The European Society for Textual Scholarship provides an international and interdisciplinary forum for the theory and practice of textual scholarship in Europe. It has been established in close collaboration with the Society for Textual Scholarship (North America).
The bylaws were approved by the membership on December 2005. A new board has been elected and had its first meeting in 2006.
The president of the society is Dirk Van Hulle, University of Antwerp; the secretary is Caroline Mace, University of Leuven and the membership secretary is Herman Brinkman, Huygens Instituut.
The Society's postal address is:
Centre for Manuscript Genetics
c/o Dirk Van Hulle
University of Antwerp, L&W, D.137
Prinsstraat 13
2000 Antwerp, Belgium
For membership enquiries contact Herman Brinkman by e-mail, phone (+31-70-3315812) or post:
Join/Renew your membership now for 2010. Membership fee is €50 for EU/€55 for non-EU. A list of current members is available on this site.
Variants 10 will not be a themed issue. Contributions on any aspect of textual scholarship, scholarly editing and cognate fields will be considered. Participants from the 2010 Pisa conference, "Texts Worth Editing", and the 2011/12 Bern conference InterNational and InterDisciplinary Aspects of Scholarly Editing may still submit their revised paper. Deadline is 31 March 2012.
The Society is pleased to announce that Variants 8 is now published. Members who have renewed their dues for 2012 will automatically receive the new issue. The volume, Private: do (not) enter: Textual Scholarship and Personal Writings, is guest-edited by João Dionísio (University of Lisbon) and contains a selection of the papers from the 2008 conference. Until recently, writings of a private nature have been neglected in literary and textual studies. There are two main reasons for this: the scarcity of pre-modern witnesses of this type of textual production and, in contrast, the over-abundance of material in contemporary writers' archives. Although in more recent times, there has been a marked shift towards the study of private and personal writings, important issues remain to be studied. In the light of genetic criticism and in the context of the broadening attention of textual scholarship to all matters relating to textual production, these texts have acquired a new status, but the legal, philological and historical questions they raise have not been systematically addressed. The new interest of textual scholarship in the processes of creation and dissemination of texts offers an opportunity to reflect more thoroughly on the nature of these documents: on the role they play as witnesses to specific literary or para-literary genres (e.g. letters, diaries), on their significance in circumstances of political repression, and as part of the textual genetic process. This collection of essays includes articles that deal, through heterogeneous approaches, with different aspects of Dutch, English, French, Lithuanian, Portuguese and Spanish written cultures. Non-members can purchase a copy from Rodopi.
In 2011 the Society will one time only deviate from its normal annual conference date. The next conference on InterNational and InterDisciplinary Aspects of Scholarly Editing will take place on 15-18 February 2012 in Bern, in association with the German Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Germanistische Edition, Arbeitsgemeinschaft philosophischer Editionen and Fachgruppe Freie Forschungsinstitute der Gesellschaft für Musikforschung. See the conference pages for details or visit www.ag-edition.org. The Society will return to its normal schedule in the autumn of 2012.
The 9th annual conference will take place in Amsterdam on 22-24 November 2012. Further information and a call for papers will be available presently.
Call for Papers: Writers and their Libraries: An International Conference will be held at the Institute of English Studies, University of London on 1-2 February 2013. Deadline for proposals is 15 July 2012.
Please contact the webmaster, if you want us to include your news and announcements here. An events calendar listing forthcoming conferences, colloquia, seminars and call for papers is also available.
The Society holds a conference each year. The first of these was held in Alicante, Spain, on the theme 'Editing Texts in Multiple Versions' on 25-27 November 2004, and was preceded by three colloquia. The second, on the theme 'Histories of Editions,' was held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, on 16th and 17th December 2005. Our third conference, on the theme 'Textual Scholarship and the Material Book,' was held in London, in November 2006. The fourth ESTS conference was held in Vilnius, Lithuania, on 22-24 November 2007. The subject of the conference was Textual Scholarship and the Canon. The fifth conference was held at the University of Lisbon from November 20 to 22, 2008, on the subject "Private: Do (not) enter: Personal Writings and Textual Scholarship". On 19-21 November 2009 the Academy for Science and the Arts (KVAB) hosted the sixth conference in Brussels, Belgium on the topic "Texts beyond Borders: Multilingualism and Textual Scholarship".
ESTS has also held a number of smaller colloquia. The first one of these was was held in Leicester on November 22-23, 2001. The second colloquium was held in Antwerp in December 6-7, 2002. The third colloquium was held in Copenhagen on November 21-23, 2003.
The Society publishes a refereed journal, Variants, of articles and reviews with a focus on European textual scholarship. The first number was published in 2002 by Brepols. From thesecond volume onwards, a double issue (2/3) on Reading Notes, the journal was published in association with Rodopi. The most recent volume is Variants 7 (2008) on Textual Scholarship and the Canon, edited by Hans Walter Gabler, Peter Robinson and Paulus Subačius, will be available in November 2010.
With STS, we maintain a discussion group about textual scholarship. The list is open to anyone (you do not have to be a member of either society to join) and we welcome anyone who is interested in textual criticism, scholarly editing and related topics. Join at Textual Scholarship.