The WPHP Monthly Mercury
The WPHP Monthly Mercury is the podcast of The Women's Print History Project, a digital bibliographical database that recovers and discovers women’s print history for the eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries. Inspired by the titles of periodicals of the period, the podcast dives into the gritty and gorgeous details of investigating women’s work as authors and labourers in the book trades.
Episodes
Finding, Building, Sustaining, Supporting, feat. Isobel Grundy, Leslie Howsam, and Maureen Bell
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
A Newcastle Novelist, feat. Tricia Monsour
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
Bibliographic Intimacies, feat. Megan Peiser and Emily D. Spunaugle
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, intellectua
Deal with the Devil (feat. Kate Ozment)
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
Authority Issues
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' a
Address-ing Firms; or, The Consequences of Our Own Actions
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 movin
Ghosts of Print Culture Past
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 cas
New Romanticisms Bonus Episode 5: Kirsteen McCue
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
New Romanticisms Bonus Episode 4: Manu Samriti Chander
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
New Romanticisms Bonus Episode 3: Patricia Matthew and Andrew McInnes
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
New Romanticisms Bonus Episode 2: Noah Heringman
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
New Romanticisms Bonus Episode 1: Jennie Batchelor
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
It's (A)Live!' The WPHP Monthly Mercury at New Romanticisms
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. Organized by Dr. Andrew McInnes and his incredible team of research assistants, “New Romanticisms” was a four-day Romanticist extravaganza with five plenaries, m
The Canterbury Fails x The WPHP Monthly Mercury: MONKS!!!
What do the medieval period and the Romantic period have in common? Well, at the very least, badly behaved monks. In Episode 4 of Season 3 of The WPHP Monthly Mercury, hosts Kate Moffatt and Kandice Sharren team up with David Coley and Matt Hussey and their podcast, The Canterbury Fails, for our first-ever crossover episode. This is, in the words of our friends at The Canterbury Fails, "A lat
Working for the (Wo)man ft. Sara Penn, Julianna Wagar, Amanda Law, & Belle Eist
This August, the WPHP has been sharing the Spotlights that make up our newest Spotlight Series, “Down the Rabbit Hole: Researching Women in the Book Trades.” Over the course of the month, posts from Research Assistants Sara Penn, Julianna Wagar, Amanda Law, and, as of this coming Friday with the last post of the Series, Belle Eist, have focused on women who worked in the eighteenth- and nineteenth
Wollstonecraft, Revisited (feat. E.J. Clery)
If you’ve ever taken an undergraduate English class on the Romantic period, you have probably encountered Mary Wollstonecraft, author of Vindication of the Rights of Woman. A widely read and controversial writer of political treatises, fiction, travel writing, and other works during her lifetime, she has been variously vilified and mythologized since her death in 1797, and has long been a staple i
By the Author of...
Our inaugural episodes of each season have thus far begun with beloved canonical authors: Jane Austen in Season One, Frances Burney in Season Two. This season, we’ve turned to an anonymous author—one whose identity is still a mystery. In 1808, The Woman of Colour was published, with its byline simply reading “By the author of "Light and Shade," "The Aunt and the Niece," "E
Season 2 in Review
As we prepare to launch Season 3 of the The WPHP Monthly Mercury later this week, project director Michelle Levy takes a look back at Season 2. Putting it into conversation with Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein's Data Feminism (2020) and Katherine Bode's A World of Fiction: Digital Collections and the Future of Literary History (2018), Michelle thinks about the work our podca
The Queen of the Disciplines (feat. Lisa Shapiro)
Throughout the month of March, the WPHP has been posting Spotlights about women philosophers in print in the WPHP as part of our Women & Philosophy Spotlight Series to celebrate Women’s History Month. Contributors to the series include research assistants Angela Wachowich, Belle Eist, Isabelle Burrows, Tammy T., and project director Michelle Levy, who wrote about the anonymous ‘Sophia, a Pers
Transatlantic Trajectories (feat. Melissa J. Homestead)
In July 2020, project lead Michelle Levy and lead editor Kandice Sharren attended a virtual workshop hosted by Amy Tims at the American Antiquarian Society titled “Searching the AAS Catalog: Keyword & Browse.” This workshop introduced them to the many specific and useful headings of the American Antiquarian Society catalog, including some that we were particularly excited for given that we see
Mary Hays, Mapped (feat. Timothy Whelan)
In 1803, Mary Hays published the six-volume work Female Biography, a substantial work of scholarship that relied on more than one hundred sources to write biographies about more than 300 hundred women. But how did Hays, a Dissenting writer of moderate means, access all of those books? To find out, we invited Dr. Timothy Whelan to talk all things Mary Hays, but especially her literary environs, whi
The Business of Gossip
In Episode 7 of Season 2 of The WPHP Monthly Mercury, “The Business of Gossip,” hosts Kate and Kandice follow the highly successful Henry Colburn, leading publisher of fiction in the early nineteenth century, across his three main business addresses in London—and in so doing, explore how the publisher prompted, encouraged, and engaged with gossip. The subject of much gossip himself, Colburn’s orig
The Ecology of Databases (feat. Lawrence Evalyn)
Why hasn’t the third edition of Hannah More’s Coelebs in Search of a Wife been digitized? Why doesn’t GoogleBooks group the different volumes of multi-volume works together in a single catalogue record? And, what do authors and pandas have in common? We bemoan the limitations of our various sources on a monthly basis, but this month we’re digging into why they exist in the first place—especially w
The Witching Hour
In last October's episode, “Of Monks and Mountains!!!” Kate and Kandice each read a gothic novel found in the WPHP, and it was so much fun that we simply had to do it again. For Season 2, Episode 5, “The Witching Hour”, we read books about witches — almost every book that mentions witches in the title in the WPHP, in fact! (There are only five.)But within that small sample, we found a full sp
Cheap Thrills (Pay Lemoine's Bills) (feat. Sara Penn and Roy Bearden-White)
In 1794, Ann Lemoine’s husband, Henry, who was an author and publisher, went to debtor’s prison—this led to their separation, and the following year, Ann Lemoine began her own publishing business in White Rose Court in London. Between 1795 and the early 1820s, it is estimated that Ann Lemoine published, printed, and sold more than 400 titles, and explored new and inventive ways of packaging and re
A Brief Journey through Women's Travel Writing in the Summer of 2021 (feat. the WPHP team)
Throughout the month of August, we’ve been sharing Spotlights on the WPHP site as part of the “Around the World with Six Women” Spotlight Series on travel writing. In this month’s episode, hosts Kate Moffatt and Kandice Sharren are joined by the authors of the Spotlight Series, who share what they have learned during their vicarious journeys through France, Italy, Germany, India, Chile, Rome, Chin
Collected, Catalogued, Counted (feat. Kirstyn Leuner)
In 2016, Dr. Kirstyn Leuner shared data from her project, The Stainforth Library of Women’s Writing, with the WPHP — in particular, the Virtual International Authority Files she and her team had attached to their person records. This month, she joins us to chat all things Stainforth, databases, and cataloguing, including the kinds of data her team has been working with and collecting, the project
Oh! Those Fashionable Burney Novels!
Welcome back! In the first episode of Season 2 of The WPHP Monthly Mercury, hosts Kate Moffatt and Kandice Sharren delve into the publication history of Frances Burney’s first two (and most popular) novels, Evelina (1778) and Cecilia (1782). Although both were regularly reprinted well into the nineteenth century, we recently realised that the WPHP was missing the post-1800 editions of these works
Season 1 in Review
As we get ready to launch the second season later this week, WPHP Primary Investigator Michelle Levy reviews some of the highlights from our first season.
A Brief and Scandalous History of Delarivier Manley (feat. Kate Ozment)
In the final episode of Season One of The WPHP Monthly Mercury, hosts Kate Moffatt and Kandice Sharren celebrate Women’s History Month by interviewing Dr. Kate Ozment about the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century writer, Delarivier Manley. Famous for her scandalous semi-autobiographical ‘secret histories,’ which satirized important Whigs in Queen Anne’s courts, Manley inspires us to con
Bluestockings in Print (feat. Betty Schellenberg)
In Episode 9, “Bluestockings in Print,” hosts Kate Moffatt and Kandice Sharren are joined by Dr. Betty Schellenberg, Bluestocking expert, to talk about the learned ladies of the informal eighteenth-century society and their complex relationships with print — along with some musings about puddings, friendships, and dirty laundry. Put on your blue stockings and join us for our penultimate episode of
50 Words for Walking (feat. Kerri Andrews)
Ramble. Ambulate. Wander. What are the words you use for walking? In our eighth episode, we’re looking to the words that women used to describe walking in print and manuscript during the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, when a surge in pedestrian activity for leisure and pleasure occurred. An interview with guest Dr. Kerri Andrews, author of Wanderers: A History of Women Walking, has us
1816 and 2020: The Years Without Summers
As 2020 draws to a tumultuous close, join hosts Kate Moffatt and Kandice Sharren as they look back—all the way to 1816. Often remembered as the cold and fog-laden year in which an 18-year-old Mary Shelley came up with the idea for Frankenstein, 1816 was a year of catastrophe more generally, known colloquially as “The Year Without a Summer” or “Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death.” This double epis
Mind the (Data) Gaps
Have you ever wondered, “Where does all the WPHP data come from?” Well, look no further than this month’s episode of The WPHP Monthly Mercury! From missing Frances Burney and Ann Radcliffe editions to ESTC imprint-specific searches, our sixth episode identifies data gaps and explores our superstar resources, the wide variety of print and digital sources we use, and the data limitations we wrangle
Of Monks and Mountains!!!
What do two of our favourite Gothic titles from the WPHP have in common? Banditti, the name ‘Clementina,’ and abducted women, for a start! Join hosts Kate and Kandice for this Halloween-themed episode of The WPHP Monthly Mercury as they discuss how you can identify works that align with the ‘gothic’ mode in the WPHP, chat about little-known women authors, and share their experiences reading two go
A Bibliographical Education (feat. Reese Irwin)
In the fourth episode of The WPHP Monthly Mercury, “A Bibliographical Education”, hosts Kandice Sharren and Kate Moffatt wander through the works categorized as “Education” in the WPHP, exploring its variety of formats and styles, as well as its many adjacent genres—not least of which is the considerable “Juvenile Literature” genre, which past RA Reese Irwin cheerfully (and almost single-handedly)
Black Women and Female Abolitionists in Print (feat. the WPHP team)
In this double episode of The WPHP Monthly Mercury, "Black Women and Female Abolitionists in Print," hosts Kandice Sharren and Kate Moffatt are joined by the entire team of the WPHP to speak to the Black Women’s and Abolition Print History Spotlight Series that we published on the WPHP site between June 19th and July 31st in response to the Black Lives Matter movement and the protests th
Women in the Imprints
In Episode 2: Women in the Imprints, follow Kate and Kandice through the labyrinthine labour that goes into discovering female-run firms: the women who were publishers, printers, and booksellers. Starting with the discovery of Ann Sancho, a Black bookseller in London (the only Black woman in the book trades we know of thus far), this episode shares the joys and the frustrations of discovering and
Jane Austen Adjacent
In this first episode of The WPHP Monthly Mercury, “Jane Austen Adjacent”, hosts Kandice Sharren and Kate Moffatt explore Jane Austen’s publication history, from unpublished anonymity to well-beloved and canonical, to introduce you to the Women’s Print History Project. They share the project’s not-so-humble data collection beginnings at Chawton House Library and the types of bibliographic data col
Introducing the WPHP Monthly Mercury
The Women’s Print History Project is pleased to announce the arrival of its very own podcast. Introducing: The WPHP Monthly Mercury. The WPHP Monthly Mercury will be released every third Wednesday of the month, starting June 17, 2020, so welcome to our first-ever podcast episode: Episode 0.5: Introducing the WPHP Monthly Mercury. Each future episode will have a corresponding blog post on the WPHP
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