To create the Lady’s Museum Project, a digital humanities project that provides free, open access to the first ever edition of Charlotte Lennox’s early magazine, the Lady’s Museum (1761-62) that is also a social edition and learning community, I received with my co-editor, Karenza Sutton-Bennett, the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (CSECS) 2021 D. W. Smith Fellowship. We have presented on this project at CSECS, the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies, the British Society for Eighteenth Century Studies, and in classrooms in the U.S. and Canada. We have worked with student interns over the Spring/Summer 2022 semester from Brazil and Canada to provide professionalization experience and publication opportunities to students. In Winter semester 2022, Brandeis University funded a graduate student internship for recording a portion of our forthcoming audiobook on LibriVox.org. We have presented at Brandeis University, Wayne State University, the University of Ottawa, and have scheduled presentations at other universities for Fall 2022. For more information on the guest-lectures that we have given, including video demos of our presentations and the theory and praxis of our site design and implementation, please visit ladysmuseum.com/public-presentations/.
About the Project
This website presents the first ever critical edition of The Lady’s Museum, in two formats: in phase 1 of the project (2021-2022) we are creating the platform for the teaching edition and activities for teachers, students, and volunteers to begin reading and participating in our vision of a social edition; in phase 2 (2022-2023), we are implementing improvements to complete the modernized version aimed at non-specialists, including undergraduates; phase 3 will include an unmodernized version intended for scholars to read alongside and compare to the modernized version (2023-2024).
The Lady’s Museum was among the most important early periodicals largely written by the one of the most important authors of the eighteenth century, and her protofeminist writing is beginning to receive the critical and pedagogical attention it deserves. Yet despite historical, literary and cultural significance of The Lady’s Museum‘s and Charlotte Lennox, no authoritative critical edition has existed—until now. This digital critical edition of Lennox’s fascinating periodical serves as a starting point for filling the gap in Lennox and periodical scholarship and teaching even as it presents Lennox’s periodical writing to new audiences, especially non-specialists and undergraduate students.
For further details on the status we are at in updating the site, see my 2022 Aphra Behn Online (ABO): An Interactive Journal for Women and the Arts article: “The Lady’s Museum Project: A Digital Critical Edition in Phase 1 of Its Development, Now Available for Teachers and Students to Learn Collaboratively through Charlotte Lennox’s Lady’s Museum (1761-62).”
Significance
In the past ten years, literary/cultural critics and historians began focusing on women-penned periodicals after years of favoring male writers and fiction and poetry. Long overdue, Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1690-1820s, edited by Jennie Batchelor and Manushag N. Powell (2018), was the first comprehensive study of women’s periodicals in the eighteenth-century field. Susan Carlile’s scholarly biography of Charlotte Lennox, Charlotte Lennox: An Independent Mind (2018) has inspired scholars to dig deeper into the literary works of the author who penned The Female Quixote(1752). However, Lennox’s periodicals remain behind the paywalls of libraries, universities, and digital databases. This is the first modern edition of Lennox’s The Lady’s Museum (1761-62), despite the significance of this publication in the history of women’s writing and periodicals. The goal of this digital edition is to familiarize a diverse audience—composed of non-specialists, advanced undergraduates, and scholars—with Lennox’s periodical. Besides providing a reliable edition of Lennox’s Ladies Museum(1760-61), this edition maintains Lennox’s textual authority while supplying a basis for including Lennox’s periodical into the canon of English literature.
Open-access digital projects such as this edition give scholars, students, and instructors access to eighteenth-century texts and pedagogical tools in ways that are more cost-effective and more conducive to online, interactive modes of learning than the traditional, printed book. This digital critical edition participates in this tradition by providing open access to Lennox’s periodical including scholarly and pedagogical contextual apparatus and resources. It builds on Oxford University’s Text Creation Partnership (TCP) transposing of the periodical’s text from the Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO) editions to contextualize the periodical by categorizing and tagging articles for increased navigability, adding images from this visually stunning publication, modernizing the text for a non-specialist audience, and adding explanatory footnotes and introductory, contextual and scholarly essays. The site also includes sample syllabi for teachers with suggested assignments that ask students to critically annotate articles or images from the periodical.
For further historical and scholarly context into the Lady’s Museum—and insight on the value of teaching it—see Susan Carlile and Karenza Sutton-Bennett’s 2022 article previewing our LadysMuseum.com site published by Aphra Behn Online (ABO): “Teaching the Lady’s Museum and Sophia: Imperialism, Early Feminism, and Beyond.”
Edition Home: ladysmuseum.com
Assignments Created and Guest-taught in College Courses in the U.S. and Canada
Lady’s LibriVox audibook recording assignment
18th-Century Magazine Article Glossing assignment
Critical Introduction writing assignment
Other creative assignment ideas
Site Setup for Interactive, Social Reading
In addition to the above glossing assignment, the following two functionalities I enabled on our site create opportunities for teachers and students to socially engage with, annotate, and discuss the texts in our course reader/teaching edition for the Lady’s Museum.
Hypothes.is reading group for global social annotation and discussion