New Issue of Early Modern Studies Journal Published

Monday, Feb 08, 2021

Early Modern Studies Journal, housed in the UTA Department of English, began its life as an effort for students in Dr. Amy Tigner’s 2006 graduate course, “Elizabeth I and Elizabethan Literature,” to experience what it is like to submit papers for publication. Now, fifteen years later, Early Modern Studies has grown to become an open-submission journal with articles reviewed by medieval and early modern scholars around the country, and with its seventh edition hot off the digital presses.

After revising their papers into publishable articles, the labor of that very first group of graduate students resulted in 2008 in the first edition of the journal, which was then called Early English Studies. Graduate students also worked for the journal, creating and managing the web pages and functioning as assistant editors. After becoming an open-submission journal in 2009, Early English Studies began to receive submissions from outside the UTA community. Then, in 2012, the editorial team headed by Dr. Tigner revamped the entire journal with a new name and new design in order to increase its appeal to readers interested in early modern scholarship. Volumes followed that focused on “Shakespeare and Performance” (Vol. 5) and “Women’s Writing/Women’s Work in Early Modernity” (Vol. 6).

The current volume, number 7, features a series of articles on a seventeenth-century recipe manuscript associated with Mary Baumfylde that is held by the Folger Shakespeare Library. The articles consider various questions about the manuscript: 1) What are the features of an early modern manuscript, and what features are particular to recipe manuscripts? 2) How can we teach and use paleography in our classrooms? 3) How can we use the digital archive as a teaching tool? 4) How can we use recipes or recipe manuscripts in teaching? 5) What can we learn from texts created by underrepresented populations? 6) What are the problems and opportunities associated with texts not associated with authors, or linked only to unknown people? 7) What does it mean to use a recipe manuscript as the centerpiece of research? And lastly, 8) What new scholarly products do digital archives allow, and how do we integrate them into current academic practices and institutional structures?

This volume breaks new ground in its focus on a nearly 400-year-old manuscript that until recently hasn’t been much considered at all, let alone in a scholarly context. The scholars in the volume shed light on how women’s domestic collaborative work creates and disseminates knowledge in the form of recipes.

Check out the latest edition, along with earlier volumes, of Early Modern Studies Journal here.