December 22, 2006
Yes, yes, I'm marking (sheesh!)
but I have also been Wiki-ing. For the greater good, don't you know. And, it is helpful to me: it gets me ferreting around where I would not be otherwise.
Here are some excellent resources I have stumbled on in the past few weeks:
British and Irish Women's Letters and Diaries
British Fiction, 1800-1829: A Database of Production, Circulation, and Reception
British Poetry 1780-1910: a Hypertext Archive of Scholarly Editions, The Modern English Collection, and more, at the Electronic Text Centre (some items restricted).
British Women's Novels: A Reading List, 1775-1818
British Women Playwrights around 1800: etexts and articles about little-studied women dramatists
Meta:
Meta-meta:
November 22, 2006
In which our heroine joins the 21st century
I think I am set up with GTalk, and I think my username is "scribbling."
Dagburn newfangled tomfoolery!
Update: That would be scribbling at gmail dot com. And I am set up; I had my first conversation yesterday. And I think I also have an AIM account via miriamjones at mac dot com.
November 11, 2006
I have only myself to blame,
since I'm the one who got my students involved in the first place. But after resolutely staying away — and for the same reasons I have never tried role-playing games — I have spent much of the day Wiki-ing. Some small edits here, a short article there. I can see how people get addicted to it.
And one could make a case, one could: that Wikipedia has become ubiquitous; that it is the first choice of many when seeking information. One almost has a certain obligation to oversee those little corners about which one might have some knowledge or experience.
It's a duty.
That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
October 14, 2006
And have in fact done considerable marking
but wanted to make note of the excellent Reinventing the Feminine: Bluestocking Women Writers in 18thc London, the Masters project of Katelyn Ludwig (thanks to Kirstie for the link).
October 13, 2006
Busy marking
but wanted to note the marvellous Open Collections Program of the Harvard University Library. Available for perusal is "Women Working, 1800 - 1930" (500,000 digitalised pages); "Immigration to the United States, 1789-1930" is due to go online soon. Natasha at feminish, from whom I got the link, highlights the diaries. But, she warns, the site is "vicarious and addictive."
September 26, 2006
ESTC online
[Xposted to The Long Eighteenth]
Just found out that the British Library is offering free online access to the English Short Title Catalogue. Most, most excellent. Heads up from Stephen Karian on C18-L.
September 15, 2006
Royal Society Journals Online
[Xposted to The Long Eighteenth]
Over 340 years of landmark science available for first time: "The complete archive of the Royal Society journals, including some of the most significant scientific papers ever published since 1665, is to be made freely available electronically for the first time today (14th September 2006) for a two month period" (heads up from Kevin Berland at C18-L).
August 14, 2006
That old time music
A post from Hal Hall to SF-L alerted subscribers to the existence of OTR.Network: "a new online resource for Old Time Radio (OTR) enthusiasts. We have over 11,000 OTR shows available for instant listening, and we add at least 100 more every week. Oh yeah, did we mention it's free?" A wide range of material, lots of genre shows. Space Patrol, anyone?
Addendum: Subsequent messages to SF-L have linked to Old Time Radio at the Internet Archive, Phil Nichols' Ray Bradbury page, and the Digital Deli.
June 11, 2006
New listserv in town
From the Cultural Studies Collective homepage:
As combination of the Cultural Studies caucus of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS), the Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies (GEMCS), and other interested scholars and students, the Cultural Studies Collective is designed to foster curiosity and engaged discussion about the cultures of the long eighteenth century and early modern periods.
Cultural studies is above all characterized by its multiplicity: encompassing myriad disciplinary approaches (literature, history, anthropology, philosophy, psychology, political science), diverse cultural traditions (European, African, Asian, American, or otherwise), as well as various avenues of research (e.g. constructions of gender, sexuality, and the body; narratives of nation and community; global and/or transatlantic capitalism; genealogies of race or racism; spaces urban, rural, and diasporic, etc.) — all approached from a wide array of theoretical perspectives, including queer theory, postcolonial criticism, gender studies, and new historicism. In the case of this particular listserv, cultural studies also comprehends a range of periods spanning the Renaissance to the mid-nineteenth century. In short, unapologetic curiosity about these various periods and cultures, in all of their heterogeneity and/or unsettling homogeneity, is key.
May 31, 2006
Science Fiction and Fantasy Research Database
Hal Hall has set up a blog in order to solicit advice about the future of his very useful Science Fiction and Fantasy Research Database. If you use the database you might want to drop him a line.
May 17, 2006
Early Modern Resources
Sharon Howard has been adding to and updating her most useful Early Modern Resources. She has posted her own publications, as well as a slew of open-access academic papers and publications in early modern history.
May 12, 2006
Street Literature Online
Following are some online sources of street literature (ballads/broadsides/chapbooks), pulled together from a discussion on C18-L begun by Fraser Easton (the first seven descriptions are his; subsequent links are from Jim Chevalier; the last three were culled from this blog):
Bodleian Library Broadside Ballads: an online catalogue of holdings of over 30,000 ballads in several major Oxford collections, ranging from the 16th to the 20th centuries; the database is a complete digitization of all the ballads.
The Word on the Street — Broadsides at the National Library of Scotland: online sample of nearly 1,800 Scottish broadsides, prose and verse, ranging from 1650 to 1910 and searchable by keyword, title, or subject, from the 250,000 or so held by the National Library of Scotland.
Lilly Library Chapbook Index: searchable index of 1,900 chapbooks — not themselves online — from England, Scotland, Ireland, France, and the United States, which were part of the Elisabeth W. Ball collection of children's books (Indiana University).
Early Modern Center English Ballad Archive, 1500-1800 — The Pepys Ballads: an online archive of the 1,857 ballads of the Samuel Pepys collection held by Cambridge University.
An American Time Capsule: from the Library of Congress Printed Ephemera Collection, which comprises 28,000 primary-source items from the 17th Century to the present; over 10,000 items are presently available online in the digitized Printed Ephemera Collection.
The Elizabeth Nesbitt Room Chapbook Collection: index with colour reproductions of the chapbook covers, but not the chapbooks themselves, of over 270 English and American chapbooks (and a few Scottish chapbooks) from the years 1650-1850, held at the University of Pittsburgh.
The Scottish Chapbook Project: still under construction; participating institutions are: Glasgow University, University of Guelph, University of Indiana, and University of South Carolina.
Streetprint: Revolution and Romanticism: a wide range of types, from street ballads through chapbooks and tracts to valentines, from Britain and mostly from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Ballads and Broadsides Links on Folk Music of England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and America.
Sixteenth Century Ballads: "a collection of ballads from before 1600, containing sheet music and lyrics, both in their original form, and in a form intelligible to a modern listener."
The Harris Collection of American Poetry and Plays: approximately 250,000 volumes of American and Canadian poetry, plays, and vocal music dating from 1609 to the present day.
From the Bottom Up: popular reading and writing from the Michael Zinman Collection of early-American imprints.
Nineteenth-century British street ballads: a collaborative student project.
[cross-posted to Mrs. Spectator's Coffeehouse]
March 21, 2006
The inestimable
Jim Chevalier has for quite some time now been posting "Sundries," a "weekly miscellany," to C18-L. This newsletter is always filled with useful links to various 18thc stories and resources. Now he has decided to post it to a website (so far only posts from 2005 are up), and has started a related blog for conversation and comments. He is apparently waiting for some feedback before posting 2006, so head on over and drop him a line.
February 12, 2006
The first online symposium on the Old Bailey Session Papers
Please check out "A searchable feast: the first online symposium on the Old Bailey Session Papers" at The Head Heeb and read the excellent posts by Jonathan and the various guest contributors. The alert reader may remember that I had intended to be among them, but obviously — no post! — have not managed to do so. For that I apologize to Jonathan and all the others. Life has intervened this month. A lot.
January 31, 2006
OBSP Symposioum
Jonathan Edelstein is organizing the first online symposium on the Old Bailey Session Paper database, scheduled for February 12. I have said I will post something, though it will not be at all formal. (At all formal.)
December 30, 2005
Wikipedia
almost as good/just as bad (you pick) as the Encyclopedia Britannica. (Sorry, lost the referrer.)
November 25, 2005
Electronic publications
John Holbo has recently posted about his vision of "a possible academic blogging/social software model" which would include electronic publishing. A commenter to that post links to two publishing efforts newly underway (though no-one else seems to have thought of the blogging community), Humanities-Ebooks, and NINES (a networked interface of nineteenth-century scholarship). The former is the brainchild of Romantic scholar Richard Gravil, while the latter is "a committee of concerned scholars," including Jerome McGann, who are "[d]eveloping an aggregated body of peer-reviewed scholarly and educational tools and materials." It is an impressive site. Both projects seek to challenge, and provide an alternative to, the failing scholarly publishing industry, something Holbo has written about at length at various points.
It's the Zeitgeist, baby. And for all my moaning away about the joys of paper, it's pretty exciting.
Questions for you, dear readers: do you read e-texts? Would you publish an article, book, or edition as an e-text? How do you regard e-publications on cv's? How does your institution (if you have an institution) regard them?
November 20, 2005
Lust for paper
Inspired by a post by Miriam Burnstein over at The Little Professor, and cross-posted to The Valve, about collecting 19thc books:
I don't think we talk enough about our love of paper. Paper, bindings: the physical experience of holding books and touching paper. And the addictive nature of book collecting is almost as visceral.
When I interviewed for my current job, I talked about work I was doing on print culture and street literature. I passed around a little pamphlet, an 18thc collection of songs. It sits inside a clear plastic envelop that screams noli me tangere, which is a dreadful shame as the paper is beautiful. Even 18thc street ephemera was printed on strong, thick paper, unlike the books The Little Professor describes. So on a whim I said, as it circulated, "Go ahead, slip your finger in. Touch it." At least one person looked revolted; perhaps my tone was more lascivious than was desirable, given the circumstances. At any rate, others must have shared my fetish, for here I am.
In my comment to Miriam B.'s post I mentioned Steetprint, developed at the University of Alberta and billed as
An online community dedicated to the public research, teaching, and sharing of formerly inaccessible texts and artifacts.... We also provide free software for creating your own digital collections. Our goal is to make formerly inaccessible and ephemeral texts and artifacts available to the widest possible audience, fulfilling the promise of the Internet and bringing information "back to the streets."
I have not looked too far into this myself — it's on my "To-do" list — but it seems most promising. And it might, somehow, tie into John Holbo's ideas for scholarly online community.
Is there a disconnect between lust for paper, and interest in on-line facsimiles? Not really, no: facsimiles are the only way most of us are going to see these texts. In fact, high resolution facsimiles (with workable interfaces) promote an appreciation for the materiality of texts in a way that plain-text transcriptions, as wonderful and useful as they are, cannot.
My only question is, given my admitted propensities, is looking at online facsimiles of texts the same as looking at porn?
[cross-posted to The Valve]
October 2, 2005
The 18thc Online: commonplace book or coffeehouse?
Here are the notes for the paper I gave at NEASECS this past Saturday. The audience was a mixed group of 18thc scholars from various disciplines, mainly literary studies and history. Afterwards, someone asked about how we can judge the validity of internet sources, and that led to a lively discussion about learning to use new tools to evaluate new technologies. I used the example of the ways in which individuals on the internet exposed the lies and omissions of the mainstream media right after Hurricane Katrina.
I do believe everything I said, but I also feel like a proselytizer.
Have you accepted the internet into your heart, sister?
And no, it has not escaped my notice that the following is as much a blog entry as anything else. I clicked away on the featured websites as I spoke, replicating, in a half-arsed way, your experience here, should you read on.
[cross-posted to The Valve.
There have been a significant number of extensive, university-based on-line projects, for a number of years now, projects like the U of A's Orlando Project, The Brown University Women Writers Project, and Corvey Women Writers on the Web. There are also a gratifying number of commercial electronic/online projects available, like Thompson-Gale's Eighteenth Century Collections Online.
My interest today is in more personal projects: individual labours of love that increase the common wealth: the democratic, artisanal, online 18thc. There are individual homepages and weblogs. There are of course listservs, which provided many of us with our first taste of online culture. There are electronic journals. There are also larger projects: Alan Liu and Jack Lynch's indispensable sites, while now significant concerns with funding and numbers of associates, began as individual visions. There are also an increasing number of electronic texts — online editions of books, pamphlets, and other texts — as well as electronic facsimiles. There is a whole internet out there of individuals, and in some cases classrooms, busy posting transcriptions and facsimile editions, or links pages, or weblogs that note various resources.
I couldn't say whether these sorts of activities are more prevalent among 18thc scholars; I would suspect they are, because, well, our primary materials are generally out of copyright, luckily for us. But I think — and it may be fantasy, but bear with me — that people who study our period have a particular understanding of print culture, and print culture at a time of open-ended possibility and expansion, that makes self-publication an acceptable, a desirable, option. Not self-publication in the sense of vanity publication, but in the sense of artisanal production.
The title of this talk refers to commonplace books and coffeehouses as metaphors for understanding the phenomenon of online scholarly activity in our field.
Commonplace books involve the noting, collecting and archiving of materials.
Commonplace-book. Formerly Book of common places. orig. A book in which 'commonplaces' or passages important for reference were collected, usually under general heads; hence, a book in which one records passages or matters to be especially remembered or referred to, with or without arrangement. First usage recorded: 1578. (OED)
Wikipedia, the free, collaborative online encyclopedia, has this to say:
Commonplace books (or commonplaces) emerged in the 15th century with the availability of cheap paper for writing, mainly in England. They were a way to compile knowledge, usually by writing information into books. They were essentially scrapbooks filled with items of every kind: medical recipes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, proverbs, prayers, legal formulas. Commonplaces were used by readers, writers, students, and humanists as an aid for remembering useful concepts or facts they had learned. Each commonplace book was unique to its creators particular interests.... Producing a commonplace is known as commonplacing.
This congruence of two technologies, one from the Renaissance and the other from yesterday, has not escaped notice. There are a significant number of sites with the words "commonplace book" in their title or subtitle; I have identified nine with one quick search with Google. This is not to mention all the myriad blogs which fulfil similar functions: reading logs are one of the most common forms — there is even software to make it simple to offer a quick reading list, with graphics, in the sidebar of one's weblog — as well as various other collections and catalogues of information useful perhaps only to its collector, perhaps to a wider audience. Many of these are produced by individuals for their own use, much as commonplace books were, historically. But then, commonplace books were sometimes shared, and many an internet projects that may have been originally designed as a personal repository has taken on a wider life and become engaged in the wider exchange of the web. In other words, the model, or the metaphor, of the commonplace book is no longer accurate; or, at least, it no longer tells the whole story. At the risk of dreadfully mixing metaphors, the commonplace book — an essentially private phenomenon, whether shared or not — is replaced by the coffeehouse.
Coffeehouses, as we all know, became popular in the UK in the 17thc; the first coffeehouse opened in London in 1652. They were meeting places where people came together to socialize, and to do business. According to one historian,
The patrons of the coffee-houses agreed to conform to the strict rules of the establishments. According to the posted "Rules and Orders of the Coffee House," all men were equal in these establishments, and none need give his place to a "Finer" man. Anyone who swore was made to "forfeit twelve pence," and the man who began a quarrel "shall give each man a dish t'atone the sin." "Maudlin lovers" were forbidden "here in Corners to mourn," for all were expected to "be brisk, and talk, but not too much," "Sacred Things" must be excluded from conversation, and the patrons could neither "profane Scripture, nor saucily wrong Affairs of State with an irreverent tongue." In many establishments, games of chance as well as cards were prohibited, and any wager was limited to five shillings, a sum which was to "be spent In such Good Liquor as the House doth vent."
According to Markman Ellis, "In late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth century England, the coffee-house was both a symbol and a site of profound cultural transformations in English society." I use them here to refer to the transformative sharing and interaction, the collaboration, of much of the internet. This comparison is hardly original to me; last year Henry Farrell wondered aloud if the internet is not like a coffeehouse, and two years ago Economist.com published "The internet in a cup," to name just two instances.
An example of the type of casual collaboration common online: I posted the bare bones of a new blog designed to collect 18thc resources. Within 24 hours Sharon Howard, a historian and post-doctoral fellow in Wales, linked from her blog to the new blog, effectively sending me new readers. Then, I received an email from her telling me two of my links weren't working. This is not quite the same as asking a friend or colleague to read a draft; she herself found my link through trackback software, visited, decided to link my fledgling blog to her well-established one, and then did me (and my potential readers) the service of checking some links and letting me know that there were problems, unasked, because of her sense, presumably, of shared project.
Another example of collaboration: the phenomenon of carnivals, such as the History Carnival and the early modern Carnivalesque, hosted periodically by one blog or another and showcasing notable posts from a variety of blogs in the preceding weeks.
I'd like to give a few brief examples of the homemade, or artisanal, internet. Sharon Howard, just mentioned, has her own site, the very useful Early Modern Resources, a clearinghouse of online resources "for researchers, teachers and students of early modern history." It is a labour of love, perhaps not as slick as some of the larger (read, the funded) sites, but certainly as trustworthy as a conscientious historian can make it. She has grouped her links into various rough areas, such as "Women, gender, sexuality" and "Crime, Law and Disorder," presumably for her own use, but also for the use of anyone else interested.
Of particular interest to me, and to many others I am sure, are the burgeoning numbers of etexts, and even facsimiles, to be found online. There are of course excellent commercial products, but those are not always affordable. And, such projects of necessity have to be aware of the marketplace. There are also freely available professional projects, like the NYPL digitalization of Anne Wagner's Friendship Album. But in the true spirit of the internet as originally conceived, many individuals edit and post their own electronic editions. Here, for example, is an edition of Curiosities of Literature by Isaac D'Israeli (6 vols., 1791-1823) (HTML; PDF), a text most of us are not likely to come across otherwise. It is posted by the pseudonymous Mister Aitch at his most excellent site, Giornale Nuovo. Mister Aitch specializes in making available beautiful images of early modern engravings.
Online facsimiles, of course, are particularly valuable to researchers, from Tristram Shandy to pamphlets like "Tawny Rachel, or The Fortune Teller." This latter was produced with Streetprint, billed as "the world's most user-friendly free software solution for showcasing, teaching, and archiving popular print and countless other kinds of collections and artifacts online." Streetprint is particularly exciting in that it makes the production of professional facsimiles within reach of everyone with a computer and a text to digitalize.
There are little gems tucked away in corners and niches all across cyberspace, like offerings. Freely given, as part of the exchange, the community, the democracy, the common wealth, of online scholars, researchers, and book lovers. Beyond national borders, beyond the walls of universities, people are taking control of the distribution of knowledge. Open access to information and the free dissemination of knowledge, have long been ideals in the online community; these scholars are applying the Open Access philosophy to texts, and academic knowledge.
Who are these people? Some are surely here at this conference. There are many public intellectuals online: the members of Crooked Timber, the influential group weblog, come immediately to mind, as well as individuals like literary scholar Michael Bérubé and historian Timothy Burke, both of whom have blogs. But there are also public scholars: people engaged in serious, legitimate scholarship who choose to share some of their resources online. Librarians are well-represented; perhaps the internet is an ideal place to pursue some of their own research interests. Some of these people are credentialed, some are not. To a refreshing extent, they are usually judged, online, by their web presence alone.
Of course, it is wise to remember caveat empore with anything one comes across. But then, that is also the case with traditionally published materials. (As a side-note, there is a timely discussion at the moment, on C18-L, about errors in both the new DBN, and the OED. Indeed, we would all lose much of our work if it were not for all the misguided books that need reviewing and all the texts that have never been properly edited.) If the established and the canonical are now vulnerable to assessment to a degree hitherto unknown, perhaps we can meet the artisanal half way. During her keynote address yesterday, Laurel Ulrich, in reference to material artifacts, said, "the notion that you can't work with it because you don't know what it is, is exaggerated." This struck me as applicable to the scores of online productions one encounters.
Of course, on the internet, one needs to bite every coin. "Standards" certainly exist, but the individual must judge whether or not a given item adheres to them. Homemade or artisanal scholarship moves the reader away from passive consumerism, from standardization, and makes us more like the active customers (and textual producers) of our period, who of necessity had to examine all goods carefully and judge each one in its non-rationalized, artisan-produced integrity (or lack thereof). In this sense, both producer and reader are empowered; both are distanced from the commodification of intellectual culture, and assert an intellectual responsibility to remake and rework that culture.
One final example: the metaphor literalized and made concrete. The summer before last, I wrote on my blog that I was going to the UK for a conference. Another blogger, an American who works on 18thc Methodist texts, emailed that he would also be there doing research, and would I like to get together? So we did, two 18th-centuryists who had not known of each other, or of each other's off-line work, until we encountered one another online. And where do you think we met? In London, across from the new British Library. In a Starbucks.
September 29, 2005
Here is
Mrs. Spectator's Coffeehouse,"a clearinghouse of online resources for researchers interested in the long 18thc." Very modest so far (though I found some nice fonts at The Scriptorium). All suggestions gratefully accepted.
Well, probably not all suggestions.
September 18, 2005
Cataloguing personal libraries
Another think on the "to-do" list: Ellen Moody, who I seem to be quoting a lot lately, writes that she has begun to catalogue her personal library online, with Library Thing. Sharon, The Little Professor and Language Hat are also new users. It sounds very useful, though as others have pointed out, it would benefit from drawing on an even wider field than Amazon.com and the Library of Congress, and to be of real use, it needs to recognize different editions. Though apparently one can add or amend items manually.
Anyway, it will be some time before I start playing with this.
Tim Spalding, the creator of Library Thing, also offers MothBoard, an interesting idea: transitory discussion boards for ephemeral topics or projects.
September 16, 2005
Blogging on blogging on ... blogging
Every year, on each course blog I have been posting various links for the newest crop of baby bloggers. This year I finally smartened up and decided to make one purpose-built blog, called, originally, blogging, where I will collect the how-to's and "what is this blogging of which you speak?" links that I find. I have the strong feeling that this is probably giving them more than most of them want to know, but at least it will streamline things for me.
September 11, 2005
Forgot to tell you
Was just putzing around in MovableType (my blogging program) and discovered several unfinished posts. Here are two of them combined: some interesting early-modern/19thc resources:
Christopher Hill's The English Revolution, 1640 is available online (link from Plep).
Sharon posted a number of links to electronic journals of early-modern studies. Of particular interest to me is Early Modern Culture, in issue 4 of which can be found "The Case of Moll Frith" by Natasha Korda, and Early Modern Literary Studies, which published a special issue on Margaret Cavendish.
Other excellent resources: Romanticism on the Net
Domestic Goddessess a.k.a. scribbling mobs of women: "A moderated E-journal, devoted to women writers, beginning in the 19th century, who wrote domestic fiction."
Genders: "Presenting Innovative Work in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Theories."
May 22, 2005
Too good for 'em!!
The wonderful Sharon, who has singlehandedly done more to collect and make available early modern web resources than anyone I can think of, has posted her own transcription of
Not Punishment Enough,
FOR
Murtherers, High-way Men, and House-Breakers.
Offered to the Consideration of the Two HOUSES of PARLIAMENT.
...
LONDON, Printed for A. Baldwin in Warwick-Lane, 1701
In the note to the reader, the author writes,
... I send this Essay into the World, to set this Evil in its due light, and attempt its Cure. And if in it I have discovered more Zeal than Knowlege, yet the good end it aims at, with Candid Judges will cover abundance of faults.
She also links to William Paley's Reasons for Contentment, Addressed to the Labouring Part of the British Public (1792) (PDF), made available by Don Herzog of Left2Right. And to the Project Gutenberg version of Hannah More's Stories for the Young, Or, Cheap Repository Tracts: Entertaining, Moral, and Religious, posted a few months ago, and More's Village Politics, Addressed to All the Mechanics, Journeymen, and Labourers, in Great Britain, by Will Chip, A Country Carpenter [Written early in the French Revolution.].
As I said below, quite shortly we may never have to leave our desks. Which may be just as well given how rare research funding for the Humanities is becoming, in Canada at least.
May 21, 2005
The tragedy of Jane Shore
Nicholas Rowe (1674-1718), The tragedy of Jane Shore. Written in imitation of Shakespear's style. London: Printed for Bernard Lintott, 1714. An online facsimile from the Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text & Image at the University of Pennsylvania. Link from Jim Chevalier at C18-L. Anne Finch wrote the epilogue. Nick Balmer reports
Jane Shore was mistress to Edward IV of England. She is supposed to have come from the tiny village of Edworth just north of Baldock in Hertfordshire. She was the wife of William Shore, a goldsmith. She became in about 1470 the mistress to Edward IV and was supposed to have exerted a considerable influence over the king.
After Edward's death in 1483 she became mistress to Thomas Grey, 1st marquess of Dorset, who later became Lord Hastings.
Richard the III accused her of witchcraft, and she ended up in the Tower of London in 1483, and was later forced to do public penance for being a harlot.
She is supposed to have died in penury in about 1527.
Bonus links:
Rowe's Some Acount of the Life &c. of Mr. William ShakespearSamuel Johnson's Life of Nicholas Rowe
Passage from A Child's History of England by Charles Dickens
Nicholas Rowe's Writing of Woman as Feminist Hero (PDF): Ph.D. thesis by Henry Sennett
Rowe's grave
There are lots of other titles of interest, with a heavy emphasis on the 17thc. Aphra Behn's Oroonoko is included. I can't decide whether or not I'm delighted that so much is becoming available online, or sad that research trips may well become an endangered species.