FEATHERS (FE / MALES AND THEIR SCRIBES): Authorship and the Mediation of Voices, c. 1558-1642

ended

When we look at a text, we think we know who wrote it. Indeed, Paradise Lost was authored by John Milton; the warrant of execution for Mary, Queen of Scots by Elizabeth I. The writers of these texts, the pen wielders, however, were Deborah Milton, and W. Davidson with Burghley. Manuscript production was a collaborative or ‘socialised’ enterprise that often involved secretaries and scribes who physically wrote what the author dictated. Sometimes, however, they contributed rather more. Google, MS Word and even dictation software help us write emails – a traditional secretary silently corrects grammatical errors, suggests changes and even creates texts from notes ready for the employer’s authorising signature: the early modern scribe fulfilled some or all of these roles. To distinguish between authorial and scribal voices the project will analyse 3 distinct manuscript types: Historical letters, Legal documents, and Literary works. In doing so it will address 3 questions: who were these scribes; what was their role or function, and where did their influence end and their employer’s begin? Experiences of scribal publication differed along gender and class lines as while high-born men were drawn to it, women and the lower-born were mostly confined to it, rarely holding a pen themselves for reasons as diverse as seemliness and illiteracy. Impacting the fields of literature, cultural history, and digital humanities, this cutting edge project will forever change the way we think about early modern authorship, adding many texts to the canon by authors hitherto marginalised, such as women and the lower-born. The project will create a model applicable to multiple political periods and countries by concentrating on England between 1558 and 1642 (the beginning of Elizabeth I’s reign to the English Civil War), a time when the centres of power were stable enough to allow for relatively constant employment, making individual scribes easier to identify, and with that their influence.