Overview
One of the most important literary discoveries of the second half of the twentieth
centuries involves the recovery of the spectacular library of more than 72,000
volumes collected in the first half of the nineteenth century by Victor Amadeus,
the Landgrave of Hess-Rotenberg (1779-1834) at his castle (Castle Corvey) near
Paderborn, Germany. This remarkable library remained unknown to scholars until
late in the 1970s, when its discovery led the University of Paderborn to begin
cataloguing and copying to microfiche some of the collection. Even so, the existence
of both the library itself and the microforms materials relating to it remained
virtually unknown outside the University of Paderborn until the 1990s, when
in 1994 Sheffield Hallam University (Sheffield, England) acquired the English-language
Belles Lettres portion of this "Edition Corvey," an archive comprising some
3,290 titles by 1,280 different authors from the later 18th- and early 19th
centuries. In real terms this collection contains about 2,150,000 printed pages!
This collection constitutes one of the most important collections of British
Romantic writing in existence anywhere. The extent of its scholarly significance
is indicated, for instance, by the considerable number of exceedingly rare publications
- and even numerous previously unknown works - by British writers (and women
writers in particular) active during the Romantic period.
Sheffield Hallam University's acquisition of the English-language portion of the Edition Corvey immediately furthered the archival resources and scholarly expertise of the English Subject Group at that university, an international cadre of scholars whose work focuses on women's writing, and within that area especially on Romantic poetry, Gothic literature, autobiography, and travel writing. Under the initial sponsorship of the Cultural Research Institute, an intensive research program was instituted at SHU to systematize these materials, with the application of advanced information technology (especially computer technology) regarded as an integral part of the project. The initial stage of the project, begun in 1994, aims to produce a comprehensive database of information regarding women's writing in English (principally British women writers) during the period 1770-1850. This database will be bibliographical, biographical, and contextual in nature, encompassing both literary studies and broader aspects of historical, sociological, and cultural studies. The database is envisioned as a continually evolving project that will grow in size and sophistication as the collection is more fully assessed, catalogued, and digitized, and as electronic links are established to other archives and research projects in women's writing of the period primarily of 1770-1850. The Corvey Project will, in short, gradually make available in both conventional and digitized forms a complete census of the materials in the collection, followed by the texts themselves, along with contextual apparatus.
Significantly, in Spring 1999 the University of Nebraska
Libraries in Lincoln acquired the entire English-language section of the Corvey
Collection: the 3,290 titles described above. In Spring 2000 the Libraries added
the French and German sections, comprising an additional 3,261 and 2,653 titles
respectively. These microform materials are now available at the University
of Nebraska to students and scholars, together with significant supplementary
materials described elsewhere on this website.