For Episode 3 of the fifth season of The WPHP Monthly Mercury, “Bibliographic Intimacies,” Kate and Kandice interviewed Megan Peiser and Emily Spunaugle about their work on the Marguerite Hicks Collection in the Kresge Library at Oakland University, a collection of women’s books collected by a queer, disabled woman. Their deep, immersive work on this collection highlights the physical, intellectual, and emotional intimacies that arise from bibliographic research. 

From the practicalities of rare book collection during the Second World War, to the joys (and occasional frustrations) of collaboration, to a heist (!!!), this episode really has it all. Join us to learn more about the human stories embedded in the Marguerite Hicks Collection.

Guests

Megan Peiser is an enrolled Citizen of Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. She is associate professor of Literature at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan where she teaches eighteenth-century literature, Indigenous literature, digital humanities, and book history and bibliography. Her writing on these subjects can be found in Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Eighteenth-Century Theory and Interpretation, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Her monograph, The Review Periodical and British Women Novelists, 1790-1820 is forthcoming from Johns Hopkins University Press. Peiser is the co-manager with Emily Spunaugle of the Marguerite Hicks Project. She lives and works on the traditional and ancestral lands of the Anishinaabe people.

Emily D. Spunaugle is Associate Professor and Coordinator of Archives and Special Collections at Oakland University in Rochester, MI. Her research interests include book history, bibliography, and women writers of the long eighteenth century, and her writing is featured in Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, Romantic Circles, ABO, Libraries: Culture, History, and Society, and elsewhere. She is a former chair of the Library History Round Table of the American Library Association and a former editor of SHARP News.

Every year, come hell or high water, The WPHP Monthly Mercury has released a gothic-inflected Halloween episode—and this year, we’re literally taking a trip to hell with Charlotte Dacre’s 1806 novel Zofloya; or, The Moor. To talk about this demonic, orientalist bloodbath, Kandice sat down with WPHP collaborator Kate Ozment, and they found themselves hurled into the abyss of trying to untangle the plot of this most bonkers of bonkers novels. 

Happy Halloween!

In August 2022, Kate and Kandice traveled to Liverpool for “New Romanticisms”: the joint conference for the British Association for Romantic Studies and the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism—BARS and NASSR, respectively. Organized by Dr. Andrew McInnes and his incredible team of research assistants, “New Romanticisms” was a four-day Romanticist extravaganza with five plenaries, more than one hundred panels, the stunning environs of Edge Hill University, an ingenious coffee cart, and the occasional visit from Buster, the campus cat. The call for papers “invite[d] explorations of both the concept of newness in and about the Romantic period and new approaches to Romantic Studies today,” and the conference expressed an openness to ‘alternative’ and ‘innovative’ formats. This led us to wonder: could we create a live episode about the conference? 

After nine interviews, twelve months of editing, and thirty-five audio tracks (insert Kate sobbing here), the answer is yes—sort of. Stitching together interviews with conference plenaries, organizers, award winners, and award facilitators, this episode is a truly Frankensteinian attempt to answer the question: What do New Romanticisms sound like?

FEATURING Jennie Batchelor, Roy Bayfield, Manu Samriti Chander, Chloe Dilworth, Noah Heringman, Diana Little, Carmen Faye Mathes, Patricia Matthew, Kirsteen McCue, Andrew McInnes, and Dana Moss.

What do the medieval period and the Romantic period have in common? Well, at the very least, badly behaved monks. In Episode 4 of Season 3 of The WPHP Monthly Mercury, hosts Kate Moffatt and Kandice Sharren team up with David Coley and Matt Hussey and their podcast, The Canterbury Fails, for our first-ever crossover episode. 

This is, in the words of our friends at The Canterbury Fails, "A late medieval music theory complaint and literally the best most bonkers depraved monk freak show mock-gothic novel paired with a gin-soaked tea (do re mi!) and repugnant Jolly Rancher retro-cocktail."

The Canterbury Fails podcast is hosted by David Coley and Matt Hussey. If you'd like to hear more about little-read Old and Middle English poetry, you can find them on any reputable podcasting platform, including Apple Podcasts, Audible, and  Spotify.

As always, links to relevant entries in the WPHP, information about our sources, and suggestions for further reading  can be found here : https://womensprinthistoryproject.com/blog/post/118

This August, the WPHP has been sharing the Spotlights that make up our newest Spotlight Series, “Down the Rabbit Hole: Researching Women in the Book Trades.” Over the course of the month, posts from Research Assistants Sara Penn, Julianna Wagar, Amanda Law, and, as of this coming Friday with the last post of the Series, Belle Eist, have focused on women who worked in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century book trades. 

In this month’s episode, “Working for the (Wo)man”, you’ll hear from our Research Assistants themselves about their Spotlights and the women they researched: the feuding men and women of the Farley family of Bristol printers, the King’s and Queen’s Printer Agnes Campbell who began her career with her husband’s debt and by the time she died was the wealthy Lady Roseburn, the printer Jane Aitken, whose imprints tell a very different story than the life she lived, and Ann Vernor, the woman behind an imprint we’ve had in the WPHP for the last seven years while completely unaware that she was at its helm. We also feature a Spotlight about Anne Dodd, trade publisher, by WPHP Contributing Scholar Kate Ozment, which allows us to delve into our data model and its — you guessed it — limits.

As always, links to relevant entries in the WPHP, information about our sources, and suggestions for further reading  can be found here: https://womensprinthistoryproject.com/blog/post/116

If you’ve ever taken an undergraduate English class on the Romantic period, you have probably encountered Mary Wollstonecraft, author of Vindication of the Rights of Woman. A widely read and controversial writer of political treatises, fiction, travel writing, and other works during her lifetime, she has been variously vilified and mythologized since her death in 1797, and has long been a staple in the literary canon. But can we ever really know Wollstonecraft?

In the newest episode of The WPHP Monthly Mercury, hosts Kate Moffatt and Kandice Sharren are joined by Professor E.J. Clery, General Editor of a new edition of The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, forthcoming from Oxford University Press. We consider not only her canonical works and her reputation as a philosophical “powerhouse,” as she is so often thought of, but also how myth can write historical figures larger than life—and as a result, sometimes obscure their lived reality. We delve into her life, both the highs and the lows, and how thinking about the ways in which many of the issues that afflicted Wollstonecraft, like precarious employment, labour, and challenges to women’s rights, are present in her writing. We think about how considering these challenges both for their own sake, and within the framework of her philosophy, can serve to humanize this massively influential Romantic figure.

Guest:

E.J. Clery is Chair Professor of English Literature at Uppsala University. Recent publications include Jane Austen: The Banker’s Sister, (Biteback Press, 2017), and Eighteen Hundred and Eleven: Poetry, Protest and Economic Crisis (Cambridge University Press, 2017), winner of the British Academy’s Rose Mary Crawshay Prize. Research for these publications was supported by a Leverhulme Trust major fellowship. She is currently working on A Very Short Introduction to Mary Wollstonecraft, a new paperback edition of Wollstonecraft’s fictions, and, as General Editor, the new Collected Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, forthcoming with Oxford University Press.

If you're interested in learning more about what we discussed in this episode, you can find resources and suggestions for further reading here: https://womensprinthistoryproject.com/blog/post/110  

Our inaugural episodes of each season have thus far begun with beloved canonical authors: Jane Austen in Season One, Frances Burney in Season Two. This season, we’ve turned to an anonymous author—one whose identity is still a mystery. In 1808, The Woman of Colour was published, with its byline simply reading “By the author of "Light and Shade," "The Aunt and the Niece," "Ebersfield Abby", &c.” Those titles link to more titles, which link to more titles, which link to—! In this first episode of Season 3, Kandice dives into this tangled attribution chain, asking, which titles are attached to which? How many times? Who published them? What layers of influence do they reveal?

Featuring audio from a podcast brainstorming session, this episode invites listeners behind-the-scenes and into the delightfully messy reality of research (and podcasting!) to kick off Season 3 of the WPHP Monthly Mercury.

 If you're interested in learning more about what we discussed in this episode, you can find resources and suggestions for further reading here: https://womensprinthistoryproject.com/blog/post/108

As we prepare to launch Season 3 of the The WPHP Monthly Mercury later this week, project director Michelle Levy takes a look back at Season 2. Putting it into conversation with Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein's Data Feminism (2020) and Katherine Bode's A World of Fiction: Digital Collections and the Future of Literary History (2018), Michelle thinks about the work our podcast has engaged in over the last year. 

Throughout the month of March, the WPHP  has been posting Spotlights about women philosophers in print in the WPHP as part of our Women & Philosophy Spotlight Series to celebrate Women’s History Month. Contributors to the series include research assistants Angela Wachowich, Belle Eist, Isabelle Burrows, Tammy T., and project director Michelle Levy, who wrote about the anonymous ‘Sophia, a Person of Quality,’ Margaret Cavendish, Harriet Martineau, Anna Letitia Barbauld, and Ann Williams.

Finding women philosophers in the WPHP is not necessarily a straightforward task: we don’t include philosophy as a genre, as research assistant Angela Wachowich, organizer of the Series, discovered during some of her work on early feminist writing last year. Turning to Lisa Shapiro’s New Narratives Bibliography of Works by Women Philosophers of the Past, Angela identified a number of women philosophers who we do, indeed, have in the WPHP—but that she had to use the New Narratives Bibliography to find them illustrates how the WPHP data model does not (and cannot) render visible every genre. It also, however, demonstrates how digital humanities projects from different disciplines can speak to each other. 

And that is precisely what we did for this month’s episode: we invited Lisa Shapiro, director of the Extending New Narratives Partnership Project, to chat with us about women philosophers, the difficulty of genre, the narratives in entrenched canons (and the cross-disciplinary urge to name a canon), and the importance of discipline-specific recovery efforts.

Lisa Shapiro is Professor of Philosophy at Simon Fraser University. Her research is focused on accounts of human nature in the 17th century, along two general tracks. She has been interested in the place of the passions in accounts of the relations of human beings to the world around them, and their understanding of that world. She is currently the Principal Investigator of the SSHRC-funded Extending New Narratives Partnership Project, which aims to retrieve philosophical works of women and individuals from other marginalized groups and sustain the presence of these figures in the history of philosophy, and part of that project includes the New Narratives Bibliography of Works by Women Philosophers of the Past. 

If you're interested in learning more about what we discussed in this episode, you can find resources and suggestions for further reading here: https://womensprinthistoryproject.com/blog/post/105 

In July 2020, project lead Michelle Levy and lead editor Kandice Sharren attended a virtual workshop hosted by Amy Tims at the American Antiquarian Society titled “Searching the AAS Catalog: Keyword & Browse.” This workshop introduced them to the many specific and useful headings of the American Antiquarian Society catalog, including some that we were particularly excited for given that we see them in resources so rarely: “women as authors” and “women as publishers and printers.” In November 2021, the WPHP used these headings to import more than 6000 title records from the American Antiquarian Society. Our thrilling plunge into titles printed in the United States is something we’ve been anticipating, and started preparing for over the last two years: we added a ‘copyright statement’ field, for example, so that we could capture the copyright information located on the verso of the title page of many American titles. 

While our team of research assistants works diligently to clean up these imported records and make them available to the public, we have been starting to think about what having this data in the WPHP might tell us about the transatlantic reprinting of women’s writing during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the process, we have had to grapple with new questions about how to best represent American titles within our data model. Thankfully, WPHP contributing scholar Dr. Melissa J. Homestead came to our rescue!

In Episode 9, “Transatlantic Trajectories,” hosts Kate Moffatt and Kandice Sharren introduce listeners to some of the joys and hiccups of the recent American import by way of a lively chat with Dr. Melissa J. Homestead about women’s American and transatlantic publishing. In it, we discuss transatlantic authors Susanna Rowson and Catharine Maria Sedgwick, as well as American copyright and its intricacies during the period, how studying book history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries can inform similar research in the twentieth, and the altar of chronology (with a special focus on Willa Cather and Edith Lewis, too!). 

Melissa J. Homestead is Professor of English and Program Faculty in Women’s & Gender Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Having worked on authors from Susanna Rowson to Willa Cather, she considers her field to be American women’s writing, authorship, and publishing history of the very long nineteenth century. She is the author of American Women Authors and Literary Property, 1822-1869 (Cambridge University Press 2005) and The Only Wonderful Things: The Creative Partnership of Willa Cather and Edith Lewis (Oxford University Press 2021). She is Associate Editor of The Complete Letters of Willa Cather: A Digital Edition (ongoing), has collaborated on bibliographies of the works of Catharine Maria Sedgwick and E. D. E. N. Southworth, serves as President of the Catharine Maria Sedgwick Society, and is a member of the Board of Governors of the National Willa Cather Center. Cather expressed less than complimentary opinions in print about Southworth but, alas, she evidently never heard of Sedgwick.

If you're interested in learning more about what we discussed in this episode, you can find resources and suggestions for further reading here: https://womensprinthistoryproject.com/blog/post/96 

In 1803, Mary Hays published the six-volume work Female Biography, a substantial work of scholarship that relied on more than one hundred sources to write biographies about more than 300 hundred women. But how did Hays, a Dissenting writer of moderate means, access all of those books?

To find out, we invited Dr. Timothy Whelan to talk all things Mary Hays, but especially her literary environs, which included relationships with Dissenting booksellers, connections with the Godwin circle, a number of the biggest and most successful circulating libraries of the time, including the Minerva Press and Hookham’s, and residences across London that were never more than a five-minute walk from a library or a bookshop. And we meander through London itself, where Dr. Whelan tracked more than just where Hays’ likely found her sources for her History: he mapped Hays’ residences, the residences of her large extended family, the booksellers and circulating libraries around her locations, Dissenting booksellers, and the chapels of Dissenters in London—a variety of networks that, as it turns out, are far more interwoven than one could have anticipated without the help of Dr. Whelan’s seven-by-seven foot map.

Dr. Timothy Whelan is a Professor of English at Georgia Southern University. He works in the area of women’s studies and at the intersection of religion and literature in the lives of British and American Nonconformist women writers between 1650 and 1850, with a particular focus on various Romantic writers, both men and women, and their interaction with religious Dissent. He was the general editor for Pickering and Chatto’s eight-volume collection of Nonconformist Women Writers, 1720–1840, and some of his recent publications include an article in Publishing History called, “Mary Lewis and her Family of Printers and Booksellers, 1 Paternoster Row, 1749-1812” and an article in Women’s Writing called “Room[s] of her Own”: Libraries and Residences in the Later Career of Mary Hays, 1814–1828.” To learn more about his work on Mary Hays, you can visit his website https://www.maryhayslifewritingscorrespondence.com, and to learn more about his work on Non-Conformist women, including booksellers, visit his website https://www.nonconformistwomenwriters1650-1850.com/.

If you're interested in learning more about what we discussed in this episode, you can find resources and suggestions for further reading here: https://womensprinthistoryproject.com/blog/post/95

In Episode 7 of Season 2 of The WPHP Monthly Mercury, “The Business of Gossip,” hosts Kate and Kandice follow the highly successful Henry Colburn, leading publisher of fiction in the early nineteenth century, across his three main business addresses in London—and in so doing, explore how the publisher prompted, encouraged, and engaged with gossip. 

The subject of much gossip himself, Colburn’s origins are unknown (although rumoured to be noble), his less-savoury business practices are disparaged by his partners (with good reason), and his reputation, even into scholarship until very recently, is extremely poor. Drawing on research from John Sutherland and Veronica Melnyk, this episode explores the timeline of Colburn’s 47-year career and how, exactly, certain narratives about him were established, and have since been corrected. 

Featuring such authors as Sydney, Lady Morgan, Lady Caroline Lamb, and Letitia Elizabeth Landon, and such publishers and book trades members as Saunders and Otley, and Richard Bentley, we traipse through the landscape of Colburn’s publishing practice as it moved through London (and, briefly, Windsor), sharing what each new address wrought or signified for the publisher and what such considerations of business and gossip might tell us about the role of gossip in the book trades more generally. 

If you're interested in learning more about this topic, we've posted a blog post with links, resources, and suggestions for further reading on the WPHP site: https://womensprinthistoryproject.com/blog/post/93

Authority records, authority figures, authoritative scholarship... What does it really mean to have authority? Nothing good, according to Kandice. However, in working on a new project that relies on bibliographic data from the WPHP, she has had to confront her authority issues. (Meanwhile, Kate is still reeling from the discovery that 'WorldCat' is short for 'World Catalogue' and has nothing to do with felines. 

On this podcast, we have spent a lot—a lot—of time talking about our sources, and especially the libraries and digitization initiatives that enable us to verify the majority of our title records. In the first episode of Season 5 (!!!), Kate and Kandice once again dig into the different kinds of authority records that they use (and don't use) to create and populate WPHP records—from VIAF to the ESTC to WorldCat—as well as whether WPHP records count as authority records. Authority records can help identify entities and disambiguate people and editions from each other. But just as having authority doesn't mean you're always right, 'data' doesn't necessarily mean 'fact', and authority records can cause problems when they are built on faulty or limited data. From Sinful Sally to Frances Crewe, this episode explores the mistakes Kate and Kandice have made and the mistakes they have replicated from other resources to ask: what might it mean to call the WPHP an authority?

Why hasn’t the third edition of Hannah More’s Coelebs in Search of a Wife been digitized? Why doesn’t GoogleBooks group the different volumes of multi-volume works together in a single catalogue record? And, what do authors and pandas have in common? We bemoan the limitations of our various sources on a monthly basis, but this month we’re digging into why they exist in the first place—especially why digitization can be so uneven.

In Episode 6 of Season 2 of The WPHP Monthly Mercury, “The Ecology of Databases,” co-hosts Kate Moffatt and Kandice Sharren are joined by Lawrence Evalyn to learn more about the issue of uneven digitization. In addition to giving us the hard numbers about which titles appear in the ESTC, ECCO, The Text Creation Partnership, and HathiTrust, Lawrence puts forward his "charismatic megafauna" theory of authorship, shares moon prophecies and invitations to meetings about waterway management, and details the searching strategies he used during the WPHP Summer Readathon. 

Lawrence Evalyn is currently a "pre-doc postdoc," both a Ph.D Candidate and a Teaching Postdoctoral Fellow in English at the University of Toronto, where he is affiliated with the Digital Humanities Network and the Data Sciences Institute. His dissertation, "Database Representations of English literature, 1789-99," measures and historicizes uneven digitization in four resources to examine how digital infrastructure shapes eighteenth-century studies, especially the study of women's writing. His collaborative digital humanities publications include "One Loveheart At A Time," an article on emoji in Digital Humanities Quarterly. He holds a Masters in English from the University of Victoria, where his M.A. essay, supervised by Robert Miles, looked for large-scale trends in late eighteenth century Gothic novels.

If you're interested in learning more about what we discussed in this episode, you can find resources and suggestions for further reading here: https://womensprinthistoryproject.com/blog/post/91 

In last October's episode, “Of Monks and Mountains!!!” Kate and Kandice each read a gothic novel found in the WPHP, and it was so much fun that we simply had to do it again. For Season 2, Episode 5, “The Witching Hour”, we read books about witches — almost every book that mentions witches in the title in the WPHP, in fact! (There are only five.)

But within that small sample, we found a full spectrum of representations of witches and witchcraft, from the fantastical (and silly) woodland witches in Alethea Lewis’s The Nuns of the Desert (1805), to Joanna Baillie’s spine-tingling play, Witchcraft (1836), which is set against the backdrop of the Scottish witch hunt—and everything in between.

Join us for the fifth episode of Season 2, “The Witching Hour,” to learn more about why we only found five titles, what those titles told us about the role of witchcraft in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cultural imagination, and (most importantly) which title we awarded the coveted label of “bonkers.” But be warned—recording this episode gave Kate nightmares.

If you're interested in learning more about what we discussed in this episode, you can find resources and suggestions for further reading here: https://womensprinthistoryproject.com/blog/post/89 

In 1794, Ann Lemoine’s husband, Henry, who was an author and publisher, went to debtor’s prison—this led to their separation, and the following year, Ann Lemoine began her own publishing business in White Rose Court in London. Between 1795 and the early 1820s, it is estimated that Ann Lemoine published, printed, and sold more than 400 titles, and explored new and inventive ways of packaging and reselling the cheap print she was known for publishing: chapbooks.

In this episode, hosts Kate and Kandice are joined by WPHP Research Assistant Sara Penn, who undertook entering the many titles Lemoine produced into the database and has become our resident Lemoine expert. We share some of Sara’s conversation with Dr. Roy Bearden-White, explore the history of the chapbook — including the difficulties of defining the term itself — and the significance of cheap print, the challenges of including it in the database, and chat about the labour involved in working with female publishers, printers, or booksellers, or forms of print that are lacking in bibliographical sources.

You can find more resources and information about this episode, including a bibliography and suggestions for further reading, on the WPHP site: https://womensprinthistoryproject.com/blog/post/88 

Throughout the month of August, we’ve been sharing Spotlights on the WPHP site as part of the “Around the World with Six Women” Spotlight Series on travel writing. In this month’s episode, hosts Kate Moffatt and Kandice Sharren are joined by the authors of the Spotlight Series, who share what they have learned during their vicarious journeys through France, Italy, Germany, India, Chile, Rome, China, the Red Sea, and the Scottish Highlands. Along the route we touch on the stakes of travel writing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly in terms of British imperialism and colonial forces, and how considering these stakes can help us contextualize the genre. Our conversation also prompted us to consider the stakes of our own travel, now that the world is opening up and travel is once again becoming a possibility.

You can find more resources and information about this episode, including a bibliography and suggestions for further reading, on the WPHP site: https://womensprinthistoryproject.com/blog/post/84 

In 2016, Dr. Kirstyn Leuner shared data from her project, The Stainforth Library of Women’s Writing, with the WPHP — in particular, the Virtual International Authority Files she and her team had attached to their person records. This month, she joins us to chat all things Stainforth, databases, and cataloguing, including the kinds of data her team has been working with and collecting, the project decisions that have had to be made along the way, the hidden and not-so-hidden gems the Stainforth catalogue contains, and the many commonalities our projects share in their efforts to recover women writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Stainforth on!

You can find more resources and information about this episode, including a bibliography and suggestions for further reading, on the WPHP site: https://womensprinthistoryproject.com/blog/post/80

Welcome back! In the first episode of Season 2 of The WPHP Monthly Mercury, hosts Kate Moffatt and Kandice Sharren delve into the publication history of Frances Burney’s first two (and most popular) novels,  Evelina (1778) and Cecilia (1782). Although both were regularly reprinted well into the nineteenth century, we recently realised that the WPHP was missing the post-1800 editions of these works (although it did already hold all of the editions of her two far less popular novels, Camilla (1796) and The Wanderer (1814) — thank goodness!). In this episode, we explore why these titles were missing and our subsequent task: creating an as-comprehensive-as-we-can-make-it bibliography of Frances Burney’s novels up to 1836. 

As always, you can find more resources and information about this episode, including a bibliography and suggestions for further reading, on the WPHP site: https://womensprinthistoryproject.com/blog/post/76

As we get ready to launch the second season later this week, WPHP Primary Investigator Michelle Levy reviews some of the highlights from our first season.

In the final episode of Season One of The WPHP Monthly Mercury, hosts Kate Moffatt and Kandice Sharren celebrate Women’s History Month by interviewing Dr. Kate Ozment about the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century writer, Delarivier Manley. Famous for her scandalous semi-autobiographical ‘secret histories,’ which satirized important Whigs in Queen Anne’s courts, Manley inspires us to consider the relationship between eighteenth-century women and history, and how they—and we!—capture, create, and record it (and sometimes make things up along the way). 

In Episode 9, “Bluestockings in Print,” hosts Kate Moffatt and Kandice Sharren are joined by Dr. Betty Schellenberg, Bluestocking expert, to talk about the learned ladies of the informal eighteenth-century society and their complex relationships with print — along with some musings about puddings, friendships, and dirty laundry. Put on your blue stockings and join us for our penultimate episode of Season 1 of The WPHP Monthly Mercury!

If you're interested in learning more about this topic, we have compiled a list of resources and suggestions for further reading, available here: https://womensprinthistoryproject.com/blog/post/62 

Ramble. Ambulate. Wander. What are the words you use for walking? In our eighth episode, we’re looking to the words that women used to describe walking in print and manuscript during the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, when a surge in pedestrian activity for leisure and pleasure occurred. An interview with guest Dr. Kerri Andrews, author of Wanderers: A History of Women Walking, has us grappling with women’s involvement in that pedestrianism surge, and explore how the language they used (in manuscript and in print) illustrates the age-old tradition of women’s walking that is so often left out of the history books. 

If you're interested in exploring this topic further, a blog post containing links to all WPHP records referenced and our suggestions for further reading is available here: https://womensprinthistoryproject.com/blog/post/60

One of the fields we include in our records for publishing, printing, and bookselling businesses in the WPHP—our firm records—is for the addresses where they operated. Sometimes this is straightforward: one individual working at one location for the duration of their career. Other times, however, it is decidedly less so. There are booksellers running multiple shops at the same time, printers moving locations every year or two for fifteen years, publishers working with various combinations of partners and at various addresses over a number of months and years, and any number of other complex business and address relationships that our data struggles to capture.

Last fall, Kate worked with the WPHP address data for Dublin printer-publisher Alice Reilly—and the address data of the other printers, publishers, and booksellers she appeared in imprints with—to try and trace further material evidence of her labour. In theory, the project was simple and data-driven; in practice, it involved Kandice walking around Dublin filming a video and talking into her phone for an hour so Kate could see the streets she was studying, trying to establish where particular streets may have been located when the cityscape has shifted since the 1750s when Reilly was working, and ultimately had Kate thinking less about addresses and more about the embodiment of labour—Alice Reilly’s, Kandice’s, and her own.

In episode 3 of season 4 of The WPHP Monthly Mercury, “Address-ing Firms,” join Kate and Kandice as they reflect on the realities of trying to capture this address information, including the decisions that they made for this particular work in 2018 (or was it 2017?) before they really knew what they were doing, what working with the address data for a research project looks like, and a thrilling audio glimpse of Kandice’s Alice-Reilly Dublin walk. 

As 2020 draws to a tumultuous close, join hosts Kate Moffatt and Kandice Sharren as they look back—all the way to 1816. Often remembered as the cold and fog-laden year in which an 18-year-old Mary Shelley came up with the idea for Frankenstein, 1816 was a year of catastrophe more generally, known colloquially as “The Year Without a Summer” or “Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death.” This double episode, peer reviewed by Romanticism on the Net, explores how the bibliographical metadata contained in the WPHP can help us uncover a wider range of voices and genres, including political writing, travel memoirs, and poetry. These works reveal the lived experiences of women in a time of upheaval, but also provide an opportunity to meditate on the nature of literary production during catastrophe, especially how our own experiences during the upheavals of 2020 shaped our response to the books that we uncovered.

If you're interested in learning more about this topic, we have compiled a list of resources and suggestions for further reading, available here: https://womensprinthistoryproject.com/blog/post/58 

Have you ever wondered, “Where does all the WPHP data come from?” Well, look no further than this month’s episode of The WPHP Monthly Mercury! From missing Frances Burney and Ann Radcliffe editions to ESTC imprint-specific searches, our sixth episode identifies data gaps and explores our superstar resources, the wide variety of print and digital sources we use, and the data limitations we wrangle on a daily basis while working on the WPHP.

What do two of our favourite Gothic titles from the WPHP have in common? Banditti, the name ‘Clementina,’ and abducted women, for a start! Join hosts Kate and Kandice for this Halloween-themed episode of The WPHP Monthly Mercury as they discuss how you can identify works that align with the ‘gothic’ mode in the WPHP, chat about little-known women authors, and share their experiences reading two gothic novels: Elisabeth Guenard’s The Three Monks!!! and Catherine Cuthbertson’s Romance of the Pyrenees (both published in 1803 and both delightfully strange).  

If you're interested in learning more about this topic, we have compiled a list of resources and suggestions for further reading, available here: https://womensprinthistoryproject.com/blog/post/47 

In the fourth episode of The WPHP Monthly Mercury, “A Bibliographical Education”, hosts Kandice Sharren and Kate Moffatt wander through the works categorized as “Education” in the WPHP, exploring its variety of formats and styles, as well as its many adjacent genres—not least of which is the considerable “Juvenile Literature” genre, which past RA Reese Irwin cheerfully (and almost single-handedly) entered into the database. In this episode, Reese joins us to speak about the process of entering the majority of our 3200+ Juvenile Literature titles, Kate and Kandice do suitably dramatic readings of excerpts from educational texts from notable eighteenth-century authors, and we speak to the ways in which the many forms teaching has taken this year during COVID-19 echoes eighteenth-century educational practices and their challenges.

If you're interested in learning more about this topic, we've posted a list of links, resources, and suggestions for further reading on the WPHP site: https://womensprinthistoryproject.com/blog/post/35 

In this double episode of The WPHP Monthly Mercury, "Black Women and Female Abolitionists in Print," hosts Kandice Sharren and Kate Moffatt are joined by the entire team of the WPHP to speak to the Black Women’s and Abolition Print History Spotlight Series that we published on the WPHP site between June 19th and July 31st in response to the Black Lives Matter movement and the protests that erupted across the globe in response to police brutality and the murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020. Featuring poet Phillis Wheatley, bookseller Ann Sancho, author Mary Prince, abolitionists Elizabeth Heyrick and Lydia Maria Child, orator Maria W. Stewart, and the anonymous novel The Woman of Colour, these spotlights sought to celebrate and make visible Black women’s and radical abolitionist history as it appeared in print during the Romantic period. This episode discusses what the common threads and challenges we faced can tell us about Black women’s lives and the abolitionist movement in the eighteenth and nineteenth century.

This episode has been peer reviewed as part of Romanticism on the Net's special issue, "Romanticism, Interrupted." For more information, as well as links to the spotlight series, see the blog post on the WPHP website.

In Episode 2: Women in the Imprints, follow Kate and Kandice through the labyrinthine labour that goes into discovering female-run firms: the women who were publishers, printers, and booksellers. Starting with the discovery of Ann Sancho, a Black bookseller in London (the only Black woman in the book trades we know of thus far), this episode shares the joys and the frustrations of discovering and recovering the women who worked in the book trades in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for the Women’s Print History Project.

If you’re interested in learning more about this topic, we’ve posted a list of resources and suggestions for further reading on the WPHP site.

In this first episode of The WPHP Monthly Mercury, “Jane Austen Adjacent”, hosts Kandice Sharren and Kate Moffatt explore Jane Austen’s publication history, from unpublished anonymity to well-beloved and canonical, to introduce you to the Women’s Print History Project. They share the project’s not-so-humble data collection beginnings at Chawton House Library and the types of bibliographic data collected on the database, and explain the role that bibliographic and publication data can play in understanding the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century book trades.

If you're interested in learning more about this topic, we've posted a list of links and suggestions for further reading on the WPHP site.

The Women’s Print History Project is pleased to announce the arrival of its very own podcast. Introducing: The WPHP Monthly Mercury.

The WPHP Monthly Mercury will be released every third Wednesday of the month, starting June 17, 2020, so welcome to our first-ever podcast episode: Episode 0.5: Introducing the WPHP Monthly Mercury. Each future episode will have a corresponding blog post on the WPHP (womensprinthistoryproject.com) that contains further reading, a bibliography, and a full list of all WPHP entries referenced in the episode. 

Do you believe in ghosts? In this spirited (ha ha) Halloween episode, Kandice and Kate encounter a ghost of their very own in circulating library owner and author Mary Tuck’s Durston Castle; or, The Ghost of Eleonora (1804). Every year, in anticipation of October, we scour the WPHP for suitably spooky titles—previous Halloween episodes have featured badly behaved monks, rogue banditti, haunted castles, lost (and found!) parents, and pages upon pages of moralizing in the mountains (we’re looking at you, Catherine Cuthbertson’s four-volume Romance in the Pyrenees). Often satirical and rarely scary, these “Gothic” novels we share every year play out many of the tropes of the genre that we expect as readers, including explaining away anything supernatural. So when Kandice realized we might have a real ghost on our hands, well, we couldn’t resist—and a real ghost story demands an audience. 

Join our intrepid ghost-hunting hosts as they do a reading of Mary Tuck’s tale together and harken back to a common eighteenth-century practice: reading aloud with friends and family. Filled with horrified gasps at the actions of “sanguinous villains,” delighted laughter at descriptions of “brawny thighs,” and inquisitions about how practical it is, really, to throw yourself onto a bed to sleep in full chain mail, this episode engages in a practice of print culture past and reflects on the act itself as much as the spirited tale being shared. 

In August 2022, Kate and Kandice traveled to Liverpool for “New Romanticisms”: the joint conference for the British Association for Romantic Studies and the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism—BARS and NASSR, respectively. Our conference episode involved interviews with conference plenaries, organizers, award winners, and award facilitators, becoming what we've affectionately termed a truly Frankensteinian attempt to answer the question: What do New Romanticisms sound like?

One answer is that it sounds like even more than what you first heard in our "It's Alive! The WPHP Monthly Mercury at New Romanticisms" episode. Our conversations with the conference plenaries were delightful, brilliant, generous, and wide-ranging, and there was no way for us to include all of the recorded material in one podcast episode of reasonable length. And so we bring you this: a series of bonus episodes containing our full interviews with Jennie Batchelor, Manu Samriti Chander, Noah Heringman, Patricia Matthew and Andrew McInnes, and Kirsteen McCue.

This fifth (and final) bonus episode features our conversation with Kirsteen McCue. We spoke to her the day she presented her Stephen Copley Memorial Lecture, '"Melodys of Earth and Sky": The National Air and Romantic Lyric.'  Kirsteen McCue is Professor of Scottish Literature and Song Culture and the co-director of the Centre for Robert Burns Studies at the University of Glasgow. Most recently, she has edited the fourth volume of the Oxford Edition of the Works of Robert Burns: Robert Burns’s Songs for George Thomson (2021) and a collection of essays titled An Orkney Tapestry (2021).

In August 2022, Kate and Kandice traveled to Liverpool for “New Romanticisms”: the joint conference for the British Association for Romantic Studies and the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism—BARS and NASSR, respectively. Our conference episode involved interviews with conference plenaries, organizers, award winners, and award facilitators, becoming what we've affectionately termed a truly Frankensteinian attempt to answer the question: What do New Romanticisms sound like?

One answer is that it sounds like even more than what you first heard in our "It's Alive! The WPHP Monthly Mercury at New Romanticisms" episode. Our conversations with the conference plenaries were delightful, brilliant, generous, and wide-ranging, and there was no way for us to include all of the recorded material in one podcast episode of reasonable length. And so we bring you this: a series of bonus episodes containing our full interviews with Jennie Batchelor, Manu Samriti Chander, Noah Heringman, Patricia Matthew and Andrew McInnes, and Kirsteen McCue.

This episode is our conversation with Dr. Manu Samriti Chander, who gave the unplenary, "'Have These Gentlemen Ever Seen A Revolution?': A Provocation." He is an Associate Teaching Professor at Georgetown University. He is a founding member of The Bigger 6 Collective, and the author of Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century. 

In August 2022, Kate and Kandice traveled to Liverpool for “New Romanticisms”: the joint conference for the British Association for Romantic Studies and the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism—BARS and NASSR, respectively. Our conference episode involved interviews with conference plenaries, organizers, award winners, and award facilitators, becoming what we've affectionately termed a truly Frankensteinian attempt to answer the question: What do New Romanticisms sound like?

One answer is that it sounds like even more than what you first heard in our "It's Alive! The WPHP Monthly Mercury at New Romanticisms" episode. Our conversations with the conference plenaries were delightful, brilliant, generous, and wide-ranging, and there was no way for us to include all of the recorded material in one podcast episode of reasonable length. And so we bring you this: a series of bonus episodes containing our full interviews with Jennie Batchelor, Manu Samriti Chander, Noah Heringman, Patricia Matthew and Andrew McInnes, and Kirsteen McCue.

This episode is our conversation with Dr. Patricia Matthew, who gave the keynote "Confected Sentimentalism: Motherhood, Poetry, and Abolition," and Dr. Andrew McInnes, organizer of BARS/NASSR 2022: New Romanticisms. Patricia Matthew is an Associate Professor of English at Montclair State University. A founder of the Bigger Six collective, she is the author of Written/Unwritten: Diversity and the Hidden Truths of Tenure (2016). Andrew McInnes is a Reader in English Literature at Edge Hill University, the co-director of the EHU Nineteen research group at Edge Hill University, and the author of Wollstonecraft's Ghost: The Fate of the Female Philosopher in the Romantic Period. 

In August 2022, Kate and Kandice traveled to Liverpool for “New Romanticisms”: the joint conference for the British Association for Romantic Studies and the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism—BARS and NASSR, respectively. Our conference episode involved interviews with conference plenaries, organizers, award winners, and award facilitators, becoming what we've affectionately termed a truly Frankensteinian attempt to answer the question: What do New Romanticisms sound like?

One answer is that it sounds like even more than what you first heard in our "It's Alive! The WPHP Monthly Mercury at New Romanticisms" episode. Our conversations with the conference plenaries were delightful, brilliant, generous, and wide-ranging, and there was no way for us to include all of the recorded material in one podcast episode of reasonable length. And so we bring you this: a series of bonus episodes containing our full interviews with Jennie Batchelor, Manu Samriti Chander, Noah Heringman, Patricia Matthew and Andrew McInnes, and Kirsteen McCue.

This episode features our interview with Dr. Noah Heringman, who gave the final keynote at BARS/NASSR 2022, titled "Who has priority in deep time?" Noah Heringman is Curator’s Professor of English at the University of Missouri. He is the author of Romantic Rocks, Aesthetic Geology, Sciences of Antiquity: Romantic Antiquarianism, Natural History, and Knowledge Work, and, most recently, A Literary History of Deep Time, which came out in January 2023.

In August 2022, Kate and Kandice traveled to Liverpool for “New Romanticisms”: the joint conference for the British Association for Romantic Studies and the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism—BARS and NASSR, respectively. Our conference episode involved interviews with conference plenaries, organizers, award winners, and award facilitators, becoming what we've affectionately termed a truly Frankensteinian attempt to answer the question: What do New Romanticisms sound like?

One answer is that it sounds like even more than what you first heard in our "It's Alive! The WPHP Monthly Mercury at New Romanticisms" episode. Our conversations with the conference plenaries were delightful, brilliant, generous, and wide-ranging, and there was no way for us to include all of the recorded material in one podcast episode of reasonable length. And so we bring you this: a series of bonus episodes containing our full interviews with Jennie Batchelor, Manu Samriti Chander, Noah Heringman, Patricia Matthew and Andrew McInnes, and Kirsteen McCue.

This episode is an interview with Dr. Jennie Batchelor, whose keynote was the BARS Marilyn Butler Memorial Lecture titled “To Rescue from Oblivion what Might Have Been Forgotten: The Lady’s Magazine and the Remaking of Romantic Literary History.” Jennie Batchelor is Head of the Department of English and Related Literature and Professor of English at the University of York.

Dr. Batchelor's most recent book, The Lady's Magazine (1770-1832) and the Making of Literary History, is available open access through the Edinburgh University Press website.