Paris Early Modern Seminar is pleased to host ICCEMS’s third online workshop of our series Tacit Knowledge for Higher Degree and Early Career Researchers. This session, “Working with digital collections: does seeing the actual thing matter?” will be presented by Guillaume Coatalen of Université Versailles Saint-Quentin and Blandine Demotz of Cergy Université.
When: 14 April 2026, 10:00-11:00 AM (CET)
Where: Online
Register: Registrations will open closer to the date of the event
The exponential growth of digital collections has radically changed research in the field of early modern manuscripts by making it possible to access an impressive number of sources on a screen. To save time, expenses, and limit our carbon footprint, it may be tempting to decide not to consult the physical objects in libraries and other repositories. Digital pictures, however, flatten manuscripts and by doing so necessarily leave out characteristics which may be crucial. In that regard, digital collections only give a partial insight into the materiality of manuscripts. This paper looks at when and why researchers must see the actual thing based on the case study of Thomas Cromwell’s correspondence.
About the Presenters
Guillaume Coatalen is Professor of English studies at the University of Versailles Saint Quentin (France). He has published on a variety of topics including early modern manuscripts, translation, rhetoric, Elizabeth I’s French correspondence and Petrarchan sonnets. He is the author of Two Elizabethan Treatises on Rhetoric: Richard Rainold’s Foundacion of Rhetoricke (1563) and William Medley’s Brief Notes in Manuscript (1575) (Brill, 2018) and the co-author of Elizabeth I’s foreign correspondence: letters, rhetoric, and politics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and of Translating Petrarch’s Poetry: L’Aura del Petrarca from the Quattrocento to the 21st Century (Legenda, 2020). He is completing a book on the figure of the poet in early modern plays for Manchester University Press.
Blandine Demotz is a PhD student at Cergy Université. Her thesis, titled “‘I require you on the kynges behalf that ye procede’: agency and State authority in Thomas Cromwell’s letters (1532-1540)” offers a rhetorical analysis of Cromwell’s correspondence and aims at understanding how the minister built his own ethos in writing, while confronting it to the actual limits of his administrative role. Blandine Demotz has published a number of scientific articles focusing on Cromwell’s administrative and literary position, among which “Hierarchy and Diplomatic Letter Writing in Early Modern letters: The Case of an Unpublished Letter from Thomas Cromwell to Mary of Hungary”, in Reformation & Renaissance Review. She currently teaches English literature and translation at Université Lyon 3 Jean Moulin (France).