Mise en texte and Early Modern Textual Transformations

The third session of our seminar on the notion of Mise en texte will be held on
Monday 28 March 2022, at 16.30 EST (15.30 GMT) on Zoom.

Our guest speakers, Tessa Whitehouse (Queen Mary University of London) and Neil Keeble (Stirling University) recently co-edited a volume whose preoccupations are very akin to those of mise en texte, Textual Transformations. Purposing and Repurposing Books from Richard Baxter to Samuel Taylor Coleridge (OUP, 2019).

Early modern books were not stable or settled outputs of the press but dynamic shape-changers, subject to reworking, re-presentation, revision and reinterpretation. Their history is often the history of multiple, sometimes competing, agencies as their texts were re-packaged, redirected and transformed in ways that their original authors might hardly recognize. This session will investigate processes of editing, glossing, disputation and posthumous publication that resulted in textual mobility and varieties of authorship, using specific examples from the activities of the nonconformist ministers Richard Baxter (1615-1689) and Isaac Watts (1674-1748). We shall also consider the ways in which such textual histories and complexities can be represented in modern editions.

Please join us for this session (see the abstract below) by registering on Eventbrite, where you will find abstract, biographies and the Zoom invitation.