Welcome Page
This portal is meant to introduce reviewers to the features of the Spenser Archive (currently in beta release).
The links on the left side of the page open the works currently housed in the Archive. Continue reading the guide below for instructions on the toggle-system for Archive texts.
Quick Links for Reviewers
In addition to the materials provided in static format as part of our application, we here provide the following supplements.
- The editorial manual for both the print edition and the digital archive.
- Sample critical introduction, textual introduction, and headnotes. Whereas we offered, as part of our grant application, editorial samples of texts destined for volumes 3 and 4 of the Collected Works, we offer sample critical and textual introductions to A Theatre for Voluptuous Worldlings, and headnotes for The Shepheardes Calender, to be printed in volume 1.
- The narrative of our grant application, with accompanying appendices — the organization of the Edition, sample texts, screenshots, letters of commitment, and editors’ CV's.
How to Read the Archive
The home page provides an index and links to virtually the entire Spenser corpus: while the editorial apparatus of all but the earliest of Spenser’s texts is still incomplete, the Archive contains transcriptions and scans of all of Spenser’s surviving works, except for his secretarial correspondence. The editorial apparatus to be provided in the Spenser Archive will include fuller commentary than that in the print versions, supplemented by scans of original printed books and all variant states of those books, a finding aid, forme-state analyses, and, where appropriate, inter-editional collation grids.
- Commentary links are currently available for the works in volumes 1 and 2 except for book I of The Faerie Queene and the back matter to the 1590 edition.
- For the works of volume 1, along with The First Part of The Faerie Queene (1590), Complaints and The Second Part of The Faerie Queene (1596), also have working forme state analyses, which list variants between witnesses of the same edition.
- The Shepheardes Calender has an inter-editional collation link, which lists variants across editions.
- Critical and Textual Introductions are currently completed for most of the works in volumes 1 and 2, but are not yet linked to the archive. These introductions will be completed and linked before the beginning of the grant period.
Malleable Display of Text
A reader can choose to read the text without any accompanying information.
Or she can turn on collation notes, commentary links, glosses, line numbers, and stanza numbers (collation notes, glosses, and commentary are currently available for A Theatre for Voluptuous Worldlings, The Shepheardes Calender, and the Spenser-Harvey Letters).
The collation notes list textual variants and are documented by means of links to scanned images of those variants. The glosses define unusual or unfamiliar words. When the box for the commentary links is checked, words and passages receiving commentary are highlighted; clicking on highlighted text will trigger the display of editorial commentary.
The signature numbers (A1r, A1v, A2r etc.) running down the side of the page link to scans of pages from original printed books. We reproduce no particular witness, but a “best copy” or eclectic copy text based on the corrected states of all formes, assembling the cleanest and best-inked formes from the various extant copies.for that particular page of Spenser’s text.
Textual Changes
The reader can also control the level of editorial intervention in the text by clicking particular toggles, which activate and deactivate certain classes of textual change;, the reader can also highlight the sites of such change with or without altering the actual text. The images below show all changes with the highlight toggles on to highlight the changes.
Modern Lineation In the copy text, a single word might be printed on two separate lines (prose), or the final word of a line might not fit in the remaining page space (poetry). This toggle sets the word back in its line, uninterrupted.
Expansions Provides standard expansions for early modern abbreviated forms.
Modern Characters Converts u, v, i, y, and vv to v, u, j, i, and w respectively in accordance with modern orthographic norms.
Lexical Modernizations Adjusts certain Early Modern words to modern orthographic equivalents.
Emendations Shows the adjustments the editors have made to obvious errors in the copy text.
