Penn Manuscript Collective
The Penn Manuscript collective is a collaborative humanities research initiative between Professor Peter Stallybrass and undergraduates with the support and supervision of Will Noel, director of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies. We seek to to involve students of all levels of expertise in manuscript transcription and research.
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Publication Ms. Coll. 251: Literary Models, Religion, and Romantic Science in John Syng Dorsey’s Poems, 1805-1818(2019-05-01) DeStefano, SamanthaJohn Syng Dorsey (1783-1818) was a Philadelphia surgeon and the author of The Elements of Surgery (1813), the first American textbook of surgery. He was also the author of Poems, 1805-1818 (UPenn Ms. Coll. 251), a forty-page collection that reveals his interests in spirituality, the history of science and medicine, and classical and eighteenth-century British poetry. Decades after Dorsey’s death, his son Robert Ralston Dorsey (1808-1869) revised his father’s poems, identified classical sources with Latin and Italian quotations, and completed Dorsey’s final, unfinished poem. This project analyzes Dorsey’s literary, scientific, and biblical allusions and contextualizes his Poems within early nineteenth-century literary history and Romantic science and medicine. This article is an expanded version of the annotated transcription and critical introduction published as “Religion, Writing, and Romantic Science in John Syng Dorsey’s Poems, 1805-1818” in Volume 1 (Fall/Winter 2017/18) of Journal of the Penn Manuscript Collective. Corrections to the original transcription, as well as the discovery of four pages of riddles at the back of the volume, reveal additional literary and theological allusions, information about the involvement of Dorsey’s wife’s family and his medical colleagues in Philadelphia charitable organizations, and Dorsey’s connections to elite early nineteenth-century Philadelphia society. The expanded introduction and annotations analyze this new evidence and discuss the five poems from Ms. Coll. 251 and eleven poems not included in the manuscript that Dorsey published in the Port Folio, an influential Philadelphia literary journal.Publication Ms. Codex 238: The Foundling: A Tragedy(2018-05-01) Smith, Martin EarlThe Foundling: A Tragedy. Both a raw and a critical transcription (edited for performance) of a play, composed c 1803-1810 by a Scottish teenager, discussing the issues of bastard children, abortion, honor, and the Scottish nobility.Publication An Essay of a Declaration of Rights(2016-05-01) Picciani, ElizabethThe transcription of an essay declaring the rights of Pennsylvanians, edited by Benjamin Franklin in 1776.Publication Ms. Codex 176: “Pastorcillos” or “Little Shepherds”: Exploring a Miscellany Manuscript from Spain’s Early Modern Period(2017-04-01) Riano, NayeliAn investigation and partial transcription of "Pastorcillos," a seventeenth century play written in old Castilian Spanish and in Catalan. This thesis explores the possible origins and genre of this play.Publication Ms. Coll. 762: Rebecca Buckley Ferguson letters, 1747-1819(2017-01-01) Burke, NatalieA transcription of the Buckley-Ferguson letters (1747-1819). Born in the Philadelphia suburbs to William (b. 1713) and Ruth Buckley (d. 1780), Rebecca lived for periods in Essequibo and Demerara in Guyana and resided in New York after her marriage to James Ferguson in 1792. She is the sister of William Buckley (b. 1745). This collection of correspondence to Rebecca Buckley Ferguson is arranged alphabetically and is from family members and close friends.Publication Ms. Codex 926: The Royal Merchant(2017-04-01) Flibbert, NicoleAn annotated transcription of an anonymous seventeenth-century English manuscript play, The Royal Merchant. The play is set in Atlantis and addresses the role of the monarchy.Publication A Transcription, History, and Analysis of the Pennsylvania Declaration of Rights and Constitution of 1776(2016-05-01) Picciani, ElizabethAn examination of the editing process of the Pennsylvania Declaration of Rights of 1776 and how this process reflects and influenced both Pennsylvania politics and the American government as a whole.Publication Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Letters, 1868: A Study(2017-09-01) Kong-Chow, JanetThis project examines two letters written by Harriet Beecher Stowe, one dated 1868; the other undated. The 1868 letter is personal correspondence sent from Charleston, South Carolina and reveals a surprising connection between Stowe and the Tyler family of Philadelphia (for whom Temple University’s Tyler School of Art is named). The undated letter is addressed to Stowe’s editor and publisher, James T. Fields. In it she includes detailed input on the cover art for the forthcoming Little Pussy Willow (1870), and updates on various shorter writing projects under contract. While the contents of both letters contain rather quotidian details and information, they nevertheless offer a glimpse of Stowe and the business of writing professionally in the nineteenth century—including the packaging, marketing, and promotion of her books, as well as brief insights on her financial compensation for contributions to various periodicals.Publication Confessions of a Palaeographer(2017-09-01) Flibbert, NicolePublication ‘Not Essentially Different From [Her] Sex:’ A Literary Reading of the Rebecca Buckley Ferguson Letters(2016-12-01) Burke, NatalieThe Rebecca Buckley Ferguson Letters, a collection of letters at the University of Pennsylvania’s Kislak Center for Rare Books & Manuscripts, detail an important eighteenth century correspondence between a young woman in Philadelphia and her family members at home and abroad. Spanning seventy-two years (1747-1819) and multiple cities, the letters provide important insight into the lives of eighteenth century American women and the slaves they held. The letters discuss major life events within the Buckley family, including births, marriages, and deaths, life on the plantation in British Guinea in the eighteenth century, exchanges and interactions among family slaves, and revolutionary sentiments, especially surrounding the ratification of the constitution in 1788. The letters also hold an especial significance at the University of Pennsylvania for their geographical situation as a part of Philadelphia cultural heritage. This project constitutes a critical re-reading of the letters, applying techniques from comparative literature to these historical documents in order to see what might be gleaned if they were creatively re-read as if they were an American womens’ epistolary novel. The effort draws inspiration from M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! and R. Mac Jones and Ray McManus’s Found Anew, hoping to build upon their suggestions of the powers of creative writing – and reading – to reinvigorate difficult historical materials. It responds to recent criticisms of the epistolary genre by Julie Gilbert, Anna Hulseberg, and Jeff Jenson, who argue for the “imagination ... of the reader” as scholarly lens. Sharon Harris and Theresa Gaul have also influenced the project; they write a “[rejection of] the view of letters as historical documents valuable only for revealing information about famous people or events,” rather “[according] letters an independent literary status.”