Languages and Literature

The Riddle Ages

English Language and Literature, Languages and Literature | Latin, medievalLatin, Old English, translation

The project website, launched in autumn 2020, made available texts and translations of two riddle collections: the 95 Old English riddles of the Exeter Book and the 63 Latin riddles known as the Bern Riddles. In addition to providing new translations and texts (with notes about previous editions and manuscript information), the project team produced commentary posts about each riddle's proposed solutions, literary features and historical context. In 2021, the project team made available a further four Latin riddle collections: the 12 anonymous Lorsch riddles, 20 riddles by Boniface, 40 riddles by Tatwine and 60 riddles by Eusebius. In total, the website currently hosts 290 texts/translations and 168 commentary posts. A further 100 riddles by Aldhelm are to follow. In addition to original texts/translations, we have made available guest translations of riddles into other languages, including: Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin and Serbian, Indonesian and Spanish.

Data type: text

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UK RED

English Language and Literature, Languages and Literature | autobiography, diary, eighteenth century, fifteenth century, interviews, letters, nineteenth century, seventeenth century, sixteenth century, twentieth century, United Kingdom

The Reading Experience Database, 1450-1945 (RED), housed and developed at the OU is the world's largest database about reading habits. An online, open-access project with over 30,000 entries, it is revolutionising public understanding of the history of reading. RED is democratising scholarship about the history of reading by encouraging ordinary members of the public from any location to contribute and use information about readers through history. 120+ volunteers from outside academia have already contributed some 6,000 entries. RED attracts over 1500 users per month from over 135 countries and has inspired partner projects in Australia, Canada, the Netherlands and New Zealand.

Data type: text

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The Online Froissart: A Searchable Electronic Edition

Languages and Literature, Medieval Literature | books, England, fourteenth century, France, illustrations, manuscripts, non-fiction

Jean Froissart’s Chroniques cover the period from around 1326 to around 1400 and are the single most important contemporary prose narrative about the first part of the Hundred Years’ War. More than 150 manuscript volumes containing the Chronicles have survived in more than 30 different libraries across Europe and North America. Of the four Books of the Chronicles the first three exist in substantially different versions. […] The Online Froissart offers access to the core manuscript tradition of the first three Books of Froissart’s Chronicles, and to some manuscripts of Book IV. It delivers complete or partial transcriptions of all 114 surviving manuscripts containing Books I-III, partial transcriptions of three witnesses of Book IV, a new translation into modern English of a selection of chapters, providing readers with an accessible way of exploring chapters selected from the first three Books, several complete high-resolution reproductions of illuminated manuscript copies, including many pages containing miniatures, and a range of secondary materials (codicological descriptions, name/place index, historical and textual commentaries accompanying the transcriptions, scholarly essays, a glossary and some commentaries on the illustrations).

Data type: images, text

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The Origins of Early Modern Literature: Recovering Mid-Tudor Writing for a Modern Readership

English Language and Literature, Languages and Literature | books, Early Modern, England, fiction, letters, music, non-fiction, plays, sixteenth century

Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, this project aims to redress the critical neglect of mid-Tudor writing, a period which saw the Reformation, the consolidation of the Tudor state, and the rise of English as a national language. Whilst there is a great deal of general interest in the history of this period, very little is known about its writers and the work they produce. During the three years of AHRC funding (from April 2005), the project team have compiled a searchable, on-line catalogue of literary works printed in English, 1519-1579 - the decades which precede, and lay the foundations for, the canonical period of English Renaissance Literature. This catalogue - which is accessible from this website - includes details of titles, authors (including the authors of liminary material, such as prefaces and dedicatory poems), printers, booksellers, dedicatees, entries in the Stationers Register, the format in which books were published, and type faces and foreign languages used. It also contains a list of contents for each work, and information about genres, subjects, sources and literary coteries, as well as short essays on the context for each work. The catalogue significantly adds to the information available on ESTC and other bibliographical resources, providing scholars, students and members of the general public with a first point-of-call for research on works from this formative period of early modern literature.

Data type: text

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The Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne

English Language and Literature, Languages and Literature | 17th-century, Theology

The Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne will achieve a complete reassessment of the sermons of John Donne (1572-1631), with a new critical edition of those sermons in 16 volumes, with introductions and explanatory notes for a new generation of readers.

Data type: text

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The Gersum Project: The Scandinavian Influence on English Vocabulary

History and Development of the English Language, Languages and Literature | England, Scandinavia

The Gersum Project, funded by the AHRC, aims to understand Scandinavian influence on English vocabulary by examining the origins of more than 900 words in a corpus of Middle English poems from the North of England. Investigating the early history of these words allows us to address questions about how we can identify Old Norse loans, and how and by whom these words were used in the first few centuries after their adoption into English, especially in the crucial Middle English period.

Data type: text

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The James Madison Carpenter Collection Online Catalogue

Ethnography and Anthropology, Languages and Literature | England, ethnography, folklore, irish, music, performance, Scotland, twentieth century, United States, Wales

The James Madison Carpenter Collection is a major collection of traditional song and drama, plus some items of traditional instrumental music, dance, custom, narrative and children's folklore, from England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland and the USA, documented in the period 1927-55.

Data type: text

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Iona’s Namescape: Place-Names and Their Dynamics in Iona and Its Environs

Celtic Studies, Languages and Literature | Gaelic, geography, maps, place names, Scotland

Iona is a site of exceptional historical, archaeological, and religious interest, and has been since its foundation as a monastery around AD 563. Despite the multiple ways in which Iona has been of interest to scholars and the general public, its complex legacy of place-names has never been the subject of sustained scholarly investigation. This project, funded by the AHRC, interrogates the dynamics of the namescape, the historical and changing landscape of names, of Iona and its environs, shedding light on its past and its complex present, and proposing new ways of curating place-names as part of heritage management.

Data type: spatial

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Late Medieval English Scribes

English Language and Literature, Languages and Literature | England, handwriting, medieval, poetry, prose

Late Medieval English Scribes is an online catalogue of all scribal hands (identified or unidentified) which appear in the manuscripts of the English writings of five major Middle English authors: Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, John Trevisa, William Langland and Thomas Hoccleve.

Data type: images, text

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French Oral Narrative Corpus

French Studies, Languages and Literature | French, oral-literature

This is a fully transcribed and annotated corpus of oral narrative in Modern French. There are 87 stories told by 18 storytellers. The narratives are live recordings of storytelling in authentic contexts. All form part of the recorded collection of the Conservatoire de Litterature Orale in Vendome, France, with permission from the Artistic Director. The narratives are transcribed and annotated using the conventions of the Text Encoding Initiative. A full set of tags has been designed to annotate a variety of syntactic and stylistic features and these are annotated throughout the corpus. Full metadata is contained in the Header of each document: this includes information on the tagset, details of the recording contexts, as well as sociolinguistic information on the storytellers (regional origin, age, educational profile, gender). The corpus can be accesse via the website or via the Oxford Text Archive.

Data type: audio, text

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