Event Date: 10 – 11 May 2014
Percy Building, G.10,
Newcastle University
Newcastle upon Tyne,
Tyne and Wear NE1 7RU
Editing Tudor Literature
Newcastle University, 10-11 May 2014
Organisers: Jennifer Richards (Newcastle) and Fred Schurink (Northumbria)
There has never been a more interesting time to edit Tudor writings. Scholarly interest in Tudor literature has boomed in the last decade. Now, there is a need to make more texts available and understand how they might be read. At the same time scholarly editing is experiencing a renaissance even as a new field of study – the digital humanities – is being established. New digital technologies and resources like EEBO have brought original texts to wider audiences. There is a demand for ‘creative’ editions (like the audio-books of Shakespeare’s sonnets). However, they also pose questions and challenges to our access to and engagement with texts. Many works of Tudor literature were circulated in manuscript rather than in print – the vast majority of which are not yet available online; in Latin instead of English – theoretically available but practically inaccessible to most modern readers; and closely bound up with their immediate historical circumstances, often unknown to all but the most specialist readers. Meanwhile old debates – new versus old spelling – continue to rage, and traditional editorial practices are still valued. We ask what kind of editorial practices might best suit Tudor writing and its diverse readerships? What problems are editors likely to encounter that are peculiar to Tudor texts? How might new technologies help represent and preserve Tudor writings? And above all, what kind of writings should we be editing and sharing with a wide readership?
Saturday 10th May
Roundtable 1:
Gavin Alexander (Cambridge) and Joe Black (Massachusetts) – Modernization
Roundtable 2:
Jennifer Richards (Newcastle) and Andrew Hadfield (Sussex) – Editing Thomas Nashe
Cathy Shrank (Sheffield) – What is an error?
Sunday 11th May
Keynote Lecture:
Pip Willcox (Bodleian Library Digital Team, Oxford) – “ſome crauen ſcruple / Of thinking too preciſely” Democratization, dialogue, and the digital
Michelle O’Callaghan (Reading) – Miscellanies digitized
Roundtable 3:
Neil Rhodes (St Andrews) and Fred Schurink (Northumbria) – Editing Tudor Translation
