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 and updated in March 2012. 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 2013. Membership fee is €50 for EU/€55 for non-EU. A list of current members is available on this site.
A call for papers has been issued for the 10th Conference of the European Society for Textual Scholarship, to be held at the École normale supérieure, Paris from 20 to 22 November 2013. The topic is "Variance in textual scholarship and genetic criticism". Proposals in English or French are due on 1 June 2013. See the Conference pages for details
Good news for members from outside the European Union: you can now pay your memberschip dues through PayPal. See the membership pages for details.
Variants 10 (2013) has rolled off the press and will be sent to members of the Society for the current year. If you join (or renew your membership) now, you will receive this 318-page issue for free as part of your 2013 membership. Meanwhile the topic for this autumn's conference in Paris will be "Variance in Textual Scholarship and Genetic Criticism / La Variance en philologie et dans la critique génétique". The precise dates are yet to be announced.
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 organizes an international autumn conference each year hosted by a different European city on a specific topic or theme. The first one of these was a colloquium held in Leicester on November 22-23, 2001, to formally launch the Society. The second colloquium, on the subject of Reading Notes was held in Antwerp in December 6-7, 2002. The third colloquium was held in Copenhagen on November 21-23, 2003.
The first larger conference was held in Alicante, Spain, on the theme 'Editing Texts in Multiple Versions' on 25-27 November 2004, which was followed by 'Histories of Editions' in Amsterdam (16 - 17 December 2005), 'Textual Scholarship and the Material Book' in London (23 - 25 2006), 'Textual Scholarship and the Canon' in Vilnius, Lithuania (22 - 24 November 2007), 'Private: Do (not) enter: Personal Writings and Textual Scholarship' in Lisbon (20 - 22 November 2008), 'Texts beyond Borders: Multilingualism and Textual Scholarship' in Brussels (19 - 21 November 2009), and 'Texts Worth Editing' in Pisa and Florence (25 - 27 November 2010). The 8th international conference was exceptionally held in spring 2012 to coincide with the annual conference of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft fur Germanistische Edition. The subject of this joint conference was 'Inter National and Inter Disciplinary Aspects of Scholarly Editing' and took place in Bern on 15 - 18 February 2012. The 9th annual conference on "Editing Fundamentals: Historical and Literary Paradigms in Source Editing" took place in Amsterdam on 22-24. A Storify archive of all conference Tweets with hashtag #ests2012 is available from the original conference page.
The Society publishes a refereed journal, Variants, with academic articles and book reviews that focus on any aspect of European textual scholarship. The first number was published in 2002 by Brepols. From the second volume onwards, a double issue (2/3) on Reading Notes, the journal was published in association with Rodopi. The most recent volume is Variants 10 (2013), which contains 12 articles on textual scholarship and historical linguistics, digital scholarly editing, classical philology; scholarly editing in Dutch, English, Finnish and Swedish Literature; publishing traditions in Japan, book history, and editing and folklore.
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. You can also find us on Facebook.