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Who Were the Nuns?

Economic and Social History, History | 17th-century, 18th-century, Christianity, religion, women's studies, womens-history

The data is derived from surviving manuscript and printed sources from the English convents in exile. Where membership records are missing or have gaps, details have been sought in other sources such as biographical writings, histories and chronicles. Significant data has also been located in continental archives from visitation records and examinations of candidates for clothing and profession. Where possible data has been included for candidates who failed to complete a full career in convents for a variety of reasons including health or unsuitability. External documents have been attached to the database to provide additional data regarding family connections and networks: much of the detail is derived from sources external to the convents.

Data type: text

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Vernacular Aristotelianism in Renaissance Italy Database

Classical Reception, Classics | 15th century, 16th-century, 17th-century, Philosophy, Ethics & Religion

The Vernacular Aristotelianism in Renaissance Italy Database (VARI 2.0) is a searchable catalogue of Aristotelian works written or published in Italian between 1400 and 1650. The census covers both manuscript and printed sources preserved in libraries in Italy, other European countries, and the US. The database accessible here is in need of updating, with the last addition of new data dating back to July 2013. Currently, the database covers over 200 printed editions, 200 manuscript works, 130 authors, 65 dedicatees, and 115 printers. Since the research is still in progress, these figures are expected to rise in the coming years and will be periodically updated. The census already counts a wide range of materials constituting a critical mass suitable for general overviews as well as closer analyses.

Data type: text

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Universal Short Title Catalogue

Cultural History, History | 15th century, 16th-century, 17th-century, books

The Universal Short Title Catalogue (USTC) is a project aimed at bringing together information on all books published in Europe in the first age of print. At present this comprises 755,000 editions and around 4 million surviving copies, located in over 9,500 archives and libraries worldwide.

Data type: text

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War Widows’ Stories

Economic and Social History, History | gender, interviews, oral history, twentieth century, United Kingdom, war and conflict, women's studies, World War II

The War Widows' Stories website hosts all transcripts and recordings of the oral history interviews we have conducted in the course of the War Widows' Stories project, and they can be access and downloaded for free by anyone. Recordings can be streamed or downloaded; transcripts can be read and searched online or downloaded as PDFs.

Data type: audio, 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 Windrush Scandal in a Transnational and Commonwealth Context

History, Political History | ethnic minorities, interviews, migration, oral history, race, twentieth century, twenty-first century, United Kingdom

From the Project Abstract on the UKRI Grant List website: The key outputs will be 60 oral history interviews which will be available electronically and a searchable database of existing oral history resources on the 'Windrush generation'. 30 of the interviews will focus on the response of Caribbean governments and their representatives in London to the legal restrictions imposed on immigration to the UK from the Caribbean from the early 1960s, and the plight of those members of the diaspora community whose right to remain in the UK was challenged by the British state. The other 30 interviews will focus on members of the diaspora community, those who found themselves under threat of deportation or actually deported, and their supporters and legal and political representatives. The interviews will explore the extent to which the complexities and ambiguities of the law governing nationality exacerbated confusion around competing notions of Caribbean and British identity and belonging. They will seek to identify the extent to which members of the diaspora community were aware of changes to their rights and obligations brought about by successive acts of parliament from 1962, and the stages by which it became clear that significant numbers of people were having their right to remain in the UK challenged. This oral history research will be supplemented by archival research in collections in the UK and the Caribbean. Selected documents will be digitized and made available on the project website alongside the recordings of the interviews and supporting explanatory materials including a series of podcasts produced by the project team.

Data type: text

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The Songwork Catalogue

Drama and Theatre Studies, Performance and Live Art | dance, interviews, Judaism, music, performance, photos, twenty-first century

The project archive of the 2017 Judaica laboratory phase contains approximately 2TB of audiovisual materials: primarily audiovisual recordings generated by the DCTV method, as well as recorded audio conversations, photos, and video essays.

Data type: audio, images, text, video

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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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The Redress of the Past: Historical Pageants in Britain, 1905-2016

Drama and Theatre Studies, Theatre and History | music, performance, twentieth century, United Kingdom

The database contains entries of over 550 pageants (and growing). These list a wealth of information about individual historical pageants, sometimes in great detail. Insofar as records allow (and little trace remains of many pageants), we have sought to record details of the times and places of performances, those involved in organising and staging them, and how many people attended. For each pageant, we have also sought to record, again as fully as possible, whether the pageant made or lost money, details of the music that was played and who composed it, and synopses of the individual episodes which featured. In addition, for each pageant record we provide lists of the names of the notable historical figures that featured in the action. Last but certainly not least, we have prepared a detailed summary essay explaining each pageant and placing it in its wider historical context. We have information on all – or nearly all – of the largest pageants performed in twentieth-century Britain as well as a broadly representative sample of smaller pageants.

Data type: images, spatial, text

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The Poetry of the Lancashire Cotton Famine (1861-65)

Economic and Social History, History | 19th-century, american-civil-war, class, poetry

This database brings together for the first time poems written in response to the Lancashire Cotton Famine of 1861-65. They are presented with commentary, audio recitations and musical performances. The crisis was caused by the American Civil War and, as well as poems from British local newspapers, poems published in America are included commenting on the relationship between the US, Britain, cotton, and slavery.

Data type: audio, text

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