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 president of the society is Wim Van Mierlo, Loughborough University; the secretary is Wout Dillen, University of Antwerp; and the membership secretary and treasurer is Jan Gielkens, Huygens Instituut, Den Haag.

More information on how to join the society, or on how to check or renew your membership status can be found on our Membership page. For more information on the internal structure of the society and its board, please refer to our Board page.

Activities

The Society organizes an international conference each year hosted by a different European city on a specific topic or theme. The Society’s first meeting was held in Leicester on November 22-23, 2001 to formally launch the Society. Our latest conference was held in Oxford from March 17-19 in 2022. A list of all of the Society’s past conferences can be found on our Previous Editions page. For the next conference, the Society will move to Kent, in Canterbury (April 13-14, 2023).

The Society also publishes a refereed journal, Variants, with academic articles and book reviews that focus on any aspect of European textual scholarship. The first issue was published in 2002 by Brepols, but from the second volume onwards, the journal was published in association with Brill (formerly Rodopi). Variants 12/13 was the first to appear in Open Access on the OpenEdition platform.

Together with STS, we also maintain a public discussion group about textual scholarship. As an open forum (independent of either society), we welcome anyone who is interested in textual criticism, scholarly editing and related topics to join our discussion at the Textual Scholarship mailing list.