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.
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.
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 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.
England’s Immigrants 1330-1550, a fully-searchable database containing over 64,000 names of people known to have migrated to England during the period of the Hundred Years’ War and the Black Death, the Wars of the Roses and the Reformation. The information within this database has been drawn from a variety of published and un-published records – taxation assessments, letters of denization and protection, and a variety of other licences and grants – and offers a valuable resource for anyone interested in the origins, destinations, occupations and identities of the people who chose to make England their home during this turbulent period.
The Famine and Dearth database contains searchable transcriptions of over 700 multilingual primary sources relating to situations of famine and dearth in early modern India and Britain. The archive contains texts in ten different languages including Persian, Bengali and Hindi as well as English, and offers English translations for the majority of texts. These texts cover a wide range of genres, including chronicle histories, gazetteers, official correspondence, legislation, pamphlets, periodicals, plays, poetry, surveys, and fiction and non-fiction prose.
