This chapter positions digital editions within a broader and longer tradition of textual scholarship, book history, and scholarly editions. In it we consider the spatial, conceptual, and methodological approaches to editorial practice used in print editions and show the ways in which digital scholarly editions both extend and remake existing editorial paradigms and practices. In particular, we consider three elements of digital editions: networked structures, interactive reading, and multimodality. Throughout the chapter we consider both the potential and the ongoing challenges of making and using digital editions.

Even as she engaged with contemporary innovations in science and technology, Margaret Cavendish cultivated a cautious approach toward both artificial tools and quantitative methods. In that sense, she anticipated the “productive unease” of modern digital humanities scholars, who derive principles of a critical praxis from the tension between traditional humanistic research and computational techniques. This chapter examines the intersection between Cavendish studies and the digital turn in order to demonstrate the impact of digitally aided methods on interdisciplinary inquiries into Cavendish’s life and works and also to consider the influence that Cavendish’s own philosophy can have on digital humanities practices. It examines the contributions of the community associated with the Digital Cavendish (digitalcavendish.org) collaborative, and then addresses the larger question of how Cavendish’s awareness of the social dimensions of knowledge production and her pragmatic concerns about the limits of artifice might generate insights into the institutions, forms, and models of digital humanities research.

Having established women’s absence from the current narratives of the Shakespearean editorial tradition, Chapter 1 lays out possible reasons for this neglect, and for the gender imbalance in the editorial profession. First, it questions how the field currently defines textual editing, challenging how twentieth-century bibliographical trends have distorted judgements of past editorial work. It explores how both labour and texts can be gendered, re-evaluating the ‘social’ labour of the introduction and examining the repercussions of textual collation. Turning to the gendering of texts, it introduces ‘domestic texts’, including the Lambs’ Tales from Shakespeare and the Bowdlers’ Family Shakespeare, then addresses misogyny and gendered rhetoric in textual studies.