"Baconian Quacks & the Origins of Digital Media," a Lecture by Whitney Trettien

Amateur bibliographers who espoused the Baconian theory of Shakespearean authorship in the later nineteenth and early twentieth century — people like Orville Owen, Ignatius Donnelly, and Elizabeth Wells Gallup — have been dismissed as quacks. And they are. But, as I hope to show, their methods were also born out of a rapidly transforming media ecology. The invention of the telegraph and especially binary telegraph code in the middle of the nineteenth-century changed how Europeans and Americans wrote, shared, and theorized text messages. Around the same time, the advent of photolithographic facsimiles began to fundamentally shift how scholars related to and studied the medieval and early modern past, leading to the emergence of bibliography as a field. If we understand Baconians not only as quack reactionaries but as responding to, and embedded within, this new media environment, we can begin to see their enduring contributions to editorial theory, bibliography, and the digitization of early modern literary history.

Whitney Trettien is Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and Faculty Director of the Price Lab for Digital Humanities. Her first book, Cut/Copy/Paste: Fragments Toward a History of Bookwork (University of Minnesota Press and Manifold, 2021), explores early modern makerspaces where women and other marginalized figures assembled hand-made books. She is currently working on a collaborative and public digital project on the history of printing presses in prisons, as well as a book on the deep history of electronic textuality.

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