From day one of the project we began categorising and recording the details of the book in meta-languages that could translate it into digital data: the data you will now find in our github repository. On our website, this is displayed as an annotated transcription alongside a facsimile, in a form that seems familiar, though modernised, to readers of early modern texts. However, we (or indeed anyone; it is open access) could now display this data into any form they wished while still retaining a built-in accuracy. In this way we have not only futureproofed Butler's book, we have given it the ability to shapeshift while retaining its original essence.
This is a profoundly Butlerian move, as he himself was deeply drawn to moments of translation between different forms — of insect bodies and hive status in The Feminine Monarchie, but also in his phonetic translation of the text, which seeks to transpose the meaning of his sentences into a different convention, a modulatory procedure that also underpins his interests in music and rhetoric. Our work restores a living glow to The Feminine Monarchie in the sense that we have made this important book accessible and newly useful, and the born-digital nature of the work shows a faithfulness to the morphological intellectual spirit of the original, too.
Editing any book involves immersion in close detail, and it has been extraordinary to spend my working days listening to the buzz amidst this text's words and punctuation. The digital languages we've used to make the book have provided yet more ways of paying close attention to the text.
We have shown how Butler edits his text between the editions of 1609 and 1623, and you will see different types of changes highlighted, with 1609 pushing up through our 1623 copy text, or ghosting out where there have been deletions. These changes show Butler's thoughts as he revisits his original work. They show his experiences in the interim, his updated aims for the volume, new developments in his expression.
By coding-in Butler's marginal references we can show the pressure points where his text is tightened against external sources of authority. Likewise, we've made visible Butler's internal cross-referencing system, where he leads you to other places in his own book, creating a lattice of affinities. Our digital apparatus highlight the pattern in which Butler structures the knowledge in his text, showing us places where he increases epistemological tension to convey fact and certainty, or lets it sit a little more loosely in the case of anecdote and conjecture.
We've used TEI to reveal the discursive attention of the editorial team, too. Throughout the book you will find translations, but especially in chapter five (the central chapter in which the book's multi-sensory imaginary crescendos around the song of the queen and her swarming princes) you will see we have made visible our scholarly focus on the text with a set of annotations. Sometimes, when you go and order an early modern book in the rare materials room of the library, you find it multiply annotated by its various owners over the years, showing an accretion of thoughts and clarifications. These handwritten annotations stop, though, as we are quite rightly not permitted to write in old, special books, so Butler's text had not yet heard of today's world of bees, music, or language. We have begun this process anew with our edition, and now many future readers will be able to add annotations and interpretations to The Feminine Monarchie, in forms we may not yet even know about, and in a natural landscape that sometimes looks uncertain for nature and pollinating insects — but this text is once again in the conversation.