Project description
Who really wrote historical manuscripts
Editors, secretaries, dictation software and MS Word all help make sure an author’s grammatical errors are corrected. This was also the case with the early modern scribes who performed the same job. While the 17th century epic poem Paradise Lost was authored by John Milton, it was actually written by someone else, who may have contributed much more in the creation of the text than initially thought. The EU-funded FEATHERS project will investigate to distinguish between authorial and scribal voices. It will analyse three manuscript types: historical letters, legal documents and literary works. Three questions have been tabled: Who were the scribes? What was their role or function? Where did their influence end? FEATHERS will answer these questions, concentrating on England between 1558 and 1642.
Objective
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 employers 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 employers 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 Is 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.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencessoftware
- humanitieshistory and archaeologyhistory
- social scienceseconomics and businessbusiness and managementemployment
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Keywords
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
ERC-COG - Consolidator GrantHost institution
2311 EZ Leiden
Netherlands