{"id":7151,"date":"2016-07-06T00:13:58","date_gmt":"2016-07-06T00:13:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/?p=7151"},"modified":"2016-07-06T12:41:50","modified_gmt":"2016-07-06T12:41:50","slug":"first-blast-of-the-trumpet-wemlo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/?p=7151","title":{"rendered":"First blast of the trumpet: WEMLO"},"content":{"rendered":"

Have you spotted the women looking out from the niches on the\u00a0home page in EMLO<\/a>? Today’s\u00a0array of new catalogues marks the launch of\u00a0Women\u2019s Early Modern Letters Online [WEMLO]<\/a>, a resource and discussion forum for all early modern women’s correspondence held within EMLO.<\/p>\n

\"womanwriting\"

Woman writing a letter, by Gerard Terborch. c.1655. (Mauritshuis, The Hague; source of image: Wikimedia Commons)<\/p><\/div>\n

In 2012, Professor James Daybell<\/a> and Dr Kim McLean-Fiander<\/a> (the latter a former colleague from Cultures of Knowledge during its first phase), received British Academy\/Leverhulme<\/a> funding to bring together\u00a0a community of scholars working on early modern women. Their research interests focussed on\u00a0a number of key correspondences of\u00a0late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth century women, the metadata for which had been collated previously over several years by James Daybell. The WEMLO project organized a series of workshops,\u00a0at\u00a0which scholars identified the need for a\u00a0epistolary union catalogue tailored to allow searches by female correspondents<\/a>, filters for\u00a0letters written or received only by women<\/a>, and\u00a0the ability to interrogate both women\u2019s name\u00a0records and their correspondences against those of their male counterparts. Our lead\u00a0developer, Mat Wilcoxson, took thse\u00a0desiderata<\/em> into his \u2018alchemical laboratory\u2019, and his success in this work\u00a0is the cause for the first part of our celebrations today.<\/p>\n

We are delighted also to announce the WEMLO Network and Resources hub<\/a>,\u00a0a bespoke area (similar to the virtual exhibition space launched in November last year to mark the\u00a0Quatercentary of the dissenter Richard Baxter<\/a>) that in the future will be\u00a0a forum for\u00a0scholars to explore, discuss, and showcase early modern women\u2019s epistolary culture.\u00a0Our third cause for celebration\u00a0today is the publication of five new catalogues \u2014 those of Lady Anne Bacon<\/a>;\u00a0Margaret Clifford, countess of Cumberland<\/a>;\u00a0Anne Dudley, countess of Warwick<\/a>;\u00a0Lady Penelope Rich<\/a>; and Lady Arbella Stuart<\/a> \u2014 all of which are taken from or are based on James Daybell’s metadata.\u00a0Within the next few months, a number of additional catalogues from James\u2019s accumulated wealth of curated metadata will be published, including those for Elizabeth Bourne, a Tudor poet and prolific letter writer; Sabine Johnson, a Tudor merchant\u2019s wife; Lady Elizabeth Russell (n\u00e9e Cooke and the sister of Lady Anne Bacon) \u2014 as well as several more\u00a0catalogues compiled by members of the WEMLO community. Scholars\u00a0may be interested to know that catalogues for Elizabeth of Bohemia, Bess of Hardwick, and a collection of the correspondences of six wives of the Dutch and Frisian stadholders are all in preparation at present and will be released in\u00a0EMLO\u00a0this autumn.<\/p>\n

Over the past few weeks, as the Digital Fellows and I\u00a0have worked to prepare for upload the metadata of the five WEMLO catalogues, numerous\u00a0letters caught our collective eye, some\u00a0on account\u00a0of a\u00a0beautiful hand or a distinctive voice, others because of the content. Indeed, we found ourselves in the office reading many aloud. Were we to vote, I suspect our favourite might\u00a0be that of Lady Anne Bacon writing to one of her sons \u2014 Anthony (brother of\u00a0Francis) \u2014 as she did so often to offer advice regarding\u00a0his gout and urging him to use his ‘leggs betymes for fear of loosing in disuse’. This just a week after she had sent him ‘a hogshead of November bere . . . and a barrell also of the same bruing’.\u00a0Irrespective of gout, you are all\u00a0most\u00a0welcome to join us tonight as we raise a glass in\u00a0celebration of this vibrant scholarly community that is WEMLO\u00a0(from 6pm in Oxford\u2019s Faculty of History on George Street). We hope you enjoy these new correspondences and will take advantage of the links that have been provided, where these were available, to manuscript images, transcripts, and printed copies of the letters. The early modern women you find on EMLO\u2019s home page today are just the beginning: in the coming months and years you will encounter many more daughters, wives, mothers, widows, spinsters, nuns, and dowagers in our online resources. Many are strong, formidable, and talented women \u2014 from political rulers in their own right, to literary and scholarly figures. John Knox might not be happy, but most certainly we are!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Have you spotted the women looking out from the niches on the\u00a0home page in EMLO? Today’s\u00a0array of new catalogues marks the launch of\u00a0Women\u2019s Early Modern Letters Online [WEMLO], a resource and discussion forum for all early modern women’s correspondence held within EMLO. In 2012, Professor James Daybell and Dr Kim McLean-Fiander (the latter a former […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7151","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7151","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7151"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7151\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}