We are pleased to announce today’s publication in EMLO of a fascinating collection of letters, known as the Tixall papers, that centres around the correspondence of two English Catholic families. The inclusion of these letters arose as the result of an invaluable suggestion from Dr Victoria van Hyning, whose doctoral thesis investigated the literary culture of early modern English Augustinian nuns at St Monica’s convent in Louvain and its daughter house, the English convent of Nazareth in Bruges.

The Aston and the Thimelby families, both Staffordshire based, were united by two marriages in the middle decades of the seventeenth century. Their letters, which were edited by Arthur Clifford and published early in the nineteenth century, span the seventeenth and extend into the first decade of the eighteenth centuries. As Dr van Hyning explains in her introductory text to the catalogue, while the Thimelbys were life-long Catholics, Sir Walter Aston (1585–1639),

Image courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London.

the head of the Tixall estate, had converted on the occasion of his first ambassadorial visit to Spain. Many of the children from both families took religious vows, and it is particularly apt that their correspondence should be made available online in the same week that a workshop entitled Catholic Legacies, 1500–1800: Uncovering Catholic lives and records is scheduled to take place on Wednesday, 16 September, at the Bodleian’s Weston Library.

The papers in this workshop will explore Britain’s rich early modern Catholic heritage through archival and material culture sources and the day will include examination of material in the Bodleian collections, as well as from the Vatican Library, the Archives of the Jesuit Province in Britain, the Archives of the Canonesses of the Holy Sepulchre, the Blairs Museum, the British Museum, and Stonyhurst College. Speakers include Adalbert Roth (Vatican Library), Thomas McCoog SJ (Fordham), Hannah Thomas (Durham), Lucy Wooding (KCL), Peter Davidson (Aberdeen), Dora Thornton (British Museum), and Jan Graffius (Stonyhurst College). From 9am–3.30pm attendance is free; booking is essential only for the special display session arranged for 4–5pm. So, should you happen to be in Oxford and would like further information about the workshop, details are available here, while further details concerning the Tixall collection may be found in EMLO on the catalogue’s introductory page.

An important step was taken at the beginning of this week as the first batch of metadata for a new catalogue — the collection of Bartolomeo Gamba — was moved into the public interface of EMLO. During his lifetime, Gamba worked as director of the Remondini press, as private librarian to Eugène de Beauharnais, and as sub-keeper at the Biblioteca Marciana. By the time of his death in 1841, he had amassed a collection of circa 4,000 manuscript letters to and from eminent early modern Italian scholars, many of whom were alumni of the University of Padua and amongst whom numbered a significant percentage with close connections to Viennese court physicians.

This time last year, EMLO was approached by the historian Vittoria Feola to explore the possibility of working in partnership with the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek in Vienna,  the Biblioteca Museo Civico in Bassano del Grappa, and the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana in Venice to provide a virtual home for this ground-breaking project. Thanks to generous support and funding from both the University of Padua (DiSSGeA) and the Medical University of Vienna, and with a contribution towards scanning costs from Cultures of Knowlege, we are truly delighted now to be releasing the first installment of the collection’s metadata in EMLO. Over the coming weeks and months, letter metadata will be added on a regular basis to this virtual collection, where users will find fully searchable abstracts, keywords, people and places mentioned, and links provided to manuscript images.

In the words of our Project Director, Howard Hotson, ‘this is a catalogue with a difference: fresh and original in nature, scope, conception, and execution as well as scholarly and significant in its own right’. Over the coming months we hope you will watch as Gamba’s original collection is reunited. The relevance of such a collection to early modern science and to the Republic of Letters cannot be overestimated, nor can the unique insight it offers into the penetration and workings of the English and French book trade in Northern Italy from the second half of the sixteenth to the first half of the nineteenth centuries. These are exciting times and we hope very much Bartolomeo Gamba’s epistolary trove will be the first of a growing number of erstwhile collections made whole once again in EMLO.

Created from ‘Fireworks in honour of Catherine II in 1787’, by Jan Bogumił Plersch. (Lviv National Art Gallery; source of image: Wikimedia Commons)

Something wonderful has just taken place: EMLO-Edit, the hidden working interface at the core of our online union catalogue, has clocked up six figures and is now host to more than 100,000 letter records. If this were not reason enough to let off a few fireworks, it is a double delight for us to note that it was the sixteenth-century Swiss scholar and polymath Johann Wilhelm Stucki (1542–1607) who was in the hot seat as his epistolary calendar moved from our preparatory collation area to top this landmark figure.

This time last year, Stucki did not exist in EMLO-Edit beyond records for three letters in the Bodleian Library; but over the past twelve months the talented young scholar and EMLO visitor Marc Kolakowski has brought him to life. Funded by the Université de Lausanne with a Swiss National Science Foundation doctoral mobility study grant, Marc applied to Cultures of Knowledge to be based within the project for the academic year 2014–15. Seizing the baton from our inaugural visiting fellow, Liège doctoral student Charlotte Marique, he divided his time between work on his doctoral thesis, learning EMLO’s editorial procedures and practices, helping to develop and trial our epistolary collation and visualization tools, and assisting in the preparation of large quantities of late sixteenth-century metadata for upload: Justus Lipsius, Christophe Plantin, Theodor Zwinger, Philippe Duplessis Mornay, and Amandus Polanus von Polansdorf, to name but a few. As he pursued his archival research, Marc also created his own catalogue of metadata using EMLO’s collation tools for more than a thousand letters to and from Stucki. This metadata, now combined with other correspondences in our working area EMLO-Edit, has just nudged us over the 100,000 mark [sorry, no pun intended!]. But because this material is still work-in-progress, Marc will continue to refine, enhance, and hone his significant contribution prior to making it public at a time of his choice.

The desiderata and needs of scholars are at the heart of everything we do and all we hope to develop. During his stay, Marc has been involved in the testing processes and discussions held during EMLO’s second phase of development. His input, as a scholar working with manuscript letters, has been invaluable, and we would like to extend our heartfelt thanks to him and to wish him every good fortune from this point forward. As Marc’s period of residency here, although thankfully not his involvement with EMLO, draws to a close, we would be extremely interested to hear from other scholars, young and old, who might wish to pursue their studies for a period under the aegis of Cultures of Knowledge. Is early modern correspondence central to your research? Are you at, or are you about to embark upon, post-graduate studies? Would you be interested in gaining editorial experience as well as significant insight into the inner workings of a major project in the digital humanities? Do you like the idea of contributing in some meaningful way as we work to record a second hundred thousand letters within the union catalogue? If so, and you would like to discuss a potential residency with us, please be in touch. We’d love to hear from you!

We could not be more delighted to announce today’s publication in EMLO of a fascinating sixteenth-century correspondence catalogue: that of Philip Sidney, the poet and Elizabethan diplomat and courtier, which comes to us as the result of an exciting new partnership between EMLO and Oxford University Press’s major digital publishing enterprise, Oxford Scholarly Editions Online [OSEO].

When discussion began between these two projects at the end of last year, little did we at EMLO realise that, as a pilot dataset, we would be presented with meticulously prepared metadata for this gem of a correspondence from Roger Kuin’s exemplary publication, The Correspondence of Sir Philip Sidney, which was published in hard copy by OUP in 2012 and released on OSEO in September 2013.

Detail from the portrait of Sir Philip Sidney, after an unknown artist. (© National Portrait Gallery, London, NPG 2096)

For those who have yet to explore the veritable virtual library that is OSEO — launched just three years ago to widespread critical acclaim — there is a treat in store. Over 600 scholarly editions are mounted online already under the banner of this landmark OUP digital project, including letters, plays, poems, and a host of prose works from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries. In the case of Sidney, alongside the letters, OSEO offers texts of this remarkable young man’s poems and prose. In coming years, OSEO will release correspondence calendars of many other key early modern figures for republication in EMLO, with each letter record linking back to the OUP’s edited text. EMLO users within subscribing institutions will be able to move seamlessly from EMLO to the printed texts in OSEO, whilst even those without full access will be able to take advantage of the relevant bibliographic information, including page numbers, for the hard-copy volumes.

Diplomat to the core, the iconic English poet Sidney heralds a glimpse into what lies ahead for us all. We hope our users will enjoy exploring Sidney’s correspondence, his short life, and his remarkable literary work, and will relish also the appearance within EMLO of a long series of OSEO corespondences to be added in the coming months and years as a result of this invaluable partnership.

We are delighted to bring you news of a momentous arrival: from today, the first instalment of Johann Valentin Andreae’s substantial correspondence is available for consultation in the front end of EMLO. This publication marks a significant milestone in the history of Cultures of Knowledge and we could not be more pleased to share with you records for 3,696 manuscript letters (from what will be an eventual total of more than 4,500) contributed by our esteemed partner, the Herzog August Bibliothek [HAB] in Wolfenbüttel.

Engraving of Johann Valentin Andreae by Wolfgang Kilian (source of image: Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel).

Work on this catalogue extends back to the very first days of CofK when, at a Phase I technical workshop, our Project Director Howard Hotson remembers Jill Bepler leaving Oxford to return to Wolfenbüttel with the remark that it was ‘time to get going on Andreae’. This was in 2010 and, since the HAB obtained the necessary funding from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft in 2012, we have worked towards this moment in partnership with staff at the HAB, and in particular with Dr Stefania Salvadori, who is immediately responsible for the exemplary ‘Inventory of the correspondence of Johann Valentin Andreae (1586–1654)‘. The German theologian, reformer, and churchman Andreae, a figure highly representative of his era, now takes his place in EMLO alongside two younger contemporaries inspired directly by his work: Jan Amos Comenius [Komenský] and Samuel Hartlib. This catalogue pilots cooperation also between two of the greatest libraries founded in the century of Andreae, Comenius, and Hartlib: England’s Bodleian Library and Germany’s Herzog August Bibliothek.

Although most of Andreae’s earliest correspondence was destroyed by a fire in the city of Calw in 1634, the surviving collection amounts to more than 4,500 manuscript letters to and from the theologian. By far the greatest portion of this vast correspondence is the care of the HAB: some 5,672 folios entered the library over a short period of time, not only because Andreae wrote tirelessly to Duke August the Younger himself, but also as a result of the collection and purchase of others by Wolfenbüttel’s librarians in the years following Andreae’s death. The 3,715 letters published in EMLO today range in date from 1630 to 1654. Work to prepare the remaining section of this enormous correspondence is underway, to be added in a second instalment during the coming months. Each letter record in EMLO links straight through to both the HAB’s OPAC catalogue entry and to the relevant MS guardbook, and we hope very much that interested users are able to carve out time over these summer months to explore this large and magnificent jewel of an early modern correspondence.

Today sees the launch in EMLO of a discrete jewel of a catalogue: that of English scholar and elegiac poet Thomas Gray. Although he could not be described as particularly prolific in verse, at present his calendared letters number 651 and his correspondents comprise an intriguing selection of the ‘great and the good’, including Horace Walpole (of Strawberry Hill fame), physician Thomas Wharton, and fellow poet Richard West. The exemplary database of his correspondence, the Thomas Gray Archive, to which each letter record in EMLO is linked, has catalogued the corpus of letters to and from this polymath and scholar, who was described by his biographer William Mason as perhaps ‘the most learned man in Europe’.

Within the Thomas Gray Archive, you will find scans of and links to manuscript versions and printed copies as well as detailed information about the poet — his writing, his publications, his correspondence, and his circle — and we at CofK are truly delighted to count among our contributing partners this invaluable resource. We hope very much you enjoy consulting the correspondence and exploring in depth the Thomas Gray Archive, and we look forward greatly to enhancing our eighteenth-century metadata in EMLO with the numerous correspondences now in preparation for upload over the course of the coming year.

Madame de Graffigny, signed by Levêque, in Jean Restout, ‘Galerie française’ (Paris, 1771), vol. 1, p. 27 (source of image: The Voltaire Foundation).

Today’s publication in EMLO of the correspondence of Françoise de Graffigny (1695–1758), the pioneering French writer and salon hostess, heralds the inaugural catalogue in an exciting new partnership between the Voltaire Foundation and Cultures of Knowledge. Following an agreement made earlier this year, metadata has been prepared from the Voltaire Foundation’s exquisitely and meticulously produced edition, Correspondance de Madame de Graffigny, ed. †J. A. Dainard and English Showalter, 16 vols (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1985– ) for publication in our union catalogue.

Preparatory work on this calendar was carried out in its entirety during the closing month of CofK’s second phase and involved Stephen Ashworth working on site at the Voltaire Foundation to input metadata in collaboration with EMLO staff, while scholarly input and oversight was provided by de Graffigny’s editor English Showalter and the Foundation’s in-house editorial team. We hope very much indeed that you will consult the edition itself; Madame de Graffigny’s letters are of particular interest to scholars for their use of everyday language — the correspondence is conducted entirely in French — and, in their genuine spontaneity, they offer a unique glimpse into the social, literary, and political issues of eighteenth-century France.

Tycho’s Supernova Remnant (source of image: NASA/CXC/Rutgers/J.Warren & J.Hughes et al.).

As our Digital Project Managers conduct a game of international musical chairs (more of this in a forthcoming blog), we would like to draw your attention to the Tycho Brahe correspondence catalogue which is available now for consultation within EMLO. Publication of this metadata is a truly stellar achievement (please excuse the pun) and one we are thrilled to be able to celebrate at this particular juncture.

Whilst researching his Cambridge University Press monograph, Bearing the Heavens. Tycho Brahe and the Astronomical Community of the Late Sixteenth Century, Professor Adam Mosley assembled a large quantity of metadata on astronomical correspondence from the later decades of sixteenth and early years of the seventeenth centuries. In providing this metadata for publication in EMLO, Professor Mosley has done significantly more than contribute the first instalment of what we intend will become a representative archive of important astronomical correspondence within the union catalogue. His work has also helped pioneer the manner in which a ‘legacy’ dataset may be enhanced and prepared for upload by a CofK-funded Digital Fellow using EMLO-developed tools and procedures under the guidance of the specialist scholar. Indeed, so successful was the pilot approach with Tycho — in which our inaugural Digital Fellow, Rose Hedley, worked under Professor Mosley’s supervision — that it is used now on a routine basis to prepare EMLO metadata for upload.

Tycho Brahe’s map of the constellation Cassiopeia showing the position of the supernova of 1572 (source of image: Wikimedia Commons).

The Tycho catalogue, which contains metadata of the letters published in J.L.E. Dreyer’s 1913–1929 edition Tychonis Brahe Dani Opera Omnia, is made up currently of 498 letters, which link directly to printed copies where these are available on the Internet Archive. The catalogue is to be supplemented later this year by metadata for additional letters not published in the Opera Omnia, once again under Adam’s expert supervision; we’ll let you know when this enhancement is made, and, in the meantime, we hope very much that you enjoy the bright dawn of EMLO’s astronomical letters and trust you’ll be as excited as we are to know that Tycho is set to be the trail-blazer for a rapidly lengthening procession of early modern greats.