 |
 |
 |
 |
 
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Soon afterwards the CERES website was created, initially supporting and enhancing the email service, and gradually expanding to offer unique facilities and content. It provides ready access to all that we have done so far, by means of an Archive of recent back issues and of less recent digests, along with our Starter Guide. The electronic world moves fast, so some of the older material is out of date, though not in fact too much of it. Harvest will of course continue to be produced in email form, for those who prefer it that way, and new CERES members are always welcome. We also offer a page of Links, updated regularly, to what we feel are some of the best and most serious online services. The Links page now offers brief guides to the qualities and provenance of the websites we feature.
In the last two years the most significant change has been the introduction of COPIA, or CERES Online Publications Interactive. This includes research projects aiming to publish new material online. The first was 'Aeneas and Isabella', which undertakes a new attribution of two poems to Isabella Whitney, and includes editions of the poems. The second project was 'Sidneiana', a collection of manuscript resources relating to Sir Philip Sidney and his circle. So far it includes musical reconstructions of Philip Sidney's Certain Sonnets 6 ('To the tune of Basciami vita mia) and Robert Sidney's Song 12 ('To a French tune'), with audio files; Sir Henry Sidney's letter of advice to the young Philip Sidney; Sir Robert Sidney's wardrobe-keeper's account of his master's income and expenditure from c.1590 to 1626; a modernised and amended edition of the Countess of Pembroke's translation of Petrarch's Triumph of Death; and 'Philarchos' Tale', a narrative from the manuscript continuation of Mary Wroth's Urania. The most recent CERES project is 'Hap Hazard', a collection of transcribed manuscript materials relating to Edmund Spenser, currently focusing on his Irish experience. It includes a very important new edition of the Gonville and Caius MS of A View of the Present State of Ireland, and the first attempt to collect all Spenser's secretarial letters from Ireland in one place. All these projects aim to expand, both under the efforts of their originators, and with the help of others who we hope will come on board.
The future looks interesting. We want COPIA to expand, and to find new projects initiated by new people. We want Harvest and our Links page to continue being a guide to online resources with an informal touch and a sharp edge here and there. And we want to make a success of our new project, to be undertaken in the academic year 2001-2: an online palaeography course, harnessing the power of electronic media and the glory of Cambridge manuscript collections to give a wide-ranging and authoritative guide to English handwriting 1500-1700.
Raphael Lyne is a College Lecturer and Director of Studies in English at New Hall, Cambridge, and a Newton Trust Lecturer in the Faculty of English. He is the author of Ovid's Changing Worlds: English Metamorphoses 1567-1632 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) and is now working on Shakespeare's late work.
Andrew Zurcher is a Junior Research Fellow at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. In 2001 he completed his Ph.D. thesis on the subject of legal diction in Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene.
