Convenors: Goran Gaber, Tristan Alonge

For several reasons, Early Modernity represents a fascinating field for Digital Scholarship. On the one hand, the abundance and variety of written and printed material – ranging from academic treatises, reference works, and newspapers to maps, theatre registers, and private correspondence – offer almost infinite possibilities for historical inquiry. On the other hand, the finite nature of these textual corpora presents scholars with a reasonably delimited and thus practically manageable area of research. Last but not least, widespread intellectual interest in this period regularly results in sustained large-scale projects of digitisation, interdisciplinary and institutional collaboration, as well as technical and scholarly innovation.

It should therefore be of little surprise that such a conjecture has given rise to a large number of ground- breaking projects that have not only presented “old material in a new light” by, for example, processing, encoding, and analysing historical texts but have irrevocably altered the landscape of Early Modern scholarship as such, by enlarging both our understanding of what counts as historical material, as well as the scope of questions that such material can answer. The third session of the seminar series will thus present cutting-edge research initiatives from both sides of the Channel dealing with different types of textual corpora from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment.

Speakers:

Nicholas Cole (The Quill Project, Oxford) – “The records of negotiation: problems and opportunities”
Nicholas Cronk & Glenn Roe (The Voltaire Foundation)
Howard Hotson (Cultures of Knowledge, Oxford) – ‘Did Hartlib have a Circle? New Methods for Answering Old Questions’
Maria Susana Seguin ((IHRIM – UMR 5318 & Université Paul-Valery Montpellier – IUF) – “Constituting a virtual Corpus: the case of Philosophie cl@ndestine”