Research project
The Thomas Nashe Project
- Start date: 1 October 2015
- End date: 1 September 2020
- Funder: AHRC
- Primary investigator: Jennifer Richards
- Co-investigators: Dr Brett Greatley-Hirsch
- External co-investigators: Andrew Hadfield, Cathy Shrank, Jonathan Hope, Joseph Black
Value
£750,180
Partners and collaborators
University of Newcastle, University of Sheffield, University of Sussex, University of Strathclyde, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Description
Thomas Nashe (1567-c.1600), one of the most influential writers of the English Renaissance, has not been edited for over 100 years. 'The Thomas Nashe Project' is an ambitious project of scholarly editing: six volumes of all of Nashe's known writings and dubia, to be published by Oxford University Press in 2021 in print and also online, as part of Oxford Scholarly Editions Online, with detailed annotation that takes account of advances in our understanding of the 16th century; a new glossary that makes use of the e-search tools at our disposal; and extensive analysis and commentary. The edition will be edited to the highest standards, taking account of developments in approaches to scholarly editing and new research. R. B. McKerrow's revered scholarly edition (1904-10) is based on his collation of the copies of texts available to him in London and Oxford, although we now know that many more copies survive on both sides of the Atlantic (270+). His textual notes, accurate as they are, can be confusing as he collated his copy texts with 19th-century works that have no textual authority. His explanatory notes reflect the state of knowledge about Elizabethan society in the early 20th century. They are out of date on social history, urban history and the history of London; the relationship between individual writers; the conditions of early modern writing; the nature of patronage and the social order; rhetoric and literary culture; and religion. All of these features of McKerrow's edition and many more are in need of modernisation.