MA in Bibliography and Textual Studies

The MA in Bibliography and Textual Studies is designed to introduce students rapidly and effectively to a range of textual studies, including bibliography, palaeography and the history of the book. This course, which can be completed in nine months, teaches its students a range of textual and critical skills that will provide the foundation for the study of any literature, exploring these according to general principles, as well as within a specific field of research. The final course assignment is to prepare a paper for publication, using skills acquired during the course.

The course is structured to begin with the Centre's annual conference on editing; the Centre's annual public lecture (the Peter Davison Lecture) falls in the middle, and the course ends with the Centre's Annual Symposium on Textual Studies (previous symposia leaders have included Prof. Paul Eggert, Prof. Hans-Walter Gabler, Prof. Warwick Gould, Prof. Jim Mays, Prof. James McLaverty, Prof. Dick Van Vliet, Dr. John Jowett, and Prof. Mary Jane Edwards).

Students take five modules in all, two and a half per semester; four of the modules run for a single semester each, but the fifth is a double module, running the whole length of the course.

1. Research Methods (semester one: 30 credits)
introduces the major issues and techniques of literary research.

2. Bibliography, Palaeography and Book History (semester one: 30 credits)
introduces the key skills for textual research, including how to compile primary and secondary bibliographies, and the main source of information and tools available, both in print and electronic form; the principles of bibliographical description and an introduction to how to read manuscripts from the medieval to the modern period.

3. Theories of Textual Criticism (semester two: 30 credits)
provides an overview of the assumptions and practices that have informed the development of the discipline of textual criticism, and its variant forms in the US, the UK and in Europe (particularly in Germany).

4. Electronic Resources and Textual Criticism (semester two: 30 credits)
is a detailed, hands-on study of the use of computers in editing and textual scholarship. Students will explore current scholarly electronic projects, including those of the Centre, examining some of the solutions and available for solving scholarly problems.

5. Textual Studies (a double module, semesters one and two: 60 credits)
For the first semester, students will examine the practical application of textual scholarship to individual texts and authors across a wide range of periods and genres. During the second semester, student programmes will be tailored to the specific research interests of the individual; each student will work with an expert in their chosen field, while preparing a five thousand word article suitable for publication with their course-tutor.

Contact: Professor A.S.G. Edwards, edwar04@dmu.ac.uk