The Almanacks of Mary Moody Emerson: A Scholarly Digital Edition

Ed. Noelle A. Baker and Sandra Harbert Petrulionis

In collaboration with the Brown Women Writers Project

Here is a link to a demonstration of this digital edition in progress, which displays a twelve-page excerpt from an Almanack folder Mary Moody Emerson kept from approximately April through September 1827. This example is based on the editors’ electronic transcriptions of the holograph manuscript. Here is a link to the twelve page excerpt of the holograph manuscript pages.

Most widely known as the brilliant, unmarried aunt of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mary Moody Emerson (1774-1863) was a self-educated scholar, theologian, and proto-activist. Her published work includes pseudonymous articles informed by coterie writing and the epistolary essay, but her most significant literary accomplishment is an unpublished series of hand-made manuscript books she called her Almanacks (c. 1804-1855), housed at the Houghton Library at Harvard University and previously unavailable to general readers.  

Illustrating multiple strategies of self-cultivation, Emerson’s Almanacks contribute significantly to women’s intellectual history; document the extent to which early American women embraced transatlantic culture; and evidence the ways in which Emerson anticipates signal aspects of Transcendentalism, the antebellum movement for which her nephew is considered the primary spokesman. Our edition will recover this unique text for scholars and students of both women’s writing and Transcendentalism. It will demonstrate that eighteenth-century women anticipated a wider audience for their “private” writing than that of immediate family and friends; it will also illustrate specific examples of the modes of intellectual transmission between Mary and Waldo Emerson, and, further, it will establish pivotal “originating moments” in the history of women’s rights. 

This project will provide a scholarly digital edition of the complete text hosted by the Brown Women Writers Project in its collections of Early Modern Women's writings and will make available all extant Almanack manuscripts in chronological order and in searchable format. The markup follows Textual Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines for XML encoding of the text. We plan a phased-in implementation, with phase one providing a complete, clear text transcription searchable by keywords, and all editorial apparatus encoded (i.e., textual notes, emendations, physical condition of manuscript, annotations, scribal witness transcriptions of irrecoverable text).

bMS Am 1280.235 (385). Ralph Waldo Emerson Memorial Association deposit, Houghton Library, Harvard University. Not to be reproduced in whole or in part without permission.