Purpose:

This project seeks to use digital text analysis tools to explore how gender and religion influenced the preaching, publishing, and impact of funeral sermons for women in seventeenth-century England.

Methodology:

This project is the culmination of multiple semesters of work all leading up to the completion of a 698 Creative Project. While I previously studied modern English history, I first encountered the early modern period during the summer of 2017 when I took an independent study seminar and began to read about memory and commemoration as well as gender issues. In the Fall of 2017, I took a course covering Tudor and Stuart England to give me a better understanding of the larger historical trends. I also participated in a digital history seminar where I created a prototype of the project that you see before you. This project examined a small corpus of funeral sermons at a basic level and on a much smaller scale: twelve sermons for the initial small project, as opposed to 206 for the larger creative project corpus. Beginning with the spring term 2018, I focused on assembling transcriptions of funeral sermons for both women and men from the database Early English Books Online (EEBO). EEBO, while extremely useful, presents technological challenges as it is an older database and downloading data consumed a lot of time. There were many other decisions that had to be made, like the naming system for the files as well as figuring out the best way to gather and organize the bibliographic data from the funeral sermons. All of these tasks are part of doing digital scholarship and while there are issues that do not usually arise with traditional written research, the benefits of this method of scholarship are evident in this project.

Acknowledgments: