STEMMA
Systems of Transmitting Early Modern Manuscript Verse, 1475-1700
College of Arts, Social Sciences & Celtic Studies School of English and Creative Arts
About
This project develops and applies a data-driven approach in order to provide the first macro-level view of the circulation of early modern English poetry in manuscript. It focuses on English verse manuscripts written and used between the introduction of printing in England in 1475 and 1700, by which time the rapid changes in both literary taste and publishing norms ushered in by the Restoration had fully transformed literary culture. The project includes manuscripts circulating in England and anywhere else English was spoken and read, including Ireland, the North American colonies, and continental exile communities.
The research will be guided by four overarching research questions:
1
How did manuscript poetry escape the control of its authors?
3
How did the manuscript circulation of poetry change over time?
2
Who read and copied manuscript poetry?
4
How can network analysis methods be adapted and applied to account for partial, damaged, or missing archival material?
Principal Investigator: Prof. Erin A. McCarthy
Established Professor of English Literature and Computational Humanities in the School of English and Creative Arts, College of Arts, Social Sciences, & Celtic Studies, University of Galway.
Work Packages
Work Package 1: Data Curation and Enrichment
STEMMA draws together six of the most comprehensive existing datasets about early modern English manuscript culture. The first work package is dedicated to the development of a metadata model; the creation of data harvesting, editing, and augmentation tools; and the design and implementation of a custom research database to facilitate the preparation of project data.
Work Package 2: Networking Early Modern Manuscript Poems
This work package will trace the transmission of Donne’s poems within, between, and beyond the communities traditionally associated with manuscript verse in order to challenge received ideas about authorship and reception.
Work Package 3: Early Modern Literary Communities in the English-Speaking World
This work package aims to create, visualize, and analyse a mathematical model of early modern manuscript verse circulation using concepts from network analysis and graph theory.
Work Package 4: Rolling Archetypes, Computational Text Analysis, and Scholarly Editing
This work package tests methods from textual editing and stylometry to assess their usefulness for identifying poets and/or scribes.
Work Package 5: Textual Circulation Between Manuscript and Print
Researcher: Millie Randall
This work package will trace the copying and transmission of printed texts into manuscript to investigate how movement between the two media shaped the circulation of manuscript verse.
This project was funded by an Irish Research Council Consolidator Laureate Award from 2022 to 2023. From 2023 to 2028, it is funded by a European Research Consolidator Grant.