Joad Raymond Wren

Joad Raymond Wren is a Welsh writer and scholar, now based near Folkestone. He was educated at the University of East Anglia and Oxford University, taught at the Universities of Oxford, Aberdeen, East Anglia, Queen Mary, University of London, and retired from academic life to write full time in 2022.

He has written about early modern Europe: about cheap print and news, angels, the role of the imagination in political thought, and the capacity of utopia to carry us beyond the horizons of our own thinking. Among the dozen books of which he is the author and editor are: NEWS NETWORKS IN EARLY-MODERN EUROPE (Brill, 2016), THE INVENTION OF THE NEWSPAPER: ENGLISH NEWSBOOKS, 1641-1649 (Oxford, 1996; 2005), PAMPHLETS AND PAMPHLETEERING IN EARLY MODERN BRITAIN (Cambridge, 2003); MILTON’S ANGELS: THE EARLY-MODERN IMAGINATION (Oxford, 2010); and (ed.) THE OXFORD HISTORY OF POPULAR PRINT CULTURE, vol. 1: CHEAP PRINT IN BRITAIN AND IRELAND TO 1660 (Oxford, 2011). Some of these won prizes. His edition of Milton's Latin Prose for Oxford’s THE COMPLETE WORKS OF JOHN MILTON, vol. 7: THE LATIN DEFENCES, will appear under the general editorship of Thomas N. Corns and Gordon Campbell in June 2025. For this he hopes to be rewarded in Heaven. THE NEWS IN EUROPE, 1400–1800 will be published by Penguin books in June 2025. He has just completed a study of Utopias, THE USES OF UTOPIA, which will be published by Penguin books in 2026.

He intermittently contributes to TV and radio documentaries, talking about the history of printing, seventeenth-century print culture, seventeenth-century women, news and pamphlets. He has written for the Guardian, the TLS, the LRB, the TES, History Today, BBC History and other journals.

Under the name ‘The Unattached’ – a collaborative project with more accomplished musicians – he writes and performs avant-folk music. Their last album, REQUIEM FOR DEAD DOGS, was released by Gare du Nord in 2024.

He is currently writing a history of Britain viewed through folk music.