Perdita Project

Perdita: Frames-Based Version
https://web.warwick.ac.uk/english/perdita/html/

Perdita Manuscripts: Women Writers, 1500–1700
http://www.amdigital.co.uk/m-products/product/perdita-manuscripts-1500-1700/

The Perdita Project broke new ground in the digital humanities when it was established at Nottingham Trent University in 1997; it continues to enable and shape scholarship on early modern women's manuscript cultures two decades later. The Project has its own complex publishing history and currently exists in two forms. The first is an open-access, online, descriptive catalogue of manuscripts written or compiled by British women between 1500 and 1700, housed at Warwick University. Containing "everything but the text," it revises the function and form of the traditional print catalogue in a digital environment to present a wealth of detailed information about many of its listed manuscripts, from physical description and bibliographic data to repository, person, place, genre, and first lines.¹ This resource not only has opened up new discoveries, connections, and forms of scholarship in early modern studies, but also has asked new questions of its enabling technologies and broader cultures of production.

The Perdita Project's second incarnation is a commercial product, Perdita Manuscripts: Women Writers, 1500–1700, the result of a collaboration with Adam Matthew Digital, which provides online digital facsimiles of 230 of the 500 manuscripts used to create the original catalogue.² The addition of images makes Perdita Manuscripts a combination of catalogue and digital archive, supplementing the functionality and resources of the open-access catalogue with the images that allow first-hand scholarly examination of many of the manuscripts described. Mirroring the ways in which manuscript, print, and oral cultures overlapped in early modern England, the current hybridity of the Perdita Project exemplifies a critical juncture in the digital humanities surrounding the online representation of texts: bibliographic tools such as the index and catalogue, repositories such as the encyclopedic database, and bespoke projects such as the archive and the digital edition co-exist as related and competing cultural forms.

The earliest forms of the Perdita Project, begun at Nottingham Trent University by Elizabeth Clarke, built on the findings of Victoria Burke's doctoral thesis, "Women and 17^th-Century Manuscript Culture," and on Margaret Ezell's research on networks of manuscript exchange in The Patriarch's Wife.³ The initial catalogue was developed at a time where the capacity for volume, scale, and new forms of textual dissemination afforded by the digital environment were beginning to be explored, usually through large encyclopedic databases such as Early English Books Online and Women Writers Online (see review in this issue). Such resources focused upon print texts, grouped by broad categories such as period or the gender of the author. Thus, the Perdita Project's first innovation lay in its focus on manuscripts and its coordination of large-scale archival research to discover, record, and analyze which manuscripts existed, what they consisted of, where they were located, and the ways in which they were produced, circulated, and read. Two decades later, as the relationship between print and manuscript culture has been revised and revalued, such a choice seems obvious, but this was not the case in 1997. Peter Beal's Index of English Literary Manuscripts, published between 1980 and 1993, focused on the work of major canonical figures and largely excluded women. Since cataloguing by individual archives often was not comprehensive enough to fully describe early modern women's use of manuscripts,⁴ our understanding of early modern women's engagement with manuscript culture was preliminary and scattered, and women's manuscript writing was assumed to be marginal.

One of the extraordinary achievements of the Perdita catalogue is that it brought to light the diversity and extent of early modern women's engagement with scribal cultures. By gathering together extended manuscript works compiled or written by women from multiple archives in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia, the scale and significance of women's engagement with manuscript culture became apparent for the first time. Its 500 entries also required a new system of generic classification because the kinds of texts uncovered...