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

Project Information

FEATHERS

Grant agreement ID: 864635

DOI

10.3030/864635

Project closed

EC signature date 18 December 2019

Start date 1 August 2020

End date 31 July 2025

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 999 996,00

EU contribution

€ 1 999 996,00

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITEIT LEIDEN
Netherlands

Periodic Reporting for period 4 - FEATHERS (FEATHERS (FE / MALES AND THEIR SCRIBES): Authorship and the Mediation of Voices, c. 1558-1642)

Reporting period: 2025-02-01 to 2025-07-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The project addressed a fundamental yet understudied problem in early modern textual culture: the relationship between employers and scribes in the production of manuscripts. This has revealed that authorship, long understood in terms of solitary creation, was often a collaborative process involving previously unacknowledged contributors.

This matters for society because it reshapes our understanding of authorship, creativity, and labour—past and present. By uncovering the hidden work of scribes, secretaries, and other intermediaries, the project recovers the contributions of those historically marginalised: the poor, the illiterate, the lower-born, and especially women. In doing so, it diversifies the canon and provides new models for thinking about collaboration, authorship, and intellectual labour more broadly.

The project pursued three main research questions:
1. Who were these (often anonymous) scribes with whom both men and women collaborated?
2. What were their functions and degrees of influence?
3. Where did their agency end and that of their employer begin?

Through a series of interconnected work packages, these questions were addressed across multiple textual domains —epistolary, legal, and literary. WP1-2 reconstructed the workings of royal secretariats, revealing previously unidentified scribes who played key roles in shaping royal correspondence. WP3 applied an archaeological approach to miscellanies, tracing layers of use to expose how the actions of individual scribes left material and textual imprints. WP4 redefined the boundaries of women’s life-writing by demonstrating how legal documents can preserve their voices, thereby expanding the notion of female authorship beyond elite autobiographical forms. It also traced the creation of legal pleadings in the Court of Requests, disentangling the roles of litigants, scribes and intermediaries. WP6 examined Common Law records for their narrative and fictional qualities, showing how scribes and litigants alike contributed to legal storytelling.

The PI’s own work (WP5) synthesised these findings to propose new models of co-authorship that distinguish between private secretaries and professional scribes, emphasising that both men and women could assert independent authorship within collaborative contexts. Collectively, the project disentangled the voices embedded in early modern texts, re-evaluated the archive as a dynamic site of collaboration and contestation, and recovered the creative labour of previously overlooked figures.

In its final phase, the project is achieving its objectives by integrating the results of all work packages in preparation for The Routledge Handbook of Early Modern English Scribal Culture (under contract). The PI also expanded the project’s reach through new research on related themes, including anonymity and document forgery, culminating in a co-authored chapter for Yale UP (2024).

In conclusion, the project has redefined early modern authorship as a collective, materially grounded practice. It restores visibility to scribes and marginalised contributors, reframes textual production as a site of social and creative negotiation, and provides an enduring framework for future research into authorship, gender, and labour in the humanities.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

An international team PhDs, postdocs, and a student-assistant, led by the PI, conducted archival research in the UK and the Huntington Library in California, delivered over 20 papers at conferences in the Netherlands (Amsterdam, Leiden, Utrecht, & Nijmegen); Sweden (Uppsala); the UK (Birmingham, London, Loughborough, Oxford, Edinburgh, Glasgow, St Andrews, & Dublin); and the USA (Chicago, & Portland), and analysed data.

Overview of the results and their dissemination so far / deliverables published or under contract:

2 PhD dissertations (under examination)
-C. Murphy, ‘“By the vse of others penne”: The Collaborative Production of Queen Elizabeth I’s English Scribal Letters, 1581–90’ (Leiden University, 2026)
-H. Riach, ‘Mixed Methods: Making the Manuscript Miscellany in Early Modern England’ (Leiden University, 2026)

2 monographs
-L. Fikkers, Early Modern Women’s Life-Writing and English Law (Edinburgh UP, 2025)
-J. Powell, Common Law and English Commercial Theatre (Oxford UP, 2027/8)

1 handbook
-N. Akkerman ed., et al., Routledge Handbook of Early Modern English Scribal Culture (Routledge, 2029)

1 inaugural lecture
-N. Akkerman, ‘The Tale of the Manx Cat: Recounting Early Modern Authorship’, 3 May 2024, Leiden University (also available in Dutch)

6 peer-reviewed book chapters in high profile handbooks such as The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Early Modern Women’s Writing, or The Oxford Handbook of Medieval and Early Modern Miscellanies

1 peer-reviewed journal article
-J. Powell, ‘The Case(s) of Thomasine Ostler: Gender, Fiction, and Theatre History in Common Law Court Records’, Review of English Studies 76 (2025): 28-45

2 reviews
-N. Akkerman, review of Alan Marshall, Intelligence and Espionage in the English Republic, c. 1600-60 (Manchester UP, 2023), Journal of British Studies 64 (2025), e69
-H. Riach, review of Steven W. May, English Renaissance Manuscript Culture: The Paper Revolution (Oxford UP, 2023), English Studies 105, no. 7 (2024): 1195-97

5 popular pieces in magazines such as Vooys, Geschiedenis Magazine and Epoch

2 blog entries for the Leiden Arts in Society Blog

FEATHERS held a large international conference at Leiden on scribal culture in 2025 and co-organized another with the University of Edinburgh on calligrapher Esther Inglis in Edinburgh 2024.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The project transformed understandings of how texts were produced, shared, and read in early modern England. It introduced new interdisciplinary methods combining computational analysis, archival research, and literary interpretation to reveal previously unseen aspects of authorship and collaboration in manuscript production.

By analysing Elizabeth I’s letters through digital and scribal profiling techniques, the project uncovered previously unknown contributors: one such discovery was of a scribe whose significant role in producing the queen’s letters had gone unnoticed. It changes how we understand the making of royal correspondence and demonstrates the potential of combining digital methods with traditional manuscript study.

The project also developed a new way to study manuscript miscellanies, collections of diverse texts copied by hand. Instead of viewing them as disorganized compilations, it showed that they were often carefully structured and creatively assembled. This new approach reveals authors, readers and household scribes actively collaborating to reshape literary culture.

In addition, the project broadened the definition of women’s life-writing and authorship, uncovering new forms literary participation long overlooked in the legal record. Disentangling the roles of litigants, scribes and intermediaries in Court of Requests pleadings and Common Law records exposed the hitherto unexamined authorial fingerprints of scribes previously considered institutionalised.

Finally, an international conference at Edinburgh brought an artistic dimension to the research, highlighting the role of scribes as calligraphers and visual designers of text.

Together, these findings move well beyond existing scholarship by rethinking who created early modern manuscripts, how they did so, and how their work continues to shape literary and cultural history.

Engraving by Philips Galle, after Maarten van Heemskerk, 1646. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.