“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 team-work, 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.