text

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

Go to dataset

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

Go to dataset

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

Go to dataset

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

Go to dataset

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

Go to dataset

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

Go to dataset

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

Go to dataset

The People of Medieval Scotland, 1093-1371 (PoMS3)

History, Political History | medieval-history, Scotland

The People of Medieval Scotland is a database containing information about over 22,000 individuals recorded in over 10,000 documents to have survived from medieval Scotland from 1093-1371. PoMS was first launched in 2010, when it covered the period 1093-1286, and extended to 1314 by 2014. The Community of the Realm in Scotland project (COTR) has not only extended the database to incorporate the data from all royal documents from 1314-1371 but has also upgraded the database so that it can continue to be used. PoMS '3' has been available since September 2018.

Data type: text

Go to dataset

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

Go to dataset

The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674-1913

Economic and Social History, History | court cases, crime, Early Modern, eighteenth century, England, law, nineteenth century, seventeenth century, twentieth century

The Old Bailey Proceedings Online makes available a fully searchable, digitised collection of all surviving editions of the Old Bailey Proceedings from 1674 to 1913, and of the Ordinary of Newgate’s Accounts between 1676 and 1772. It allows access to 197,752 trials and biographical details of approximately 2,500 men and women executed at Tyburn, free of charge for non-commercial use. In addition to the text, accessible through both keyword and structured searching, this website provides digital images of all 190,000 original pages of the Proceedings and 4,000 pages of Ordinary’s Accounts, advice on methods of searching this resource, information on the historical and legal background to the Old Bailey court and its Proceedings, and descriptions of published and manuscript materials relating to the trials covered.

Data type: images, temporal, text

Go to dataset

Glossary