A digital repository of English literature that includes full texts from the medieval to the Restoration periods with subject-specific sections devoted to religious writers, Renaissance drama, Metaphysical poets, and the Cavalier poets. Each entry includes a collection of resources including links to biographical material, texts, essays and other material.
The site also includes an extensive search function and an encylopedia that provides context for the literature.
The letters of William Herle, intelligencer and diplomat for the Elizabethan court, offer a unique resource for Early Modern studies. Written over the period 1559-88, William Herle’s previously unedited, unpublished, and overlooked letters are richly textured. They offer a fascinating insight into the information networks and patronage systems of the political administration, as well as valuable material for religious, social, economic and cultural history. This online edition of his letters has been designed as a hypertext archive in order to maximize the ability to access and retrieve information from the corpus.
The Hooke Folio Online is an edition of images and transcriptions of a long lost manuscript of the papers of Robert Hooke, returned to the archive of the Royal Society of London in May 2006. Robert Hooke was one of the key figures of the scientific revolution and this manuscript describes the working life of the very earliest days of the Royal Society.
The Kit Marlowe Project is a digital space designed to introduce undergraduates with diverse majors to project-driven, research-based learning, and digital humanities practices in the context of studying one of Elizabethan England’s most compelling literary figures. As one of Shakespeare’s most famous contemporaries, Christopher Marlowe was a poet, playwright, and likely spy; his friends called him “Kit” and so do we. The site has been created so that students may curate an open-source collection of Marlowe’s works, contribute exhibits, encyclopedia, and bibliography entries, plus contribute to cultural preservation efforts by transcribing, encoding, and publishing archival works in an open-access forum. Excepting the About blogs, the Teaching Resources, the Contributor Resources, and the Mini-Archive documentation, all content has been student-generated.
This ongoing open-access project seeks to represent the striking verse of Hester Pulter (1605-1678) in at least four versions: transcriptions of the manuscript; photographic facsimiles of its pages; Elemental Editions (basic modernizations with spare annotations); and contrastive Amplified Editions, created by a growing team of contributors. Side-by-side display enhances opportunities for comparison. Supporting Curations contextualize individual poems, and Explorations offer broader points of entry. An index features hyperlinked keywords to generate thematic subsets of the verse.
This site operates as both a teaching and a research resource for students and scholars of the English literary Renaissance. It not only provides freely-accessible editions of Pulter’s still little-known poetry, it also brings those editions into close contact with images of the unique manuscript witness, while contextualizing them through contact with other verbal and visual materials that help to integrate Pulter’s novel literary voice into the canon. The deliberate display of contrastive versions also helps to pull back the curtain on scholarly editing.
http://www.livesandletters.ac.uk/bodley/bodley.html
A large and comprehensive corpus of letters survives from the twelve years Bodley was on diplomatic business, during initial extraordinary missions as a special envoy to various European sovereigns between 1585-88, and then his long residence in The Hague during his post as English representative on the Council of State for the United Provinces (Netherlands) from 1588-97. These letters, previously unedited and unpublished, are a valuable interdisciplinary resource to scholars of religious, social, cultural, geographical, military and political history. The letters also offer an important understanding of the information networks and patronage structures between official and semi-official diplomatic agents and their patrons in the later sixteenth-century.
Private Libraries in Renaissance England
A companion to the published volumes of Private Libraries in Renaissance England, this searchable database is composed of book lists and library catalogs of private book collections in England collected from wills, inventories, and account ledgers.The aim of the collection is to reconstruct the history of book reading and collecting as well as the book trade.
Professional performers of all kinds in England and Wales toured to provincial towns, monasteries and private residences before 1642. The Records of Early English Drama (REED) project is discovering fresh evidence about medieval and renaissance entertainment for publication in volumes for all English, Scottish and Welsh counties. The REED Patrons and Performances Web Site is designed to include a wide range of data about professional performers on tour in the provinces – their patrons, the performance venues they used and the routes they took across the kingdom.
Manuscript Pamphleteering in Early Stuart England
Manuscript Pamphleteering in Early Stuart England offers a survey of the vast hidden archive of early Stuart England’s manuscript pamphlets.
Early Stuart Libels is a web-based edition of early seventeenth-century English political poetry from manuscript sources. It brings into the public domain over 350 poems, many of which have never before been published. The edition is divided into chronological and thematic sections for ease of navigation. It is fully searchable by name and source.
