Scribes and Inky Fingerprints
Collaborative and Mediated Authorship in Early Modern English Manuscripts
FEATHERS Conference, 7-9 May 2025
From all of us at FEATHERS, welcome to Scribes and Inky Fingerprints: Collaborative and Mediated Authorship in Early Modern English Manuscripts! This three-day international conference, hosted at Leiden University by the ERC Consolidator-funded FEATHERS project, will bring together researchers working on early modern scribal culture and manuscript production. With a particular focus on three distinct genres of the secular manuscript industry – literary texts, letters and legal records – the conference seeks to explore the agency and influence of scribes, scribblers, secretaries, scriveners, and other manuscript users in order to shed light on their role in the production of early modern manuscripts.
Inky Fingerprints
In early modern England, the production of manuscript texts, whether literary, governmental or legal, was typically a collaborative or “socialized” enterprise, involving both professionals and amateurs. Indeed, the person a modern reader might automatically identify as “the author” rarely exerted sole influence over a text’s production: scribes and manuscript users might repurpose and adjust extracts from earlier literary contexts, while others commissioned intermediaries, such as secretaries or lawyers, to commit their words to paper. At first glance these intermediaries appear either frustratingly anonymous or, as members of a royal secretariat or court of law, institutionalised and thus indistinguishable. Nevertheless, all these contributors leave inky, authorial fingerprints on the final text, fingerprints that may allow us to identify their discrete, individual voices.
About FEATHERS
FEATHERS is a five-year research project (2020-25) investigating early modern manuscript culture and the mediation of authorship, concentrating on England between 1558 and 1642. It is funded by an ERC Consolidator Grant and led by Professor Nadine Akkerman.
Keynote Speaker: Professor Daniel Wakelin (University of Oxford)
Roundtable: Professor Marie-Louise Coolahan (University of Galway), Dr Jonathan Gibson (Open University), Professor Tim Stretton (Saint Mary's, CA), Professor Alison Wiggins (University of Glasgow)
You can find the full programme, registration page, and some practical information via the banner links at the top of the page. Please note that registration will close on 7 April.
This conference is part of a project that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No. 864635, FEATHERS).