is the Walter J. Ong SJ Professor in the Humanities at Saint Louis University. In 2019 he held a summer fellowship at the Folger. This article springs out of work on early modern blank forms which will appear in chapter six of his latest book, An Archaeology of Absence: Blanks, Space, Print, and Void in Renaissance Literature to be published next year by OUP. As this blog post might suggest, he is also a keen yachtsman. This summer he spent a few days sailing on a friend’s boat in Maine. The boat was (of course) named Phoenix.
