Lorna Hutson was born in Germany to Scottish parents and was educated in San Francisco, Edinburgh, and Oxford. At Oxford she wrote a PhD thesis on Thomas Nashe which was published by OUP as Thomas Nashe in Context (1989). From 1985-1998 she was Lecturer and then Reader at Queen Mary College, London, and wrote The Usurer's Daughter (Routledge, 1994). In 2001, as Professor of the University of California, Berkeley, she edited, with Victoria Kahn, Rhetoric and Law in Early Modern Europe. She was the recipient, in 2004-5 of an award from John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to write The