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.
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.
A new and creative interactive interface to the AHRC Ellen Terry and Edith Craig Database has new search facilities, attractive to a new user group outside academia and accessing a selection of newly digitized theatre programmes, enabling this already valuable resource to engage in new ways with the public and the principal stakeholders, the British Library and the National Trust. The enhancements to this existing online database catalogue of one of the UK's most significant theatre archives, of over 20,000 archival documents, highlights the transatlantic and Antipodean theatre activities of Britain's most renowned performers of Shakespeare in the nineteenth century: Ellen Terry and Henry Irving. The database is accessible freely online.
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.
Bess of Hardwick (c.1521/2 or 1527-1608) is one of Elizabethan England's most famous figures. She is renowned for her reputation as a dynast and indomitable matriarch and perhaps best known as the builder of great stately homes like the magnificent Hardwick Hall and Chatsworth House. The story of her life told to date typically emphasises her modest birth, her rise through the ranks of society, her four husbands, each of greater wealth than the last, and her ambitious aggrandisement of her family. Bess of Hardwick's letters, which number almost 250 items of correspondence, bring to life her extraordinary story and allow us to eavesdrop on her world. Her letters allow us to reposition Bess as a complex woman of her times, immersed in the literacy and textual practices of everyday life, as her correspondence extends from servants, friends and family, to queens and officers of state.
