“Tear your books?”: Michael Maier’s Atalanta fugues (1618) and Digital Publishing by Tara Nummedal, visiting scholar in Dept. III.

"I will discuss some of the opportunities and challenges of scholarly digital publishing and introduce Furnace and Fugue: A Digital Edition of Michael Maier's Atalanta fugiens (1618) with Scholarly Commentary (https://furnaceandfugue.org/), which I co-edited with Donna Bilak. The open-access, born-digital book brings to life an enigmatic seventeenth-century text, Michael Maier’s multimedia alchemical emblem book Atalanta fugiens. This intriguing and complex text from 1618 reinterprets Ovid’s legend of Atalanta as an alchemical allegory in a series of fifty emblems, each of which contains text, image, and a musical score for three voices. Re-rendering Maier’s multimedia masterpiece as an enhanced digital publication with manipulable recordings of the music, English translation, additional scholarly essays, and a multifunctional space that allows users to curate, save, and share their own selection and arrangement of Maier’s emblems, Furnace and Fugue allows contemporary readers to hear, see, manipulate, and investigate Atalanta fugiens in ways that were perhaps imagined when it was composed but were simply impossible to realize in full before now. In this talk, I will introduce the digital elements of this publication. I will also consider some of the ways that scholars, students, and performers have been using Furnace and Fugue since its publication in 2020, as well as some of the challenges for digital publications in a conventional landscape of book reviews, prizes, and assessment in the context of universities."