Research and Resources

In recent years research interest in the eighteenth-century manuscript book and manuscript poetry has been gaining momentum. Manuscript Verse Miscellanies 1700-1820 contributes to the discussion about manuscript culture in the gap between the scribal activity that is the focus of early modern manuscript studies, which tend to terminate at about 1700, and recent scholarship on the nineteenth-century culture of collection that produced the album and scrapbook forms.

Related Publications

Levy, Michelle, and Betty A. Schellenberg. How and Why to Do Things with Eighteenth-Century Manuscripts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. [forthcoming]

Schellenberg, Betty A. and Michelle Levy, eds. "Women’s Literary History 1660-1832," special issue of The Huntington Library Quarterly 84.1, Spring 2021. In this volume, see especially:

Friedman, Emily C. “Manuscript fiction and the Survival of Scribal Practices in the Age of Print.” Pp. 75-84.

-----, Pam Perkins, and Peter Sabor. “Response to Section 2: Authorial Choice and Modes of Circulation.” Pp. 85-86.

Perkins, Pam. “Eliza Fletcher’s Private Authorship.” Pp. 65-73.

Sabor, Peter. “‘Rummaging, Sorting, Selecting, Preserving or Destroying’: Frances Burney d’Arblay as Editor.” Pp. 55-64. 

Schellenberg, Betty A. “Eighteenth-Century Manuscript Verse Miscellanies and the Print-Manuscript Interface.” Pp. 151-64.

Sharren, Kandice. “Dorothy Wordsworth’s Decomposing Compositions: Perservation, Loss, and the Remediation of the Modern Manuscript.” Pp. 39-53.

Winckles, Andrew O. “Obscure Women, Obscure Networks, and Women’s Book History.” Pp. 113-22.

Chema, Alexis, and Betty A. Schellenberg, eds. "The Manuscript Book," special issue of Eighteenth-Century Life, consisting of 12 original essays and an afterward by Margaret J.M. Ezell. Forthcoming 2022.

Betty A. Schellenberg, “Making a Manuscript Poetry Book in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” The Oxford Handbook of Medieval and Early Modern Miscellanies, ed. Joshua Eckhardt, forthcoming.

Invited Lectures and Conference Panels

The research team behind this database is actively participating in invited lectures and conference panels. Invited lectures delivered by the lead investigator, Betty Schellenberg, include:

“Reader Creations: Arrangement, Alteration, and Intention in the Eighteenth-Century Manuscript Poetry Miscellany,” for the Washington Area Print Culture Group, Library of Congress, Washington DC, 6 September 2019;

“Thriving by Symbiosis: Manuscript Culture and the Eighteenth-Century Book Trade,” the 14th annual Karmiole Lecture on the History of the Book Trade, William A. Clark Memorial Library, Los Angeles, CA, 1 Nov. 2018; and

“What Is a Literary Coterie and Why Does It Matter (In the Eighteenth Century)?,” invited public lecture at Chawton House Library, UK, June 2017.

The research team, along with Dr. Leith Davis of Simon Fraser University, presented a panel on "Adaptable Media: New Contexts for Old Manuscripts" at the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies conference, Oct. 13-16, 2021. The panel papers were:

Davis, Leith. “Jacobite Cultural Memory and Intermediality: Robert Forbes' The Lyon in Mourning Manuscript.”

Kolosov, Linara. “The Life and Afterlife of an Elizabeth Montagu Letter.” 

Schellenberg, Betty A. “The Blank Book as Context for the Eighteenth-Century Manuscript Verse Miscellany.”

Wachowich, Angela. “Retrospective Editing and Poetic Ambition in Folger MS M.a. 182.”

In January of 2020, Betty Schellenberg organized a panel on Literary Culture in Manuscript Forms, which included the papers:

Schellenberg, Betty A. “What Is the Eighteenth-Century Verse Miscellany?”

Orchard, Jack. “Gladly would I quot my Author’: Plagiarism & Patriarchy in the Correspondence between Elizabeth Montagu & Lord Kames.”

Williams, Abigail. “‘We’ve had enough of experts’: Manuscript Culture and the History of Reading.”

Keown, Kathleen. “Instruction & Entertainment: The Commercial Appeal of Women’s Sociable Poetry.”

Blog Posts

Schellenberg, “The Eighteenth-Century Manuscript Verse Miscellany,” blog article for The Collation, Folger Shakespeare Library, January 2020. https://collation.folger.edu/?s=Schellenberg 

Schellenberg. “Field Notes from the Folger,” blog post for SFU English Department website, October 2019. http://www.sfu.ca/english/news/blog/field-notes-from-the-folger.html 

Schellenberg. “Chasing the Eighteenth-Century Literary Coterie through the Archive.” Blog post on Cambridge Core, 13 December 2016. https://www.cambridge.org/core/blog/2016/12/13/chasing-the-eighteenth-century-literary-coterie-through-the-archive/ 

Manuscript Poetry Books in the Classroom

Chen, Grace, and Ann Cheng. “Bluestocking Elizabeth Sarah Wilmot’s Poems Meet 21st-Century Technology.”  https://chawtonhouse.org/2018/03/putting-forgotten-manuscripts-in-plain-site/

ENGL 420 Students. Sarah Wilmot: Forgotten Bluestocking. (https://sarahwilmot.omeka.net/) – a student-produced edition of poetry from a manuscript notebook found at the Chawton House Library in Hampshire, UK.

Macinnis, Kaitlyn. “Monuments and the Margins: Old age and Memories of Scottish Jacobitism in the  Epitaph of Marjory Scott, 1700-1900.” SFU Dept. of History MA thesis.