Electronic Enlightenment Scholarly Edition of Correspondence

Abstract

The Electronic Enlightenment Scholarly Edition of Correspondence (EE), under the directorship of Robert McNamee and made available on a subscription basis by Oxford University Press, is a text collection of over 70,000 individual letters (written between participants of the ‘republic of letters’), biographical details of contributors, and additional contextual information. This review offers an overview of the collection (or, perhaps more accurately, collections) and its technical presentation, and some brief reflections on the benefits and limitations of the database (and others of its sort) within the realm of digital text collections and digital scholarship generally.

Keywords

• 17th century
• 18th century
• correspondences
• digital collection
• early modern
• enlightenment
• history
• intellectual history
• letters