest is the relationship between literature and the imagination: the ways literary texts encourage readers and playgoers to engage the “mind’s eye” and to think about each other.

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