This project’s aim is to recover, update, digitise, and recontextualise the pioneering work of the British scholar Caroline Spurgeon (1869-1942), an expert on the major English authors Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare, and the first woman professor of English literature in England.
Spurgeon’s Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism and Allusion (1925) is a touchstone reference work which both launched and sustains the modern field of Chaucer reception. However, it is in need of updating due to a wealth of historical evidence about Chaucer’s reception which has come to light since its completion over a century ago. This project seeks to revisit received narratives about Chaucer’s reception by augmenting Spurgeon’s catalogue of allusions with newer scholarship, analysing the expanded corpus using methods drawn from reception studies and the Digital Humanities (DH), and rendering it digitally available as a fully searchable Open-Access database. Having constructed this augmented digital corpus of allusions, we will use it to investigate fundamental questions about Chaucer’s reputation, canon, and influence in English literary history.
The project’s second objective is to recover and reassess the contributions made to literary criticism by Spurgeon’s groundbreaking monograph Shakespeare’s Imagery and What it Tells Us (1935) and its unpublished companion works. In a period before the advent of computers, Spurgeon charted and classified thousands of images in Shakespeare and his contemporaries in order to assess the playwright’s literary distinctiveness. Shakespeare’s Imagery saw six printings within 35 years and remains a classic in the field, but the fact that Spurgeon drafted two follow-up studies is virtually unremarked by scholars. As a major work of twentieth-century Shakespeare criticism which has not heretofore been studied at length, the complete trilogy of Spurgeon’s research now invites new scholarly attention. Branch 2 of the project investigates this archive of early Shakespeare scholarship so that its legacy may be fully understood.
The third objective is to situate Spurgeon’s methods of studying literature within an untold history of computational literary studies. The first decades of the twenty-first century have witnessed a digital turn within literary studies, but the prehistory of DH, in which women played a prominent role, remains largely unwritten. Branch 3 argues that Spurgeon’s analysis of early modern plays reveals the prescience of her approach and her place in the longer history of DH. It investigates the research materials developed by Spurgeon and her collaborators, and identifies fruitful parallels with modern DH in the labour-intensive and collaborative practices by which they indexed Shakespeare’s dramatic corpus in the 1930s.
In its focus on Caroline Spurgeon’s intellectual achievements across multiple disciplines, it actively contributes to recovering the legacy of a trailblazing woman scholar whose work shaped the modern field of literary studies.