Journal of the Penn Manuscript Collective
The Penn Manuscript Collective is a collaborative humanities research initiative. It is managed by Penn undergraduates, supervised by Professor Peter Stallybrass, and supported by The Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts. We seek to involve students of all levels of expertise in manuscript transcription and research. The Journal contains some of the Collective members' best work and showcases the kind of projects that the Collective seeks to foster.
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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.”Publication Religion, Writing, and Romantic Science in John Syng Dorsey’s Poems, 1805-1818(2017-08-01) De Stefano, 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 classical and eighteenth-century English poetry. Decades after his 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 annotated transcription and critical introduction analyzes Dorsey’s literary, scientific, and biblical allusions and contextualizes his Poems within early nineteenth-century literary history and Romantic science.Publication The “Art of Scraping”: Knife Erasures in Seventeenth Century English Manuscript Plays(2017-08-01) Flibbert, NicoleThis article investigates an erasure technique present in the seventeenth century English manuscript play, The Royal Merchant. It maps out a brief history of the modern scholarly awareness of this European scribal practice, then compares examples of knife erasure in The Royal Merchant with examples in the survey I completed of over 40 seventeenth century English manuscript plays from the Folger and British Libraries.Publication What is the Penn Manuscript Collective?(2017-09-01) Stallybrass, PeterPublication On Tinkering(2017-09-01) Taylor-Baranik, John