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Projects

Projects CELL’s projects have over the last ten years set the standard for marrying rigorous standards of traditional scholarship to the new possibilities opened up to us by the transformations in communication and information technologies.

Here you can find the research we’re pursuing right now, as well as older projects.

 

Ongoing Research

Research projects that are actively pursued at CELL include:

Shaping Scholarship: Early Donations to the Bodleian Library
This project seeks to uncover the stories behind the books on the shelves at the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Focusing on the first two decades following its seventeenth-century refurbishment by Sir Thomas Bodley (c.1600-1620), the study examines the shape of the collection of the books donated and purchased with funds, the social backgrounds of the c.220 donors, and how these men and women were connected across the social compass of the time.
Book Owners Online
Book Owners Online (BOO) is a directory of historical book owners, with information about their libraries, and signposts to further reference sources. It covers English seventeenth-century owners – people who died between 1610 and 1715 – with the potential to be expanded.
Sediment of Reading
This project examines dirt and dust found in the crevices of books with forensic techniques to discover evidence of the history of reading.
Baroque Latinity
This AHRC-funded network aims to engage with the current revival of Baroque studies by addressing Baroque both as a literary style, one that distorted the norms based on the Greeks and Romans that had been systematized in the Renaissance, and as an artistic period, a complex stage in the development of post-Renaissance classicism.
Seventeenth-Century Libraries: Problems & Perspectives
This symposium brings together a group of UK-based academics and librarians, as well as key Continental scholars, in an attempt to consolidate current research, for the first time, on seventeenth-century libraries and book collecting.

 

Completed Research

Research projects that have been completed at CELL include:

The Archaeology of Reading in Early Modern Europe
This new digital humanities research initiative explores historical reading practices through the lens of manuscript annotations preserved in early printed books.
Building a Library Without Walls
This project documents Thomas Bodley's efforts building the legendary Bodleian Library at Oxford University; it uses novel digital methods in conjunction with the manuscript administrative records of the Bodleian Library.
Size Matters: Early Modern Paper in Cross-Cultural Contexts
This project seeks to build a research network to examine paper surfacing methods to receive ink in the early modern period.
Gabriel Harvey's Livy Online
This project will produce a digital edition of Gabriel Harvey’s annotated copy of T. Livius Patavini, Romanae historiae principis, decades tres, cum dimidia (Basle, 1555).
The Diplomatic Correspondence of Thomas Bodley, 1585-1597
Based on a pioneering transcription method, this online edition covers all the letters between Thomas Bodley and his correspondents between the years 1585-97, as well as miscellaneous correspondence from his earlier diplomatic legations to northern European figures of state.
The Correspondence of Francis Bacon
This new critical edition of correspondence to and from Francis Bacon (1561-1626) adds more than 200 previously undocumented letters to the canon of Bacon's correspondence.
The William Dugdale Database
This database, created by Jan Broadway between 20xx and 20yy in preparation for writing the biography of William Dugdale (1605-1686), catalogues the seventeenth-century historian and herald’s correspondence.
Digitizing Correspondence
This project brings together a number of strands arising from the individual correspondence projects in which CELL is involved. It is particularly concerned with how the networks of correspondence that existed in early modern Europe might be reproduced by interactions between distinct projects online.
The Hooke Folio Online
In this edition, the long-lost manuscript of the papers of Robert Hooke are transcribed and encoded in XML, making available large amounts of new information about the day-to-day activities of the early scientific establishment.
The Complete Correspondence of Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia
This first comprehensive edition of the letters written by Elizabeth Stuart (1596-1662) is published by Oxford University Press in three volumes, presenting a detailed portrait of a Stuart princess from childhood to old age.
The Letters of William Herle
This is ‘Edition 2’ of the Letters of William Herle Project (released March 2006). It provides transcripts of 302 of Herle’s letters written in English and a series of indexes by which they can be browsed – by archival location, date, author, recipient, first line or place from – as well as lists of multiple copies and letters with enclosures.
William Dugdale (1605-1686)
This databased catalogue of William Dugdale's correspondence includes over a thousand letters either to or from Dugdale and served as the basis of the biography William Dugdale: A Life of the Warwickshire Historian and Herald.
The Workdiaries of Robert Boyle
The CELL 2004 edition of the of the Workdiaries of Robert Boyle (1627-91 is a fully revised and enhanced reworking of an earlier edition prepared under the direction of Professor Michael Hunter, published in 2001 by Perseus and on the Boyle website at Birkbeck College. As well as images of the manuscripts, the revised edition includes a new interface and search and reference facilities.