Thomas Middleton's The Collected Works, along with the companion volume Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture, of which Professor John Jowett of the Shakespeare Institute is an Associate General Editor, was recently given the Early Modern studies award.
Thomas Middleton’s The Collected Works, along with the companion volume Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture, of which Professor John Jowett of the Shakespeare Institute is an Associate General Editor, was recently awarded the Elizabeth Dietz Memorial Award.
The Award, established in 2005 by Rice University in memory of Professor Dietz, is awarded annually for the best book published in Early Modern studies. Among the judges’ comments were that the editors “by a remarkable sustained act of editorial will . . . have produced an entity of such scholarly mass that its gravity pulls many stray works and adaptations (however debatedly) into the Middleton orbit; to call the project inclusive would be an understatement.” Another judge noted that the two volumes amount to “a highly teachable object lesson in how the task of editing is as much about the creative production of parallel texts as it is about correcting the text or interpreting its true meaning.”
All concurred that “the collective depth and breadth of the research . . . is astonishing” and “neither textual practices nor attribution studies will ever be the same.”
The Dietz Award was presented to the editors and the publisher in early January 2012 at a ceremony and reception hosted by Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 held in Seattle during the annual Modern Language Association Convention.
