A growing list of web sites of particular use and interest to Early Modern scholars. With the exception of the first section on UofM's Research Databases (available to students and faculty only), all resources are free and open to the public.
Research Databases at UofM (authorization required)
Bible in English -
Contains twenty-one different versions of the English Bible, including the West Saxon, Wycliffe, Tyndale, Coverdale, Great, Thomas Matthew, Bishops', Rheims Douai, Geneva, and King James versions.
Early English Books Online (EEBO) - Contains digital facsimile page images of virtually every work printed in Englinsh from 1473-1700.
Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership (EEBO-TCP) - Full-text editions for a significant portion of the Short Title Catalog of Early English books published between 1473 and 1700. Integrated with EEBO.
Early English Prose Fiction -
A collection of over 200 works of prose fiction dating from 1500-1700. Includes Elizabethan fiction, Jest Books, novellas, Restoration fiction and works of popular fiction.
Editions and Adaptations of Shakespeare - Contains eleven major historical editions (First Folio of 1623 to the Cambridge edition of 1863-6), twenty-eight contemporary printings of individual plays and poems, selected apocrypha, and more than one hundred adaptations, sequels and burlesques (17th-19th centuries).
English Poetry Database - Full-text collection of
the works of almost 1,350 poets from 600-1900.
English Prose Drama - Contains more than 1,600 plays, masques, and entertainments written by more than 350 different authors from the Renaissance to the end of the nineteenth century.
English Verse Drama - Contains more than 2,000 works by around 450 named authors and approximately 230 anonymous works, from the Shrewsbury Fragments of the late thirteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century.
Iter: Gateway to the Middle Ages and Renaissance -
An online bibliography of more than 842,000 records for articles, essays, books, dissertation abstracts and reviews. Updated daily.
Medieval Realms - Contains images of manuscripts, artefacts and buildings together with transcripts and translations into modern English of key written sources. There are also sound clips of medieval music and spoken Middle English.
Oxford English Dictionary - The latest (3rd) online edition of the OED.
Riverside Shakespeare - A searchable full-text version of this popular Complete Works.
World Shakespeare Bibliography - A searchable database consisting of the most comprehensive record of Shakespeare-related scholarship and theatrical productions published or produced worldwide between 1962 and 2006. Contains over 110,000 annotated entries.
General Resources
Early Modern Resources - A gateway for finding electronic resources relating to the early modern period. Brings together a wide range of online resources for the period.
English Broadside Ballad Archive - An impressive digital archive of 17th century broadsides. The site provides facsimile images, transcriptions, background essays and even sung versions of the ballads.
Digital Watermark & Ornament Catalogue - Specifically, this site is a digital catalogue of the watermarks and type ornaments used by William Stansby in the printing of The Workes of Beniamin Jonson. More broadly, the project aims to create a model archive for the storage and circulation of material evidence concerning the printing industry in late Tudor and early Stuart London.
Labyrinth: Resources for Medieval Studies - An index of medieval-related databases, services, texts, and images. Organized into searchable categories.
Literary Resources on the Net - A wide-ranging resource listing sites dealing especially with English and American literature. Maintained by Jack Lynch of Rutgers.
Luminarium: Anthology of English Literature - This site provides information, texts, and links to resources on a large number of authors from the medieval to Restoration periods. Individual author pages include biographies, full-text works, and critical essays.
Making Publics: Media, Markets & Association in Early Modern Europe - The homepage for MaPs, a project to develop an innovative and potentially transformative approach to the history of early modernity. "Making Publics" refers to the creation of small-scale forms of association that represented a new way of connecting with others, connections not founded in family, rank, or vocation, but rather a form of voluntary community built on the shared interests, tastes, and desires of individuals.
The Medieval Bestiary -
An encyclopedia of animals in the Middle Ages, with a particular emphasis on bestiaries and the manuscript tradition.
Middle English Compendium - Offers easy access to and interconnectivity between three major Middle English electronic resources: the Middle English Dictionary, a HyperBibliography of Middle English prose and verse, and a Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse.
The National Archives, UK - UK government records and information management. Includes the Historical Manuscripts Commission.
Renaissance: The Elizabethan World - A collection of various Elizabethan-related texts and links, most notably the home for Life in Elizabethan England: A Compendium of Common Knowledge, 1558-1603.
Sixteenth Century Ballads - A full-text database of pre-1600 ballads.
Trade Products in Early Modern History - Information on trade products (coffee, tobacco, furs, etc.)
that chronicles the development of global trade in the early modern period.
From books, maps, and manuscripts in the James Ford Bell Library
at the University of Minnesota.
Tudor England Biographies - Rather extensive biographies of the Tudor monarchs, Henry VIII's wives, royal relatives and various other important citizens.
Voice of the Shuttle - One of the most thorough and comphrehensive collection of Renaissance-related web links on the internet.
Electronic Journals
Appositions: Studies in Renaissance / Early Modern Literature & Culture - A website with the dual purpose of hosting an annual e-conference and publishing a related, yet independent, peer-reviewed and MLA-indexed electronic journal.
Early Modern Culture - A journal that is set up as an "electronic seminar." Each issue contains
four works-in-progress by major scholars in early modern studies, along with a set of responses from readers--some junior, some senior--working on similar topics.
Early Modern Literarary Studies -
A refereed journal with articles that examine English literature, literary culture, and language during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Also includes an extensive index of web links.
Journal of the Northern Renaissance - A peer-reviewed online journal dedicated to the study of early modern Northern European cultural production in all its forms. The journal aims to be alert to the full variety of cultural practices, publishing articles on literature, visual culture, the history of ideas, language, philosophy, theology, politics, science, and technology.
Renaissance Forum - An electronic journal of early modern literary and historical studies, published 1996-2004.
Seventeenth-Century News - A scholarly review journal publishing only commissioned reviews, SCN is an official organ of the Milton Society of America and Milton Section of the Modern Language Association. The journal is published as a double issue two times each year.
Libraries
Beinecke Library - The rare book and manuscript library at Yale University. Click here for a page devoted to their early modern British and European collections at the Rare Book & Manuscript Library.
The Bodleian - Library collection, Oxford University, UK.
The British Library - The national library for the UK. Holding over 14 million books and nearly one million journals, the site offers access to a vast array of documents and images.
Cambridge University Library - Library collection, Cambridge University, UK.
The Folger - The Folger Shakespeare Library, in Washington, DC.
Houghton Library - Harvard University library.
The Huntington - The Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, near Pasadena, CA.
The Library of Congress - National library and archive for the USA.
The Newberry - An independant research library with a world-class collection of books, manuscripts, and maps. Located in Chicago, IL.
E-Text Collections: Literary
Bartelby - A wide-raging electronic text archive. Selections include works of reference, verse, fiction and nonfiction.
Coprus of Middle English Prose and Verse - A full-text collection of nearly one hundred and fifty Middle English texts.
English Renaissance in Context (ERIC) - An NEH-funded project designed to provide scholars and students at a variety of levels with access to major texts of the English Renaissance in their original versions. ERIC comprises two separate but integrated units: a set of tutorials on some of Shakespeare's plays and on the making and selling of books during the Early Modern period; and a database of scanned texts.
Perseus Digital Library - An evolving collection of resources for the study of the ancient world. While the flagship collection covers the history, literature and culture of the Greco-Roman world, the site also contains a large selection of both primary and secondary sources concerning early modern English literature.
Renaissance Editions - An online repository of works printed in English between the years 1477 and 1799.
Project Gutenberg - Started in 1971, Project Gutenberg is the first and largest single collection of free electronic books available on the web. It now contains over 30,000 texts.
E-Text Collections: Historical
British History Online - A digital library containing some of the core printed primary and secondary sources for the medieval and modern history of the British Isles. Created by the Institute of Historical Research and the History of Parliament Trust.
Elizabeth's Parliament Journals - The complete journals of all the Parliaments during the reign of Queen Elizabeth. From Sir Simond d'Ewes' 1682 collection. Part of the resources offered by British History Online.
EuroDocs: Medieval & Renaissance Europe - Provides a listing of links connecting to European primary historical documents that are transcribed, reproduced in facsimile, or translated.
Hanover Historical Texts Project - Searchable versions of a wide variety of historical texts that range from ancient Greece to 20th Century America..
A London Provisioner's Chronicle, 1550–1563 - An electronic scholarly edition of Henry Machyn's invaluable diary. Heavily damaged by the 18th century fire at the British Library, this edition attempts to recreate, as completely as possible, the full account. The site includes images of the manuscript, a faithful transcript of those images, and a rendering of them into modern English.
Shakespeare
Complete Works of Shakespeare - The complete plays and poems of Shakespeare in an electronic form.
Designing Shakespeare - Developed to illustrate the rich theatre design history of Shakespeare's plays over the last forty years of the previous century, this audio-visual database includes four separate but related databases: a text database of production details and review extracts, an image database drawn from three quite different theatre collections, a video database of interview clips with theatre designers in Britain and a database of VRML models of the most commonly used theatres.
Internet Shakespeare Editions - A site publishing scholarly, fully annotated texts of Shakespeare's plays, multimedia explorations of the context of Shakespeare's life and works, and records of his plays in performance. Includes transcriptions and digitized copies of the folio and quarto versions of the plays.
Mr. William Shakespeare and the Internet - An annotated guide to the scholarly Shakespeare resources available on the Internet and a collection of unique Shakespeare material unavailable elsewhere on the Internet.
Shakespeare Oxford Society - The homepage for the organization who argues that Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, is the true author of "Shakespeare's" plays.
The Shakespeare Quarto Archive - A digital collection of pre-1642 editions of William Shakespeare's plays with an interactive interface that allows you to search, annotate, make public or private sets of annotations, create exhibits or character cue line lists, and download and print text and images. Includes cover-to-cover digital reproductions and transcriptions of thirty-two copies of the five earliest editions of the play Hamlet, which can be viewed separately, or alongside any number of copies.
William Shakespeare in Quarto - This site hosted by the British Library offers the opportunity to view and compare some 107 quartos, either separately or two at a time, side by side. Reproduces at least one copy of each edition of William Shakespeare’s plays printed in quarto before the theatres closed in 1642.
Other Individual Authors
Browne: Sir Thomas Browne Page - A selection of full-text works by the 17th century author.
Donne: John Donne Sermons - A searchable digital database of Donne's sermons. The archive is based on a transcription of Potter and Simpson's ten-volume collection.
Marlowe: Peter Farey's Marlowe Page - Includes articles and information about Marlowe's life, as well as modernized full-text versions of all his plays.
Marlowe: The Marlowe Society - The homepage for the society. Includes biographical information, news on recent Marlowe publications, and access to some sholarly articles.
Middleton: The Plays of Thomas Middleton - A nearly complete selection of full-text versions of Middleton's works.
Milton: The Milton-L Page - The site supports a discussion group devoted to Milton; also includes images and e-texts relating to the author.
Milton: The Milton Reading Room - A site containing all of Milton's poetry in English, Italian, Latin, and Greek, and selections of his prose. Many of the texts have been fully annotated.
Emblem Books & Homilies
Alciato's Book of Emblems - The site features high-quality images and both the Latin and English versions of Andrea Alciato's Emblematum liber.
The Elizabethan Homilies - A transcription of Ian Lancashire's 1623 edition.
The English Emblem Book Project - Contains high-quality digital images of nine major emblem books.
Paleography / Secretary Hand
Early Modern Paleography - A daily paleographical gallery from the Beinecke Library's Osborn Collection at Yale University.
English Handwriting 1500-1700: An Online Course - Contains an extensive archive of manuscript images as well as a wide range of other pedagogical materials -- transcription conventions, tips on dating, a bibliography and list of links. Perhaps most suitable for beginners, though convenient also for continuing reference.
Palaeography: Reading Early Writing - Contains a number of useful quick reference materials for translating secretary hand, such as a chart of the alphabet and a listing of common abbreviations. Part of Genlinks, a website devoted to tracing genealogy in the UK.
Palaeography: Reading Old Handwriting 1500-1800 - A web tutorial hosted by The National Archives UK. Includes interactive tutorials for ten documents, plus links to many more texts for further practice.
Art & Architecture
Renaissance and Baroque Architecture - This site gathers some small images of art and architecture of early modern europe. Originally used in conjunction with an architectural history class at University of Virginia.
Renaissance Image Gallery - Early modern images collected for a course at the University of Pennsylvania.
Tudor & Elizabethan Portraits - An extensive collection of portraits and other works of art from the Tudor and Elizabethan era.
Tudor England: Images - A site collecting a number of portraits of the monarchs and their contemporaries.
Maps
The Map of Early Modern London - Using a detailed scan of the Agas Map, this site maps the streets, sites, and significant boundaries of late sixteenth-century and early seventeenth-century London. Tags are included on the map images that identify buildings and streets
MAPCO - An extensive collection of high quality scans of sixteenth and seventeeth-century maps of London and its environs.
Ryhiner Map Collection - A collection of over 16,000 high resolution images of maps, town plans and topographical views from the 16th to the early 19th century. From the University Library Berne, Switzerland.
Views of London and Its Suburbs - A small collection of eight maps, 1560-1647.
Visscher's View of London - A detailed scan of Visscher's 1616 panoramic, sectioned off into five parts.
Dance & Music
Internet Renaissance Band - The site provides hundreds of musical midi files containing early modern musical works.
Renaissance Dance - Provides access to dance treatises written during the ealry modern period.
Renaissance Dance Sources - A resource page dedicated to early modern dance websites.
Miscellaneous
Currency Converter - An online currency converter to find out how old prices compare with new. Hosted by the National Archives UK.
Ian's English Calendar - An online handbook of dates for English history and literature. This site allows one to calculate holidays and feast days for any year, convert between old and new style dates, calculate the day of the week for any given date, and calculate dates based on regnal years.
Medieval Price List - A listing of medieval prices for various services and products.
Shakespearean Insult Page - Load and reload insults gathered from Shakespeare's plays.