Foreword: Mary Hamilton and Her Archive

Abstract This foreword provides core biographical information about Mary Hamilton and tells the story of the archive she left behind. It presents a brief overview of the scholarship addressing Mary Hamilton before the research project Unlocking the Mary Hamilton Papers (2019–2023), and shows how the resulting digital edition has stimulated a new interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary wave of research that is able to exploit the archive holistically. The academic contributions to the project are contextualized by acknowledging the immensely important labour of curators, archivists, photographers, and digital specialists, among others.