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.
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.
A comprehensive catalogue of 27 Scottish manuscript sources of violin music from before 1750, with around 3500 tunes all searchable by name, Theme Code and other features.
Details of over 200 Scottish printed sources of vernacular violin music from before 1850, along with images and indexes of 22 books from the University of Glasgow and Perth's A K Bell Library. You can browse the collection, search for tunes and composers, and play the tunes.
Richard Brome Online is an online edition of the Collected Works of the Caroline dramatist, Richard Brome. The edition not only makes the texts accessible to scholars and theatre practitioners, but also begins to explore their theatricality visually, serving as inspiration to encourage more frequent staging of Brome's works.
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 project aims to survey the vast hidden archive of early Stuart England's manuscript pamphlets. In collaboration with the British Library, this project will construct a database of manuscript pamphlet texts, bibliographic information, and digital images. This will allow users to search transcriptions of the pamphlets; analyze the distribution of copies through time and space; and see how such materials were presented: large and small, elaborate and plain, professional and amateur. The project will conduct additional research in the private papers of Francis Russell, fourth earl of Bedford, who was a major political figure of the early Stuart era as well as a reader and collector of manuscript pamphlets.
This research project explores the insight that the period between the introduction of tobacco in the 1570s and the ‘Gin Craze’ of the early eighteenth century was a formative phase in the production, traffic, consumption, and representation of intoxicants. By intoxicants – a less ideologically loaded term than ‘drugs’, and a more historical descriptor for non-medicinal commodities – we mean substances understood at the time to be ‘poisoning, or envenoming’ and ‘tuddling or making drunk’, and which today are recognized as having an often detrimental impact on the body’s physiological and mental processes, especially if consumed to excess.” “The resulting research tool will be an interactive website, providing free access to the datasets generated by the project, and allowing the research team and a wider community of users to explore the relationships between the economic, social, political, material, and cultural realms of early modern intoxication. “These include people, places, objects (such as drinking vessels, printed images), organisations, language (context-specific terminology), and events (such as legislation or transactions). Each of these entities will have its own set of characteristics as well as relationships with one or more other entities. The resulting ‘ontology’ will enable the PI, Co-Is, and RAs to interrogate the entire range of data and visualise the results in ways which reveal trends and relationships that are not evident when consulting the documents individually. For example, changing volumes of tobacco or numbers of licence holders or uses of the word ‘drunkenness’ can be traced and contextualised diachronically whilst relationships between entities – for example tobacco, licences, and ‘drunkenness’ – are revealed synchronically.
This is e a digital catalogue of 230 songs from the medieval period to the early nineteenth century, categorised according to generic type, musical incipit and other features and thus permitting for the first time comparison of songs distant in time but linked across history by melody, form or audience. Facsimile images of manuscript and early printed editions are provided, as also modern musical annotation and commentaries on each song.
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.
