Rutgers Professor Bases Course on EEBO
Students present results of their research at E-Amor Conference

On December 7, 2000, eight students in Professor Rudolph Bellıs FAS Honors Seminar presented the findings of their research in Early English Books Online (EEBO). The seminar, entitled English Advice Manuals Online at Rutgers (E-Amor), used EEBO as its primary source, with students using the corpus to investigate works that offered early modern readers instruction on subjects ranging from financial matters to foreign languages.

The session began with Prof. Bell describing his initial experiences with EEBO and his decision to use the corpus as the basis for his honors seminar. He thanked Ronald Jantz of the Alexander Libraryıs Scholarly Communication Center for his help in setting up the E-Amor database for the classıs web bibliography, composed of texts from EEBO, and explained to an audience of over thirty students, scholars, and librarians that the school had a three year commitment to offering this course.

To illustrate how EEBO simplifies access to rare books for students, Professor Bell reenacted the steps that scholars go through in order to read original texts in archives. After showing the letters of introduction often required for admission to scholarly libraries, as well as the white gloves and masks that scholars sometimes are required to wear while reading early books, Prof. Bell moved to the computer, where he called up a text from 1493 in a matter of minutes. He also remarked that most students, as well as many scholars, have a "great fear of microfilm" which keeps them from accessing works in the Early English Books collection. EEBO, he summed up, made it possible to ask undergraduates to find and read books from a large variety of libraries and places that, otherwise, a student could "not possibly be expected to go during a [normal] semester."

Professor Bell then turned the session over to his eight students, who presented 12-minute papers followed by 3-minute question periods. Not one of the students majored in history or literature; instead, most favored fields outside the humanities, studying biology, chemistry and psychology. Their papers, however, showed an impressive familiarity not only with the texts they treated, but the conventions of early English printing and reading as well.

Leora Trub gave the first paper, "Bend the Will," which used 30 EEBO texts to question the assumption that the roots for child abuse today lay in early modern modes of parenthood. Emilio Panasci, a first year student who has not yet declared a major, said that the broad array of books he found in EEBO offering guidelines for handling financial matters helped him establish a sense of context for his paper, "Strike It Rich." Noting that his keyword searches uncovered materials on spiritual as well as monetary wealth, Panasci concluded that "the plethora of books you get is very useful." Similarly, Naima Afridi, a third year psychology and political science major, commented that she appreciated the opportunity to "rummage through" the earliest English printed books for her paper on views of Islam in early modern England. In the process, she asked questions about who read these books, concluding that their intended audience of statesmen and courtiers was composed of many who could be threatened politically by the spread of the Ottoman Empire. Marguerite Estephan, meanwhile, said that EEBOıs Advance Search capabilities focused her efforts to research books that taught English readers to use and understand foreign languages. The first year Journalism/Media major used the "Add Limiting Fields" option to narrow her search returns strictly to those that dealt with languages other than English. In the process, she discovered that EEBO contains 1300 such books, and that multi-lingualism and multi-culturalism are not novel concepts but were in fact topics of concern even in the 17th century.

In a paper entitled "An Accomplishıd Lady," Sameeha Hussain traced Hannah Woolleyıs career as an author of books dealing with cookery and home medicines. Looking at the signature lines in the prefaces, Sameeha concluded that the printer of The Accomplishıd Ladies Delight had actually falsely attached Woolleyıs name to the text to boost sales. Irene Wu, meanwhile, selected images from a number of texts dealing with the problems of suicide, showing how works aimed at popular audiences tended to include graphic, often sensational, depictions of those who killed themselves. Ariella Schreiber and Melissa Reynon presented papers that dealt with the early modern views of womenıs bodies, looking at how early modern texts presented childbirth and the female vulnerability to demonic possession.

In his remarks, Ronald Jantz offered an account of the creation of the E-Amor database, giving substantial attention to the pedagogical benefits of using primary sources in undergraduate research. He also discussed the possibilities of using the E-Amor model in other Rutgers courses.

Mr. Jantz and Prof. Bell are currently writing an article about their experiences using EEBO. An outline of the class and of the conference is currently available online (http://scc01.rutgers.edu/e-amor/)