GEMMS is excited to
announce the launch of our website and online database on April 21, 2018. The
website is freely available through Iter: Gateway to the Middle Ages and
Renaissance hosted by the University of Toronto (https://www.itergateway.org/resources/gemms). The website provides information about the
project as well as links to related resources and access to the database. The
database currently includes bibliographic information about 10,882 sermons and
55 reports of sermons from 680 manuscripts in 22 repositories in the United
Kingdom and North America. These numbers are continually growing as our team
adds new data.
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| GEMMS Advanced Search |
Recently, our
Research Assistants in England, Catherine Evans and Hannah Yip, have been
conducting research at repositories including the London Metropolitan Archives,
Sheffield Archives, the Society of Antiquaries of London, and the Thoresby Society
Archives. Over the next several months, Jeanne and Anne will be travelling to
libraries and archives in Ireland, Scotland, and London. Meanwhile, our Iter
Fellows, Adam Richter and David Robinson, have been busy adding data from North
American repositories and expanding location and biographical data in records.
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| GEMMS Manuscript Record |
Our two main
emphases over the coming year are making sermon scholars aware of this new
resource and facilitating processes to allow these scholars to contribute their
own data.
Public access to
the database will be launched at the Canada Milton Seminar on April 21 in a
presentation conducted by the Iter Fellows (https://crrs.ca/event/canada-milton-seminar-xiii). We are grateful to Professor Paul Stevens
for offering us this opportunity. On May 28, Jeanne and Anne will introduce the
project at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences in a joint
session of the Canadian Society for Renaissance Studies and the Canadian
Society for Digital Humanities (https://www.congress2018.ca/sites/default/files/association/2018/04/51-csrs-scer-2018-4-10-draft.pdf). Catherine Evans and Mathilde Zeeman are
currently organizing a one-day workshop, “Early Modern Sermons: Performances
and Afterlives,” on November 2, 2018, at the University of Sheffield (proposals
are due by May 21, 2018 to mz539@york.ac.uk) where Catherine and Hannah hope to introduce
the database to more scholars in the UK.
Our second focus is
on enabling all users to be able to contribute data to the database. At this
stage, contributors may download and fill in a template on the website and
submit it to the project via email (http://gemms.itercommunity.org/contributors.php). GEMMS Research Assistants will then enter
the information in the database, and contributors will be acknowledged for
their contributions. At a later date, we hope to update this process to make it
easier for contributors to submit data.
The GEMMS project
was formally launched on May 4, 2017, at Dr. Williams’s Library in London,
and we are grateful to the staff there, especially Jane Giscombe and Dr. David
Wykes for their enthusiastic support of this initiative. Jane created the
design for the website home page, while Dr. Jon Bath and Dr. Brent Nelson at
the University of Saskatchewan designed the website and database and have
worked tirelessly to create an effective user interface. Iter has supported
this initiative with research fellowships as well as providing ongoing hosting
of the site, and we appreciate the ongoing support we have received from Dr.
William Bowen and Dr. Ray Siemens. Members of our board have offered helpful
feedback as well as contributing data, while our research associate, Dr.
Jennifer Farooq, continues to efficiently perform administrative tasks and
supervise our research assistants.
