About EMEE

EMEE Mission Statement

Para1Early Modern England (ca.1485–1700 CE) featured many foundational movements, innovations, texts, and authors still important in the 21st century. The Early Modern England Encyclopedia (EMEE) is a dynamic encyclopedia that supports students studying the literature, culture, and history of Tudor and Stuart England, with a focus on early modern drama and the life and works of William Shakespeare. The peer-reviewed articles feature rich information and images, as well as a curated list of recent scholarly and online references to support study of the period’s people, places, and ideas. EMEE’s born digital resource provides multiple points of access to its theatrical, historical, and cultural contexts.

EMEE Overview

Para2EMEE offers an open-access resource for secondary and university students. EMEE content is written and edited by Dr. Kate McPherson (Utah Valley University) with support from pedagogical partners at other institutions. EMEE is a collaboration between many scholars and students; some of their collaborative entries are based on work originally featured in Shakespeare’s Life and Times, a section of the Internet Shakespeare Editions developed in the 1990s by Dr. Michael Best at the University of Victoria, Canada. EMEE is published by Linked Early Modern Drama Online (LEMDO), also at the University at Victoria.

EMEE Philosophy

Para3In our approach to publishing peer-reviewed, online articles about early modern drama and culture, we have adopted the following principles:
EMEE is open-source and free to any user without a subscription
The EMEE site is a static, Endings-compliant website with no server dependencies
EMEE is committed to keeping resources updated as scholarship evolves
Para4As scholars, we
see theatre as a vital tool for understanding the culture and society of early modern England
remain committed to authors who were part of a network of artists working concurrently with William Shakespeare
refer frequently to both historical records and quotations from key texts
foreground the original theatrical conditions in which the plays were performed
offer interpretive commentary about the play, character, person, event, place, or other entry item
Para5Our audience is
primarily secondary and undergraduate students interested in the theatrical, social, and cultural world of early modern England
secondarily, faculty at secondary schools and universities looking for resources to enrich their students’ study of early modern drama, theatre, literature, history, and culture
additionally, theatre professionals concerned with performance and production of theatrical texts from the early modern period or members of the public seeking a verifiable resource to enrich their own reading, writing, or travel.

EMEE Resources

Academic

Para6
EMEE features peer-reviewed articles of 500–1000 words
Each EMEE article includes at least one high-quality image in the public domain suitable for downloading to augment papers, presentations, or lectures
Each EMEE article includes curated suggestions for recent online and print sources

Pedagogical

Para7
EMEE offers thematic clusters of articles that can augment open-source literary and historical texts
EMEE features opportunities for individual undergraduate students to become involved as writers for EMEE
EMEE has assignments, rubrics, and guidelines for faculty to create assignments and get their students involved via a pedagogical partnership with the EMEE editors

Prosopography

Janelle Jenstad

Janelle Jenstad is a Professor of English at the University of Victoria, Director of The Map of Early Modern London, and Director of Linked Early Modern Drama Online. With Jennifer Roberts-Smith and Mark Beatrice Kaethler, she co-edited Shakespeare’s Language in Digital Media: Old Words, New Tools (Routledge). She has edited John Stow’s A Survey of London (1598 text) for MoEML and is currently editing The Merchant of Venice (with Stephen Wittek) and Heywood’s 2 If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody for DRE. Her articles have appeared in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Elizabethan Theatre, Early Modern Literary Studies, Shakespeare Bulletin, Renaissance and Reformation, and The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. She contributed chapters to Approaches to Teaching Othello (MLA); Teaching Early Modern Literature from the Archives (MLA); Institutional Culture in Early Modern England (Brill); Shakespeare, Language, and the Stage (Arden); Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate); New Directions in the Geohumanities (Routledge); Early Modern Studies and the Digital Turn (Iter); Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers (Indiana); Making Things and Drawing Boundaries (Minnesota); Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study: Audiences, Authors, and Digital Technologies (Routledge); and Civic Performance: Pageantry and Entertainments in Early Modern London (Routledge). For more details, see janellejenstad.com.

Kate McPherson

Kate McPherson is Professor of English and Honors Program Director at Utah Valley University (Orem, UT, USA). In 2015, she began working to redevelop Shakespeare’s Life and Times, created by Michael Best, into the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Her other publications include commentary on Pericles and The Comedy of Errors for the New Oxford Shakespeare (2016); the co-edited volumes Stages of Engagement: Drama and Religion in Post-Reformation England with James Mardock (Duquesne University Press, 2014) and Shakespeare Expressed: Page, Stage, and Classroom in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, with Kathryn M. Moncrief and Sarah Enloe (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013). With Kathryn M. Moncrief, Kate has also two edited collections, Performing Pedagogy in Early Modern England: Gender, Instruction, and Performance (Ashgate, 2011) and Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate 2008). She has also published numerous articles on early modern maternity in scholarly journals. Kate participated in the 2008 National Endowment for the Humanities Institute, Shakespeare’s Blackfriars: The Study, the Stage, the Classroom, at the American Shakespeare Center. She also served as Play Seminar Director, a public humanities position, for the Utah Shakespeare Festival in 2017 and 2018.

Michael Best

Michael Best is Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria, BC. He founded the Internet Shakespeare Editions in 1996, and was Coordinating Editor until 2017, contributing two editions to the ISE: King John and King Lear (the latter also available in print from Broadview Press). In print, he has published editions of works of Elizabethan magic and huswifery, a collection of letters from the Australian goldfields, and Shakespeare on the Art of Love (2008). He contributed regular columns for the Shakespeare Newsletter on Electronic Shakespeares, and has written many articles and chapters for both print and online books and journals, principally on questions raised by the new medium in the editing and publication of texts. He has delivered papers and plenary lectures on electronic media and the Internet Shakespeare Editions at conferences in Canada, the USA, the UK, Spain, Australia, and Japan.

Orgography

LEMDO Team (LEMD1)

The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators, encoders, and remediating editors.

University of Victoria (UVIC1)

https://www.uvic.ca/

Metadata