The Purpose of the Scriptorium

This site is a place for beginning practitioners 

of textual criticism to test their efforts. 

Anyone who has labored as an editor of a literary text - who has examined early printings, worked from copy texts and emended and worked through cruxes, has made decisions about regularization and modernization of spelling, has glossed and footnoted - knows that this kind of critical thinking changes forever the way we engage with literary texts.

And those literary texts are now available to us everywhere - sometimes scanned and uploaded with a greater interest in making everything available than in judicious selection of best copies or editions (and for this we are grateful, but it means that our efforts are more important than ever).

All these wonderful stories, poems, plays, broadsheet ballads, essays, songs. They are in multiple early printings with variations that have to be studied and resolved. They are in pdfs that need transcription, in transcriptions that need correction and emendation, in emended texts that need glosses and notes in order to be accessible to even knowledgeable readers. Sources such as Early English Books Online, Chadwyck-Healey (LION), Project Gutenberg, and others are making texts available to us that students haven't seen in a long time, if ever. Some sources offer digitized editions that should be read with a careful, critical eye (I'm talking to you, Google Books).

Once we understand the process of editing a work, there is the not-at-all-small matter of disagreeing with existing published editions, once we discover the choices those editors made, and finding that we have a relationship to the work that exists outside and beyond the ink on the page in front of us.

The inaugural posts of The Apprentice Scriptorium are by the five intrepid students in the Fall 2011 Literature of the Tudor Dynasty course at Lynchburg College in Virginia. But this site is intended to be a place for all those interested in trying their hand at textual criticism to have a forum in which to publish their early efforts, and get feedback and ideas for revision. How else do we learn?

To Become an Apprentice in the Scriptorium:

Anyone may submit their editions of short works or excerpts of longer works (limit 1000 words), to be posted and subjected to comments and suggestions. Should apprentices then wish to revise their efforts based on comments and suggestions, this blog will happily update posts to reflect the new drafts. Submissions should be formatted as a Word document, with:

• line numbers (every 5 or 10 lines is sufficient), 
• glosses to the right side,
• notes at the end (notes should include the sources of your information - and NO Wikipedia!), 
• the name of the author if available,
• the source of the work (what printing/database/any previous publication information),
• and keyword labels that might make it easier for users to locate works of interest to them (ex: courtship, Anne Boleyn, fashion, Petrarchan ideal, green).
• Your name is also required and will be posted. Own it.

Send submissions to bates.r@lynchburg.edu  (subject line: "apprentice submission" and the title of the work).



Teachers, short textual criticism assignments are wonderful ways to introduce students to this kind of scholarship. Students and independent scholars, if you need an introduction to this kind of scholarship, I highly recommend Erick Kelemen's Textual Editing and Criticism: An Introduction, (New York: Norton, 2009).

I am a professor at Lynchburg College, but this is not a page connected to, owned, or managed 

by that fine institution. Apprentices maintain all rights to their own work, and requests for work

 to be removed from the Scriptorium will be honored as soon as possible. 

To student visitors who are not apprentices: these posts are NOT intended to be source material for essays. Go to your library and get the real thing. Plagiarists will be uncovered and publicly shamed.