Jane Rickard is a lecturer in Seventeenth-Century English Literature, University of Leeds. Her research interests include the relationship between literature and politics, practices of reading and reception, and the cultures of manuscript and print. She is the author of Authorship and Authority: the Writings of James VI and I (Manchester University Press, 2008), which explores King James’s engagement in the literary, political and religious cultures of Scotland and England as an author, whose attempt to realise the etymological link between ‘author’ and ‘authority’ in fact exposes the tensions and contradictions between the two.