Dr Ariel Hessayon, University of London Research Fellow (September to December 2008)
Dr Ariel Hessayon is a Lecturer at the Department of History , Goldsmiths, at the University of London. Dr Hessayon was awared a University of London Research Fellowship at the School of Advanced Study, for 4 months, between September and December 2008. Dr Hessayon is familiar with the School being a convenor in the British History in the 17th Century Seminar series organised by the Institute of Historiacal Research. He can be contacted at a.hessayon@gold.ac.uk.
Dr Hessayon's field of specialism includes the Torah and Kabbalah, the most obscurantism aspects of heraldry and Renaissance neo-Platonist and mystical thought. For more than a decade his subject has been a crazed prophet of the English Revolution - Thomas Totney, a Great Shelford yeoman's son, apprenticed in London and eventually the maker of sub-standard gold trinkets, who had a series of ecstatic visions in 1649 and thereafter wrote a number of bizarre and impenetrable tracts - profoundly allusive and elliptical. He changed his name to "Theauraurojohn" Tany.
The book of his thesis, further reworked 'Gold Tried in the Fire'. The prophet TheaurauJohn Tany and the English Revolution (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007) follows a long list of published articles on subjects tangential to it. He has edited a really challenging and effective multi-disciplinary volume of essays on radical readings of the Bible in the 16th and 17th centuries. He wrote a substantial number of brilliant vignette-articles for the Oxford DNB.
His work during his fellowship at the School focused on seventeenth-century Judaizers: Jews and secret Jews in early Stuart and interregnum England. His research is described as innovative with a sophisticated methological approach to the study of heterodoxy in the English Revolution.
View Dr Hessayon fellowship report.
