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.
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).
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.
This website offers double rekeyed and fully searchable text of a selection of serials collected by seventeenth-century bookseller George Thomason. As is well known, the Thomason collection of newsbooks is a very significant body of texts. Though many bibliophiles from the period amassed impressive personal collections of contemporary books and pamphlets, none did so with Thomason's assiduity, rigour and care. Thomason regarded serials as a key component of a rich archive of printed and manuscript materials; he acquired around 7,200 of them, approximately one third of his total book collection, and, in placing them cheek-by-jowl with very different kinds of text, privileging the date he received a work above the status of the author or genre of a text, problematized distinctions between cheap unbound pamphlets and the more stable and respectable bibliographic category of the book.
This website, developed by the project PI, is a continually updated database of works of genre fiction, film and TV by Muslim women creators. Initially developed to support a third-year module, over the course of the AHRC project it has been updated and further developed. As of 8 March 2024 it contains 455 entries across 20 genres, published between 2002 and 2024.
This Variorum Edition concentrates on the four English editions of Foxe's martyrology published in London during his own lifetime: those of 1563 ; 1570 ; 1576 and 1583. There were, of course, many editions of the work published after Foxe's death in 1587 and, like any great and controversial book, the text acquired a dynamic and a history of its own. However, the objective of this edition is to recover Foxe's sources and strategy as he sought to collect and present his picture of the protestant reformation as a transforming experience in the religious history of England and Europe, and its pre-history within the broadest historical and doctrinal context that he could conceive of. It is the dynamics of the text during the twenty years from 1563 to 1583 which this edition seeks to recover.
The Language of Bindings Thesaurus (LoB) is intended to provide a consistent and agreed terminology to be used by anybody working with historic books, such as conservators, palaeographers, cataloguers, librarians, historians, book collectors, rare book dealers. Offering this vocabulary in a layered structure, the thesaurus is developed to encourage further research in book history. It can be used as a reference to concepts to describe bookbindings unambiguously in all cataloguing activities. It can also be used as a didactic tool for learning about book structures and materials, the frequency of the occurrence of bookbinding components or other aspects connected with the book trade.
The Early Modern Festival Books Database presents more than 3000 festival books published between 1500 and 1800 in 12 languages. These are printed accounts commissioned by kings and princes, by cities, and by the church to record such events as coronations, ceremonial entries into cities, ambassadorial visits, weddings, christenings, victory and peace celebrations, funerals, civic celebrations of all kinds, investitures of popes and cardinals, canonizations of saints and translations of relics, among others. The database is an expanded and fully revised version of the bibliographical and historical handbook Festivals and Ceremonies. A Bibliography of Works Relating to Court, Civic and Religious Festivals in Europe 1500-1800 by Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly and Anne Simon (London: Continuum, 2000). Festivals and Ceremonies not only provided bibliographic details of the works it listed, but also historical information about the festival the publication relates to, such as the occasion, its main actors, and the artists and genres involved. When this standard tool of festival research went out of print, it was decided not to reprint it in book form but to turn it into a freely available, fully searchable database and to use this opportunity not only to check the information it contained but to provide links to a digitized version of the texts, wherever such a version existed.
The Estoria de Espanna is an extensive thirteenth-century history of Spain composed under the direction of Alfonso X of Castile and Leon (reigned 1252-1284). It runs from the origins of Spain to the death of Alfonso’s father Fernando III in 1252.
It is the history of the people who ruled the empire and therefore deals with Roman history, the history of the Goths and the history of the Christian kingdoms of the Peninsula after the Arab invasion of 711 which Alfonso regarded as the inheritors of Rome.
It exists in three major versions, two compiled during the lifetime of the king (1272 and 1282) and another during the reign of his son Sancho IV, in 1289.
The three major versions written in close succession to each other reveal a host of anxieties about contemporary events and so an examination of the differences between them can help to demonstrate the value of control of the past in present difficulty.
The Estoria de Espanna is the centerpiece of the medieval Castilian historiographical tradition, the first and greatest medieval history of Spain written in romance, and was originally conceived as part of an all-encompassing politico-cultural project by the king.
As is frequently the case with Iberian material, it is not well known outside the peninsula, and yet its status as comprehensive history of Spain makes it one of the finest examples of late medieval chronicle writing available to us.
The breadth of learning and sophisticated narrative construction of the Estoria make it prime material for the study of medieval narrative history generally and the project therefore has the aim of bringing both the Estoria and the enormous politico-cultural enterprise of which it formed a part to a wider audience.
ELECTRONIC EDITION
The project aims to provide an electronic edition of the chronicle which, by means of a search engine and collation tool, will allow comparison of the three major versions and provide full searching ability for any of the transcriptions. The project will therefore permit access to an important and foundational series of medieval chronicles to a wide readership, both specialist and non-specialist.
It will serve as a resource for future philological and historical enquiry, for example, the presentation of three almost contemporaneous major versions in a manner which permits the scholar to compare them, will allow significant advances in our understanding of the political context of their composition in the thirteenth century. The electronic edition will also facilitate access to the Estoria to a wider audience.
The online research environment will encourage the addition of transcriptions of other manuscripts and also images of the codices in the future, which will guarantee the on-going viability of the project.
The Bibliography is a comprehensive listing of Bertolt Brecht’s works published in English, regularly updated, with currently over 4200 bibliographical entries. It includes all the major English-language editions of works from Great Britain and the United States, inviting comparisons of titles with multiple translations. Each text is entered as an individual item (single poems, songs, stories, plays, dialogues, interviews, essays, fragments, variants), while letters and journal entries are entered only as collections. If available, every entry includes the original German title and the exact citation for the original text in the 30-volume Brecht edition published in Germany (Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe, Aufbau and Suhrkamp Verlag, 1988-2000), indicated as GBA. As well, the Brecht Archive call number for the English language edition or text is provided (if available), indicated as BBA, and refers to the non-circulating collection housed at the Archive in Berlin. Many translations were licensed for republication or reprinting without modification by other publishers, especially in English-speaking countries such as India or South Africa. These editions have not been included in the bibliography.
