Houses of Correction: Carceral Institutions and Humanist Culture in Early Modern England (University of Pennsylvania Press, April 2026)

More than 250 years before the rise of the modern penitentiary, houses of correction pioneered the use of forced labor and individualized sentences within institutions of confinement, in part by promoting reform and the “hope of amendment” for every individual. Yet these earlier carceral institutions faced many of the same problems that remain familiar today: corruption scandals, recidivism, abuses of power.

Houses of Correction returns to the archives of London’s Bridewell, the first of these new prisons, to show how humanist reformers provided ideas, justifications, and administration for what came to be called bridewells, workhouses, and “Literary worke-houses,” even as repeated scandals and outcry made it clear that these coercive institutions would forever be at odds with the ideals and norms of humanist culture. By simultaneously examining how the work of writers including More, Shakespeare, and Milton dealt with the entanglements between humanism and these new prisons, Houses of Correction constructs the first book-length literary history of one of early modern Europe’s most influential carceral institutions.