Welcome to the GEMMS blog!
Our project
The Gateway to Early Modern Manuscript
Sermons (GEMMS) is a project to create a group-sourced, comprehensive, online
bibliographic database of early modern sermon manuscripts (1530-1715) from the
British Isles and North America. The database will be a finding aid for many types
of manuscripts related to sermons held in numerous repositories in the United
Kingdom, Ireland, the USA and Canada.
The primary goal of the GEMMS project is to develop a
collaborative international research culture among early modern sermon
scholars. We hope to facilitate such collaboration by identifying, classifying
and publishing bibliographic data for a broad range of manuscript sermons in
our database.
Currently, it is often difficult for researchers to access
manuscript sermons because they are inadequately catalogued or classified, are
not fully described in online catalogues and are scattered among many libraries
and archives, sometimes far from their places of origin. These challenges have
meant that manuscript sermons often have been neglected by scholars in favour
of printed sermons, which websites such as EBBO and ECCO have made more easily
accessible. While there has been much valuable scholarship based on printed
sermons, which has broadened our understanding of British sermon culture,
manuscript sermons allow us to get closer to the moments of preaching and
reveal more about routine preaching during the early modern period. Our
database will help address the challenges of access and make it easier for a
wide variety of researchers to make use of the wealth of manuscript sermons,
sermon notes and sermon reports.
In addition to our database, we want to encourage research
on manuscript sermons by providing a forum for an online community of sermon
scholars. In this blog, we will be reflecting on our work identifying and
classifying manuscript sermons. We hope that our discussions of issues,
challenges and discoveries will spark your interest and encourage conversations
among users of early modern sermons. In this blog and our other social media
sites, we also will be highlighting related projects, websites, conferences and
publications to help keep you informed on the latest developments in early
modern sermon studies.
Features of our database
The GEMMS database will include metadata for a variety of
manuscript sermons, including complete sermons, sermon notes, sermon outlines,
and for manuscript reports of sermons, such as sermon diaries, registers of
preachers and lists of sermons.
The database will be fully searchable, and users will be
able to browse the sermons by repositories, manuscripts, people, locations of
preachings and Biblical texts. It also will feature brief biographies of
preachers and links to manuscript descriptions in online catalogues. In this
blog, we will be profiling selected sermon collections, and users will be able
to go directly to these posts from the relevant database entries.
Entries for individual sermons will include:
- bibliographic data
- classification of the type of manuscript sermon
- the primary language
- names of associated people, such as preachers, note-takers
and scribes
- Biblical text(s)
- surviving data on the delivery of the sermon, including
dates, locations and occasions
Entries for sermons also may include:
- classification of the sermon genre
- a composition date
- description of the contents
- description of material features
- identification of print editions or witnesses for sermons
Entries for sermon reports will include:
- bibliographic data
- classification of the type of report
- a composition date
- the primary language
- associated people, such as the creator or frequently
mentioned preachers
Entries for sermon reports also may include:
- brief description of the contents
- description of material features
- associated places
- identification of print editions or witnesses for reports
The GEMMS team is beginning to populate the database with
data collected by a few individual contributors, the principal researchers and
our research assistant in Oxford. By the time we launch the database in the
spring of 2016, the database will contain data for over 5000 sermons. Once the
database is launched, we hope that researchers interested in manuscript sermons
will contribute their own data, as well as make use of the database for their
research.
