Edition and editorial practices: past and present

Presentation 

This international conference analyses the world of printing and editions in the early modern period, as well as the futures and receptions of works produced and circulated in the early modern period. While technological developments were central to publishing and editorial practices in the early modern period, this is no less true of our current historical juncture. New publishing formats (e.g. digital or hypertextual) raise numerous questions about how to tackle re-editing early modern works for a variety of potential target audiences.

Interrogating publishing and editorial practices helps rethink the (de/re)construction of the early modern canon from a social, political, and pedagogical perspective. How did the canon emerge? How did publishing and editorial practices contribute to consolidating or challenging it? How might new practices help bring to the fore new sources as well as contribute to developing more diverse, more ethical and more inclusive approaches to early modern works? While the focus of the conference is on the early modern period, the prism of publishing and editorial practices straddles the early modern and the contemporary periods, thus opening new ways of thinking across temporalities.

Programme 

Thursday 22 October 2026 - Université Paris Cité – Amphithéâtre Turing (Sophie Germain building)

9.00 am-9.30 am- Welcome & introduction

9.30 am-11;00 am – Panel 1: Editing the early modern self

• William Kynan-Wilson : « The penitential John Sanderson? Paratexts in Past and
  Future Editions of a Merchant’s Autobiography »
• Béatrice Chaix-Rouchon : « Samuel Daniel, or the Author as Editor »
• Floris Verhaart : Toward a Gendered Reading of Early Modern Editions of Letters »

11.00 am-11.30 am– Coffee break 

11.30 am-12.45 pm– Keynote 1:

• Bénédicte Miyamoto : « From Workshop to Printshop? Editing Instructions in
  Drawing and Painting Manuals »

12.45 pm-2.00 pm- Lunch break

2.00 pm-3.30 pm– Panel 2: From manuscript to publication

• Isabelle Baudino : « Les livres d’histoire illustrés et leurs souscripteurs en Grande-
  Bretagne au XVIIIè siècle »
• Edern de Barros : « Le contrat d’édition comme forme hybride du droit privé:
  typologie, acteurs et contentieux (XVIè-XVIIIè siècles) »
• Anne-Marie Miller-Blaise: « Editing Baroque Poetry Across Borders »

3.30 pm-4.00 pm– Coffee break

4.00 pm-5.15 pm – Roundtable: Editing early modern texts in the contemporary university

• Aurélie Griffin & Sophie Lemercier-Goddard : « Editer et traduire The Tragedy of
  Mariam d’Elizabeth Cary : enjeux et perspectives »
• Béatrice Chaix-Rouchon & Nicolas Thibault : « Le Douai Manuscript Project : les
  défis d’une édition numérique collective »

5.15 pm-6.30 pm: Drinks reception

Friday 23 October – Paris Institute for Advanced Study

9.15 am-9.30 am– Welcome 

9.30 am-11.00 am– Panel 3: The making of an edition: materiality, work, technology

• Danielle Clarke : « Paper Chains: Materiality, Manuscript and the Making of an
  Edition »
• Fiona Karcz : « Éditer des textes européens au Japon: l’exemple de l’imprimerie
  jésuite de Kyushu (1590-1614) »
• Anna Mikhalchuk : « Graver les sceaux au sein des ouvrages érudits modernes »

11.00-11.30 am– Coffee break

11.30 am-1.00 pm – Keynote 2: Guido Van Meersbergen: « The Heroic Editor: Richard Hakluyt as
an Icon of Empire »

1.00 pm-2.00 pm– Lunch break

2.00 pm-4.00 pm– Panel 4: Editing Shakespeare

• Alice Gong : « Editing Conscience and Trauma: Textual Mediation in Shakespeare’s
  Richard III »
• Sujata Iyengar : « Can We, Should We, or How Should We ‘Decolonize’ Editorial
  Textual Commentary? »
• Ladan Niayesh : « Editing Identity: speech prefixes and stage directions in
  Coriolanus »
• Nora Galland : « Sanitizing Shakespeare: Editorial Whiteness and Othello »

4.00-4.30 pm– Concluding words

Organisers

A symposium closed to the public, organised by Ladan NIAYESH (Professor) and John-Erik HANSSON (Senior Lecturer), ECHELLES (UMR 8264, CNRS), Université Paris Cité, with the support of the Paris IAS.

Organisations involved 

• Université Paris Cité
• ECHELLES (UMR 8264, CNRS)
• Société Française Shakespeare (SFS)
• Société d’Etudes Anglo- Américaines des XVIIème et XVIIIème Siècles (SEAA1718),
• Hakluyt Society,
• SHARP