The WPHP Monthly Mercury

During ten years of working on the Women’s Print History Project, we have thought seriously and often about “women’s book history.” What is it, and how do we define it in relation to the WPHP? As women working on the history of women’s book history, what does it feel like, and what do we have to offer? What ground has women’s book history trodden — and where is it going? And how can we contribute to a sustainable future for the field?

As relatively new contributors to it, Kate and Kandice were thrilled to be joined—for the penultimate episode of The WPHP Monthly Mercury—by three scholars who have contributed to the field for decades and whose work has been invaluable to the WPHP, both practically and conceptually: Isobel Grundy, Leslie Howsam, and Maureen Bell. 

As one might suspect from these guests, the conversation is a thoughtful reflection on intergenerational collaboration and scholarship, the opportunities and limits of digital humanities, and where the field has been and where—we hope—it’s going. (Spoiler alert: we hope it’s going to a place rooted in continued, ongoing, and sustainable collaboration between past, present, and future researchers of women’s book history.)

Guests

Isobel Grundy is Professor Emeritus at the University of Alberta and Research Director of the Orlando Project. She holds her B.A. and D.Phil. from Oxford University (St Anne's College) and taught at Queen Mary College, London University (now Queen Mary London), and at Alberta as Henry Marshall Tory Professor.

She is one of three founding editors (with Patricia Clements and Susan Brown) of Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present, a digital work of literary history, Cambridge University Press, 2006- (orlando.cambridge.org). She has published chiefly on Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Eliza Fenwick, Samuel Johnson, and women’s writing of the long eighteenth century.

Leslie Howsam is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and Emerita professor of history at the University of Windsor.  She was part of the leadership of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing from 2005 to 2021, serving as President 2009 to 2013. Her interest in women in book history (as authors and editors, printers and publishers, librarians and curators, and always as readers) began with the doctoral research that became Cheap Bibles: Nineteenth-Century Publishing and the British and Foreign Bible Society (Cambridge University Press, 1991). It continues as she investigates the connections between historical authorship and the book trade in Britain 1850-1950. Other publications include Old Books & New Histories: An Orientation to the Study of Book & Print Culture (University of Toronto Press, 2006) and Eliza Orme's Ambitions: Politics and the Law in Victorian London (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2024). 

Maureen Bell’s early research centred on seventeenth-century women as printers, booksellers and publishers, after which she worked on documentary evidence for the London trade (A chronology and calendar of documents relating to the London book trade, 1641-1700 with D.F. McKenzie). As Director of the British Book Trade Index she led its transformation into an online resource, publishing on the English provincial trade, its book-owners and readers. Co-editing A biographical dictionary of English women writers, 1580-1720 with G. Parfitt and S. Shepherd (Harvester, 1990) led to introducing a course in ‘Women’s writing of the seventeenth century’ at the University of Birmingham. A member of the Editorial Board of the Cambridge edition of The works of Aphra Behn, she is currently working on the Wast Register Book of the Stationers’ Register and on the publishing of plays in the Restoration period. 

On the WPHP, our encounters with books and the women who worked on them are bibliographically-focused, as they must be for a project of this scale—focused attention on the contents of every work and the stories of their producers simply isn’t possible. But that doesn’t mean we don’t want to engage with the works that closely—the opposite is true, in fact!—and for Episode 4 of Season 5 of The WPHP Monthly Mercury, “A Newcastle Novelist”, we were delighted to interview Dr. Tricia Monsour from the University of Saskatchewan about her dissertation project, a scholarly edition of a forgotten novel by a forgotten woman author, The Castle of Tynemouth (1806) by Jane Harvey, which does just that.

Rigorous attention to the intellectual, personal, and geographical contexts of the novel and its publication shapes Dr. Monsour’s encounter with this work in particular, and her understanding of Harvey more generally. In this interview, she emphasizes Harvey’s attention to space, place, and genre, and the personal contexts that data in a WPHP record cannot fully capture, familiarizing us and our listeners with this Newcastle novelist.

Guests

Tricia Monsour is a recent doctoral graduate from the University of Saskatchewan, whose dissertation took the form of a scholarly edition of the early nineteenth-century novel The Castle of Tynemouth (1806). 

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!

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?

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. 

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.