Iter Press publishes scholarly research across medieval and early modern studies, with a secondary field in Italian studies. Through our books, journals, and online discovery tools, we embrace a global perspective; contemporary approaches to disciplinary, interdisciplinary, and cross-disciplinary research; digital humanities and the use of new technologies; and editions of primary sources, especially in women’s studies and English literature.
The press is a division of Iter Inc. (incorporated in New York, 1997) and Iter Canada (incorporated in Toronto, 2018), publishing under the imprint of Iter Inc. (1998–2015), then Iter (2012–2014), Iter Academic Press (2014–16), and now Iter Press (2016–). Throughout its history, the press has adopted the logo of a sixteenth-century compass from its parent organizations, thereby building on “iter” (meaning a journey or a path in latin) as a way for individuals and communities to engage in medieval and early modern studies.
The image of a compass is particularly appropriate to our first publication ventures, all online finding tools or databases. We began with Iter Bibliography, a comprehensive list of secondary sources (launched in 1998 and currently with 1.5 million records); the International Directory of Scholars (2001–10) in collaboration with the Renaissance Society of America and the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference; and Paul Oskar Kristeller’s well-known Iter Italicum, a finding list of previously uncatalogued or incompletely catalogued Renaissance humanistic manuscripts found in libraries and collections all over the world (released in 2002 in cooperation with E. J. Brill). Several databases followed thereafter and we retain a strong commitment to this type of publication in support of the interests of our communities.
During the early years, we also offered publication services to Iter’s partners and beyond with an emphasis on facilitating online distribution of scholarship. These services grew substantially in support of journal and book publication. For the former, we relied on the Public Knowledge Project’s Open Journal System, hosted by the University of Toronto Libraries’ Journal Production Services (JPS), to provide a home for several journals, starting in 2005 with Early Theatre and Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme. Over the years, the program expanded in the number of journals and through distribution agreements with various journal aggregators – notably EBSCO, Érudit, Gale/Cengage, JSTOR, and ProQuest – and also with INKE’s Canadian Humanities and Social Sciences Commons, which, like JPS, offers open access to Iter’s journals delayed by a one-year moving wall. With such increased levels of activity, Iter Press formally recognized its role as a journal publisher in 2020.
There is a comparable thread in our book publication program, which also involved online distribution agreements with other publishers within and beyond the Iter partnership, some of which continue to the present. The initial book publications of Iter Press itself were co-published collections of essays and scholarly editions, distributed online by the Ontario Council of University Libraries’ Scholars Portal, beginning with two series, New Technologies in Medieval and Renaissance Studies (2008–) and The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series (2009–). Co-publishing arrangements with Iter’s partners, the Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies (Toronto) and the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (Tempe), changed over the years and drew to a close in 2020 when Iter Press entered into a distribution agreement with the University of Chicago Press (UCP), specifically with UCP’s Center for Distribution Services for printed books and BiblioVault for ebooks. In addition to UCP, our books and ebooks are now available through major retailers and library/educational distributors, including Amazon, Baker & Taylor, Barnes & Noble, EBSCO, Google Books, John Wiley & Sons, Kortext, ProQuest, RedShelf, and VitalSource. After the move to Chicago, we added two more book series: the first named after the Renaissance English Text Society (2021–); the second, Reflections on Early Modernity | Réflexions sur la première modernité (2024–), in collaboration with Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme.
Further information on the background of Iter Press can be found in the essay, “Discovery, Collaboration, and Publication: Iter’s Present and Thoughts for the Future,” by William R. Bowen, in The Past, Present, and Future of Early Modern Digital Studies: Iter at 25, edited by Laura Estill and Ray Siemens (New York and Toronto: Iter Press, forthcoming), pp. 13–54.
