"A Numerous and Powerful Generation of Triflers": The Social Edition as Counterpublic in Charlotte Lennox's the Lady's Museum (1760–61) and the Lady's Museum Project (2021–)

Abstract:The Lady's Museum (1760–61) "by the Author of The Female Quixote" was an important early magazine primarily edited and written by the influential eighteenth-century author Charlotte Lennox. In this essay, we describe our theoretical and methodological approaches to editing, publishing, teaching, learning, and thinking with Lennox and our teams of co-workers in the Lady's Museum Project, the first critical and digital social edition of the periodical (at Ladysmuseum.com). We update this proto-feminist text in an intersectional feminist bibliographical praxis designed to encourage teamwork, flatten user/editor relationships, and create a dynamic audio and visual version of the text to accommodate multiple learning modes. This essay highlights the social edition as a counterpublic and posits Lennox's notion of "trifling" as a digital humanities methodology.