- The Material Cultures of Early Modern Women's Writing
http://hri.newcastle.edu.au/emwrn/da/index.php?content=digitalarchive
The digital revolution in the study of early modern English women writers has been at the forefront of recovery, research, and dissemination since the launch of Women Writers Online (http://www.wwp.northeastern.edu/wwo/) in 1999. Since then, digital surrogates such as Early English Books Online have made available an ever-expanding range of early modern women's printed works, while manuscript writing has come online with Adam Matthew's Perdita Manuscripts, 1500–1700 resource; the Social Edition of the Devonshire Manuscript project; and the ongoing Shakespeare's World manuscript transcription project overseen by Early Modern Manuscripts Online at the Folger Shakespeare Library. The Material Cultures of Early Modern Women's Writing Digital Archive, produced by the Early Modern Women's Research Network, is a welcome addition to these and offers a new way to straddle the manuscript/print divide. By exploiting the possibilities of the digital medium, the project aims to represent the different material contexts by which women's writing was circulated in manuscript, print, and oral culture. The value of such a collection, the project managers hold, is that it "foregrounds the instability and diversity of early modern cultures of textual transmission." Crucially, the multiple and overlapping modes of circulation for a single text are reproduced so that no single version holds sway. [End Page 151]
Currently, this resource presents editions of works by seven women: Anne Bradstreet, Elizabeth Delaval, Mary Jacob, Elizabeth Melville, Lucy Russell, Mary Stuart, and Mary Wroth. Each edition is tailored to the needs and requirements of the particular selection of an individual woman's writings. Editors are curators of the various digital editions. Editorial methodologies are expounded in the contextual materials: the textual history and author biography. Each also includes an up-to-date bibliography.
Anne Bradstreet is represented by the paratexts that prefaced the first two print editions of her poetry, The Tenth Muse (1650) and Several Poems (1678). Bradstreet is unusual in having two editions of her work printed in the seventeenth century; the editor/curator Trisha Pender begins from the position that the epistles, commendatory verses, introduction, and foreword have been fundamental to the framing of the poet and her critical reception. That Bradstreet's poetry is already available online and in print licenses the foregrounding here of the paratextual apparatus. This edition aims to encourage comparison of the different Bradstreets that were presented to her audience twenty-eight years apart. Digital images (all images in this archive are in color) of the paratexts are side-by-side on-screen, with parallel transcriptions below, and annotations to the transcriptions below that again.
Elizabeth Delaval's writings, by contrast, are presented almost in their entirety via digital images in an edition by Susan Wiseman. The Bodleian manuscript containing Delaval's memoirs and meditations is reproduced in full—be warned, this entails downloading 344 thumbnails! The sheer size of the manuscript has mitigated against a full transcription. However, the accompanying letters from Delaval to her brother, the duke of Richmond and Lennox, dated from 1665 to 1671, and the deposition made against her by Richard Robins (her letter-carrier) in 1713, are transcriptions. The manuscript of her works is the product of revision, some of it retrospective, and the real value of this digital facsimile is its graphic representation of this: the crossings-out and corrections that invite contemplation of the effects and implications of the manuscript's material features.
Two single texts that circulated widely in manuscript miscellanies, and were attributed to women, are curated by Michelle O'Callaghan. A bawdy female-voiced answer poem, attributed to Lady Mary Jacob ("Your letter I received"), is made available here through digital images of eleven miscellany versions. This case opens up questions of oral transmission: as O'Callaghan suggests, "part of the attraction of these verses was the possibility for improvising on the form and [End Page 152] themes . . . [that] may also be a feature of the poems' place in oral cultures of performance." As with Jacob, there is only one poem surviving and attributed to Lucy...