Systems of Transmitting Early Modern Manuscript Verse, 1475–1700

ongoing

STEMMA offers the first large-scale quantitative analysis of the circulation of early modern English poetry in manuscript between 1475 and 1700. It addresses a significant gap by developing innovative computational methods for studying the social and material forces that informed literary culture. Scholars have tended to address individual manuscripts as case studies. In contrast, STEMMA revolutionizes the study of manuscript poetry by taking a data-driven approach to identify patterns and trends at scale. At its centre is the poet John Donne, whose reluctance to circulate his verse makes the survival of at least 4,249 manuscripts of his work all the more puzzling; the poems of his next most-circulated contemporary survive in fewer than 1,000 witnesses. To understand how Donne’s poems, and early modern poetry more generally, circulated throughout the English-speaking world, the project synthesizes six of the most comprehensive datasets about early modern manuscripts and applies insights from social network analysis and graph theory to model the larger transcontinental communications system. The project’s objectives are to provide the first comprehensive study of early modern English manuscript verse circulation; to combine, augment, and enrich the most important bibliographical datasets and return them as Linked Open Data; to develop transferable and extensible methods for analysing the circulation of manuscript poetry; to offer a thoroughly revised account of the production and circulation of literary manuscripts after the introduction of print; to provoke a reassessment of historical metanarratives that privilege print and obscure the diverse agents who participated in early modern literary culture; and to facilitate new modes of research and discovery. The project offers benefits for scholars of early modern Europe as well as those working on computational and digital projects addressing a range of time periods, national traditions, and disciplinary orientations.