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The website, we think, has gone from strength to strength, with a spanking new look and the beginning of COPIA and its first project, Aeneas and Isabella. We recently received a BESS award - for an outstanding contribution to electronic life (approx.) - from Richard Bear of Renascence Editions. Do check it out if you haven't already.
MANUSCRIPTS AND ARCHIVES
NUCMC, or the National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections, is a
free-of-charge cooperative cataloging program operated by the Library of
Congress at http://lcweb.loc.gov/coll/nucmc/.
Searchable, though a bit of a blunt instrument at present. Relatedly, the
UK's National Register of Archives is now available in a web version:
http://www.hmc.gov.uk/nra/overnra.htm.
CENTRE FOR THE HISTORY OF THE BOOK
The CHB at Edinburgh is an international and interdisciplinary centre for
advanced research into all aspects of the material culture of the text -
its production, circulation, and reception from manuscript to the
electronic text. The website includes information about such projects as
the History of the Book in Scotland: http://www.ed.ac.uk/englit/research/chb/.
JACK LYNCH MOVES
And all his splendid pages with him. Now at: http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Lit/.
ESTC TIP OF THE YEAR
We had not before worked out the obvious - how to search ESTC (the
amalgamated online STC, Wing, and C18 STC) by, say, STC number. The answer:
on 'Advanced Search', select 'Words from Citations' and type 'STC 18153',
or whatever. This will also search for references to other standard
bibliographies, so sometimes you will get two records because one has your
STC number as its Steele number, for example. But it seems to work pretty
well.
DIGITISED BOOKS
For some interesting examples of whole books online, see the initiative at
the University of Mannheim, whose 'MATEO' (Mannheim Texts Online) presents
a rich selection of images of early prints and manuscripts:
http://www.uni-mannheim.de/mateo/epo.html.
More to the point, and in English, is the University of Pennsylvania's CETI
site: http://www.library.upenn.edu/etext/.
The major project there is 'Shakespeare and the English Renaissance', aimed
at producing a 'major archive of virtual Shakespeareana'. You can also read
about Penn's work on digitising STC and Wing prints for UMI. A whole slew
of digital texts are listed at
http://www.library.upenn.edu/etext/working/brett/index5.html.
Beautifully indexed and presented, with generous picture quality, this
major archive already includes Daniel's Civil Wars (1609), works by Gosson,
Erasmus, Hariot, Heywood, much Shakespeare (including comparative sets of
prints of Lear, R&J, Merchant, Hamlet), and a huge amount of Holinshed. A
glimpse of the future.
EARLY MODERN WOMEN
Belatedly, but this fine society does have a website, if you did not know
that already. It includes information on how to join, and details of the
EMW Listserv, EMW programs, EMW awards, calls for papers, related links,
EMW members' sites, and a calendar of events:
http://129.174.16.182/emw/index.html.
ITALNET
ItalNet is an international consortium whose mission is to make available
scholarly Internet resources of literary and historical materials relating
to Italian studies: http://www.italnet.nd.edu/
Especially noteworthy is the Opera del Vocabolario Italiano (OVI) textual
database. The database contains 1,369 vernacular texts (16.4 million words)
dated prior to 1375, the year of Boccaccio's death. The verse and prose
works include early masters of Italian literature like Dante, Petrarch, and
Boccaccio, as well as lesser-known and obscure texts by poets, merchants,
and medieval chroniclers. The OVI database was created to aid in the
compilation of an historical dictionary of the Italian language, the Tesoro
della lingua italiana delle origini, portions of which are now available
on-line from the OVI website (follow the links). Registration is currently
free: http://ovisun199.csovi.fi.cnr.it/italnet/OVI/index_en.html.
EARLY THEATRE
Early Theatre supersedes REED Newsletter. Tables of contents for both are
available at the website, along with abstracts of Early Theatre articles:
http://www.humanities.mcmaster.ca/~reed/early/.
ETEXT OF GASCOIGNE'S POSIES (1575)
http://leeharrison.simplenet.com/bwp/gg/index.html
A decent looking etext of the 1907 CUP edition. This of course includes the
Adventures of Master F.I. in his Italian guise and Gascoigne's important
'Notes of instruction concerning the making of verse'. The pages are part
of Lee Harrison's 'Big Wind Press', which has also produced an etext of
Dekker's Gull's Hornbook (based on McKerrow) and other non-Renaissance
goodies: http://leeharrison.simplenet.com/bwp/.
H-HISTBIBL
A list devoted to 'the study and practice of History librarianship',
H-HistBibl is an international network for librarians, archivists,
curators, and scholars interested in the practice and study of
bibliographic and library services in support of historical study and
teaching. Further info at the H-Net site: http://www.h-net.msu.edu/
THE MEDICI ARCHIVE
The Medici Archive Project, based at Johns Hopkins, was founded in 1995 in
order to realise the undeveloped potential of the Medici Granducal Archive,
housed in the Archivio di Stato in Florence. There are 3 areas of activity:
Documentary Sources for the Arts and Humanities, 1537-1743; Jewish History,
Religion and Culture in the Medici Granducal Archive, 1537-1743; and
History of Costume and Textiles in the Medici Granducal Archive. A guided
tour will tell you all about the enormous archive, and this effort to bring
its resources online: http://www.jhu.edu/~medici/
BROGAN'S ENGLISH VERSIFICATION
A complete version of Terry V.F. Brogan's English Versification, 1570-1980:
A Reference Guide in Acrobat PDF hypertext is now available at the
Versification web site. EVRG is, along with Brogan's bibliography "Metrici
and Rhythmici: A List" (also available at the Versification website), the
largest single research tool for global versification.
http://sizcol.u-shizuoka-ken.ac.jp/versif/VerseBiblio.html
GLASGOW UNIVERSITY EMBLEMS WEBSITE
This site specialises in French emblematic texts, and includes a digitised
version of a French Alciato of 1536, as well as a short title catalogue of
the Stirling Maxwell Collection of Emblem Books, and info and links:
http://www.gla.ac.uk/Library/Emblems/
SHAKESPEARE ELECTRONIC ARCHIVE AT THE FOLGER
The Shakespeare Electronic Archive is now available to readers at the
Folger Shakespeare Library. This is a collection of electronic resources,
including The Oxford Electronic Edition, based on the Wells and Taylor
Complete Works, and numerous electronic transcriptions and images. And it
all sounds like it's linked together in interesting ways. More to follow as
well.
Unless you actually go to the Folger you can't get at it but there is a public website, 'Hamlet on the Ramparts', containing a wide range of materials relevant to Hamlet 1.4 and 1.5, under construction. You can link to the Folger website from the CERES links page.
SRASP!... ...stands for Shakespeare and Renaissance Association [of West Virginia]: Selected Papers. This new annual electronic journal publishes the best papers from the yearly West Virginia Shakespeare and Renaissance Conference. Volumes 20 (1997) and 21 (1998) can now be accessed through the WWW: http://www.marshall.edu/engsr/indexsr.html
NEW AT RENASCENCE EDITIONS
We have been trumpeting the wonderful editions at Richard Bear's site for a
long time, and we don't plan on stopping now he has chosen to honour CERES
with one of his BESS awards.
William Caxton's translation of Alain Chartier's letter to his brother advising him not to come to Court (The Curial), printed in 1484, is now available, as is Elyot's The Boke Named the Governour (from Ben Schneider) and Wilson's The Arte of Rhetorique (from Judy Boss). Also William Goddard's Neaste of Waspes (1615), Henrie Chettle's Kind-harts Dreame (1592), William Percy's sonnet cycle Coelia (1594), and Ester hath hang'd Haman (1617) by Ester Sowernam (pseud.). Head for http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~rbear/ren.htm
OXFORD EARLY PRINTED BOOKS PROJECT
Head for the website at http://saturn.las.ox.ac.uk/icc/resource.html.
This is a project intended to catalogue books in Oxford libraries outside
the Bodleian but it also has a very good survey of resources for
bibliographers web-wide.
SHAKSPER ARCHIVE
The web-based archive of the SHAKSPER discussion list maintained by
Interactive Early Modern Literary Studies (iEMLS) has just been updated and
now includes everything up to the end of 1998. All the materials are now
available directly from the LISTSERV, and there have been various helpful
reorganisations: the biographies of subscribers have been combined into an
A-Z listing and the full-text logs of the discussions have been 'bound'
into yearly volumes. The URL of the archive is
http://www.humanities.ualberta.ca/emls/iemls/shaksper/shak-L.html.
ONLINE BIBLE-STUDY
I dare say that the use literary scholars might make of the resources at
http://www.biblestudytools.net/ may not be exactly what the organisers had in mind. However, this voluminous facility makes it very easy to trace
keywords through the Bible, and to undertake more subtle searches. At the
very least it could provide quick answers to vexing 'where did that come
from?' questions.
RENAISSANCE MARRIAGE
There is a site with information about weddings and marriage in the early
modern and medieval periods at http://www.spu.edu/~kst/bib/bib.html.
Some of the information is aimed at re-creating authentic ceremonies rather
than at historical research, but there is plenty there.
RENAISSANCE!
http://renaissance.dm.net
This is another site with more than a toe dipped in 'Creative Anachronism'.
Lots of links and some info on the more flamboyant parts of cultural
context - heraldry, magic, sword-fighting, etc. The 'Compendium of Common
Knowledge' is a nice idea: a sort of retrospective commonplace book which
offers to 'Writers, Actors, and Re-Enactors' a synthesis of Elizabethan
culture. Lots of bite-sized info on clothes, money, duelling, food,
language, and many more: not pitched at a very high level, but enjoyable.
Back to top.
For further information on CERES, please write to Gavin Alexander or Raphael Lyne.
This page is maintained by Andrew Zurcher, and was last updated on
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