Post-project developments
Research activity resulting from Wrongdoing project
In addition to the publications coming out of the Wrongdoing project, there have been other major developments.
CENGAGE contracted (2015) with the Wrongdoing project to have the 4700 items of pliegos (chapbooks) digitized on the Wrongdoing project available on their website. CENGAGE, based in the US, has a broad range of digital information available to the academic and more general community. Their collection 'Crime, Punishment and Popular Culture 1780-1920' is an ideal location for making the work of the Wrongdoing project more visible.
‘Mapping pliegos’ group: This group arose out of the last conference of the project (July 2014). It is an international group, led by Juan Gomis (Valencia), Pura Fernández (CSIC) and Alison Sinclair (Cambridge), with an informal team of 10-15 members. Its aim is to produce a short-title comprehensive catalogue of pliegos sueltos. The current estimate of the number of pliegos sueltos involved is 12,000. Eventually the objective is to secure funding for the digitization of these items. The group meets once or twice a year with the aim of solving the practicalities of the project, and to look at the way such material can be used in research. As an offshoot to ‘Mapping pliegos’, those involved in the Wrongdoing project have moved into collaboration with EDPOP (The European Dimensions of Popular Print Culture)(PI Jeroen Salman, Utrecht). 'Mapping pliegos' is also linked to the project of the ‘Historia de la edición’ of Pura Fernández (CSIC).
A new AHRC funded student has joined the project in a collaboration between Cambridge and Oxford University. The new Collaborative Doctoral Award (CDA) is attached to the Faculty of History, University of Oxford, in partnership with Cambridge University Library.
The project examines the production, dissemination, and reception of literatura de cordel in nineteenth-century Catalonia, drawing on the Spanish Chapbook Collection at Cambridge University Library. It investigates the development of these prints against a backdrop of sociopolitical transformations that contributed to their decline. To better understand the shift toward other media serving similar purposes, the project focuses on relaciones de sucesos, a news-oriented subgenre, and compares these chapbooks with contemporary newspaper records to reveal their actual coexistence as well as the distinctive ways in which literatura de cordel represented and transmitted news events. Situated within the fields of cultural history and the history of written culture, this study of Spanish chapbooks as literature embedded in popular culture ultimately aims to contribute to a critical understanding of the interplay between hegemonic and alternative mentalités.
The lead supervisor for the project is David Hopkin, Professor of European Social History at the University of Oxford, whose research focuses on social and cultural history of modern Western Europe (c. 1760-c. 1914) Cambridge University Library supervisor will be the Hispanic Specialist, Sonia Morcillo García.