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The Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England (PASE)

The Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England (PASE) is a database which aims to provide structured information relating to all the recorded inhabitants of England from the late sixth to the late eleventh century. It is based on a systematic examination of the available written sources for the period, including chronicles, saints’ Lives, charters, libri vitae, inscriptions, Domesday Book and coins; and is intended to serve as a research tool suitable for a wide range of users with an interest in this period.

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 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 Oral History of Twentieth Century Mongolia

Economic and Social History, History | 20th-century, asia, Central Asia, Mongolia, oral history

A collection of over 600 interviews in Mongolia with English translations / summaries, available for public use.

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 People of 1381

Economic and Social History, History | 14th century, historical-records, medieval-history

The database is comprised of 3 main sections, Sources, Participants, and Incidents. The source describes where the information is found, e.g. The National Archives, and how to locate it. It contains the text in English and sometimes in the original language. The source text has been used to construct listings of Participants and Locations. Participants comprise everyone who was affected by the rising - not only those accused of being rebels, but also victims, jurors, justices and lawyers who took part in prosecutions arising from the revolt. The database includes information on relationships between individuals, occupations and background biographical information from sources such as manorial records. Locations comprise both places where incidents occurred during the rising and places associated with a particular individual. Note that although a source associates a place with a participant, this does not mean that they lived there - medieval sources frequently use a variety of locations in identifying people. One rebel is described variously as being of Edenbridge in Kent, Carshalton in Surrey and Winchester in Hampshire but actually lived in Southampton. There may be multiple entries in the database for the same person or location as an entry exists for each source the person or incident is found in.

Data type: 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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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 Mian & Kilivila Collection

Linguistics, Morphology and Phonology | Melanesia, Papua New Guinea, Trobriand Islands

The Mian and Kilivila Collection contains information pertaining to the nominal classification systems of two indigenous languages of Papua New Guinea, Mian and Kilivila. Kilivila has a single system of classifiers, with a great number of distinctions, while Mian has a dual system, which combines four genders and six classifiers. The Digital Collection on this website permits users to gain a greater understanding of these systems by exploring images of Mian and Kilivila objects and people. Users are also able to test what they have learnt about the classification systems of these two languages by taking the online Quiz.

Data type: images, text

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The Lands of the Normans in England

History, Political History | England, France

In 1204 King Philip Augustus of France conquered Normandy, thus breaking up the 'Anglo-Norman realm' created after the Norman conquest of England in 1066. The severing of connections between the two countries had profound implications for French and English identity and politics, but it has not received the detailed study that it merits. The Lands of the Normans project is based on the study of a sample of Anglo-Norman landowners, based on the single most important English source for the confiscations of 1204, the Rotulus de valore terrarum Normannorum. The project team traced the history of each of the lay families and estates that appear in this source through the surviving records, English and French, royal and private, before and after 1204. These records were entered into an online database, designed and created by the historical members of the project team in combination with the technical officers at the Humanities Research Institute. “The database contains details of over 2,000 individual documents collected from over 100 historical sources. Nearly 3,000 different people and places appear in the database, and there are over 13,500 links describing the relationships between these people and places. The Lands of the Normans database thus provides an introduction to a number of important Anglo-Norman families, including their appearances in royal and private records and access to automated reconstructions of the genealogies of each family and maps of landholding. We hope that this may encourage other historians to explore the potential benefits of Information Technology for their own research.

Data type: spatial, text

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