STEMMA: Systems of Transmitting Early Modern Manuscript Verse, 1475-1700

STEMMA offers the first macro-level view of the circulation of early modern English poetry in manuscript between 1475 and 1700. It develops innovative computational models and quantitative methods for studying the social and material forces that informed literary culture. Such forces have been of increasing interest to scholars, who have nevertheless tended to address individual manuscripts, discrete and unique by their very nature, as case studies. In contrast, STEMMA takes a data-driven approach to identify patterns and trends at scale. At its centre is the poet John Donne, whose documented reluctance to circulate his verse makes the survival of at least 4,249 manuscripts of his work even more puzzling; the poems of his next most-circulated contemporary, Richard Corbet, survive in fewer than 1,000 witnesses. To understand how Donne’s poems reached such a wide readership, the project synthesizes six of the most comprehensive datasets about early modern English manuscripts and applies insights from social network analysis and graph theory to model the larger transcontinental communications system. The project’s objectives are to provide the most comprehensive overview of the circulation of early modern English verse in manuscript to date; to combine, augment, and enrich the most important datasets in the field of early modern manuscript studies and return them as reusable, non-proprietary open data; to develop innovative, transferable, and extensible computational models and quantitative methods for analysing the circulation of early modern English verse in manuscript; to offer a thoroughly revised account of the production and circulation of literary manuscripts created after the introduction of print; to provoke a reassessment of historical metanarratives that privilege print and thus obscure the diverse textual agents who participated in early modern literary culture; and to facilitate new modes of research and discovery as well as global, diachronic, and transmedia comparisons.  

Prof. Erin A. McCarthy

Erin A. McCarthy is an Established Professor of English Literature and Computational Humanities and the Principal Investigator of the Irish Research Council and European Research Council-funded project “STEMMA: Systems of Transmitting Early Modern Manuscript Verse, 1475–1700.” She is a graduate of Arizona State University (BA 2005) and The Ohio State University (MA 2007; PhD with Certificate in Medieval and Renaissance Studies 2012). Her doctoral work was supported by an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in Humanistic Studies and OSU’s Presidential Fellowship.

From 2014 to 2018, she was a postdoctoral researcher on the European Research Council-funded project “RECIRC: The Reception and Circulation of Early Modern Women’s Writing, 1550–1700.” In 2019, she held the Katharine F. Pantzer Jr. Fellowship in Descriptive Bibliography at Harvard University’s Houghton Library before taking up her appointment as Lecturer in Digital Humanities and English at the University of Newcastle (Australia). She was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2022 and retains an affiliation with UON as an Honorary Senior Lecturer.

In 2022, Erin was awarded an Irish Research Council Consolidator Laureate Award for her project “STEMMA: Systems of Transmitting Early Modern Manuscript Verse, 1558–1660.” Most recently, she was awarded €1.86 million European Research Council Consolidator grant to extend the project’s duration from 1475 to 1700 and expand its scope. The project, which runs from September 2022 to August 2026, computationally maps and models the movement of English poetry through early modern social networks. It will apply insights from network analysis and graph theory to provide the most comprehensive overview of the circulation of early modern English verse in manuscript to date.

Erin is the author of Doubtful Readers: Print, Poetry, and the Reading Public (Oxford University Press, 2020), which was awarded the 2020 Distinguished Publication in Donne Studies from the John Donne Society and was named an Outstanding Academic Title by CHOICE in 2021. She is currently completing a second monograph, “The Reception and Circulation of Early Modern Women’s Writing in Manuscript Miscellanies, 1550–1700,” with Marie-Louise Coolahan and Sajed Chowdhury. Her scholarship has also appeared in the journals John Donne Journal, SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, the Review of English Studies, and Criticism as well edited collection, reference works, and online publications.

Contact:

E-mail: erin.mccarthy@universityofgalway.ie