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CONTENTS AND INTRODUCTION
This digest contains the highlights of the six issues of Harvest, volume II, spanning June to December 1997. It includes:
GIOSEFFO ZARLINO'S MUSIC TREATISES
The Department of Computer and Humanities (Utrecht University)
announces the publication of Gioseffo Zarlino's Music Treatises,
facsimile and transcription edited by Frans Wiering, Thesaurus
Musicarum Italicarum, Volume 1, CD-ROM for Windows 95.
Gioseffo Zarlino (1517-1590) was one of the most influential music theorists of the Renaissance. His principal work, Le istitutioni harmoniche, is a unique synthesis of the music theory of Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and the compositional practice of his own time. The Dimostrationi harmoniche presents music theory according to the axiomatic model of Euclid's Elements. In the Sopplimenti, Zarlino displays his wide reading of classical sources in a sharp response to Vincenzo Galilei's critique of his earlier writings.
This CD-ROM contains the first edition of the Istitutioni (1558), and all three treatises as they appear in the Tutte le Opere of 1588-89. Each document is available in two forms: a facsimile and a transcription. The texts are transcribed using Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), following the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). All illustrations are included, and the music examples from both editions of the Istitutioni have been transcribed into modern notation. Longer examples from the 1558 edition can also be played from MIDI.
The CD-ROM also contains an SGML viewer for Windows 95, a viewer for the facsimiles, and two fonts. Together these provide a powerful and user-friendly software environment for the TMI.
The price of the CD-ROM is 10 Dollars, 6 British Pounds [BARGAIN], LIT. 20,000, DM 20 or DFL 20 (cost of software, CD production and mailing). To order, please send this amount IN CASH to the address below. If you prefer to pay by cheque, please DOUBLE the specified sums in order to cover the banking charges we shall unavoidably incur.
TMI, Utrecht University, Department of Computer and Humanities, Achter de Dom 22-24, NL 3512 JP Utrecht, Netherlands. E-mail: tmi@let.ruu.nl. WWW: http://candl.let.ruu.nl/.
WORLD SHAKESPEARE BIBLIOGRAPHY CD
Cambridge University Press has just released the World Shakespeare
Bibliography on CD-ROM 1987-94. The 24,768 entries (along with
several thousand additional reviews) cover scholarship and
productions in more than 80 languages. Full details are available at
the World Shakespeare Bibliography Web-Site:
http://www-english.tamu.edu/wsb/ (which includes a list of books and articles that have not been tracked down).
IHR
CERES strongly recommends the Institute of Historical Research's pages at
http://ihr.sas.ac.uk/ihr/ihr0101.html. The IHR provides links to on-line resources for historians on separate pages for London, the U.K., Europe, and world-wide. So from the London list one can take a trip to the PRO via http://ihr.sas.ac.uk/ihr/source.lon.html or http://www.pro.gov.uk.
The Historical Manuscripts Commission is also accessible at http://www.hmc.gov.uk/.
THE NATIONAL REGISTER OF ARCHIVES AT HMC
The NRA (http://www.hmc.gov.uk/nra/nra.html) is a computerised database of information on the nature and locations of manuscript sources for British history. The information is
taken from nearly 40,000 catalogues of manuscript collections as well as
published guides to collections and from the HMC's own correspondence with
owners and custodians of manuscripts. If you have a telnet program running
underneath your web browser, you can access the NRA directly from the web
page. Otherwise, telnet to public.hmc.gov.uk; log in as 'public'; easy
search methods include personal and family names, corporate names, place
names, and location of records.
EXHIBITIONS AT THE BRITISH LIBRARY
Information and the odd picture, and, for the following, full presentations with
startling graphics and audios:
AEMILIA LANYER WEB SITE
A useful site, perfect for students or your own hasty preparations,
providing a full biography, comprehensive bibliography, text of the poems,
and support for the Lanyer Listserv (see also the CERES Starter Guide):
http://www.u.arizona.edu/~kari/lanyer.htm.
VERSIFICATION
An interdisciplinary journal of research in literary prosody.
'Versification is a refereed electronic journal dedicated to advancing
interdisciplinary research into literary prosody. Versification publishes
material relevant to the study of prosody in all its many-faceted complexity
and provides an international forum for scholars, students, critics and
writers from many different fields to explore the role of sound in poetry.'
The current issue is 1.1, and a reference archive of introductory material
is in the making. Versification is at http://sizcol1.u-shizuoka-ken.ac.jp/versif/Versification.html.
It already hosts T.V.F. Brogan's 'English Versification: A Reference Guide', a revised and corrected electronic edition of Brogan's monumental annotated bibliography, Versification: 1570-1980, originally published by Johns Hopkins U.P. It will be issued in individual files that correspond to the citation prefixes in the Table of Contents. When the entire bibliography has been published [and most of it seems to be there already], it will be consolidated into a single file and a search engine added to facilitate searches. This should be completed by early next year. Later supplements, scheduled for 1998, will carry the bibliography's terminus ad quem to 1987.
SHARP WEB
The website for the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading &
Publishing provides a rich set of links to bookish places, and support for
SHARP conferences, past and impending: http://www.indiana.edu/~sharp/.
COMPUTERS AND TEXTS
Computers & Texts 14 is now available on-line. Computers & Texts is the
journal/newsletter of CTI Textual Studies. The issue includes a review of
LION (Literature on-line) by Don Fowler. Start at http://info.ox.ac.uk/ctitext/publish/comtxt/; for the review, see http://info.ox.ac.uk/ctitext/publish/comtxt/ct14/fowler.html.
SHAKESPEARE DOCUMENTS
A [purportedly] complete list of documentary evidence concerning the actor
William Shakspere is at: http://fly.hiwaay.net/~paul/positive.html. It has pictures of the documents. This is part of a Baconian site whose name does not bear repeating, but is 'Shake'n'Bacon'.
SHAKESPEARE WEB
If you want more Shakespeare links, try http://199.233.193.1/shakes.html#shakes. But you don't.
ELH ON-LINE
The last few issues of English Literary History are available on-line to
institutions subscribing to Project Muse, the on-line arm of the Johns
Hopkins University Press. Information and a free sample issue at
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/elh/index.html.
FRENCH PALAEOGRAPHY COURSE
Perhaps covering dates slightly late for some CERES members; but not for
others. And who would want to miss any on-line palaeography course, complete
with exams? The 13 lessons are archived at
http://www.mygale.org/07/voirin/paleo/html/sommaire.html.
MARLOWE ON-LINE
The Perseus Project at Tufts University (which already boasts impressive
classical materials) has released the first part of a freely available
electronic version of Christopher Marlowe's Complete Works on the web at:
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/Texts/Marlowe.html.
This site now provides users with the capacity to view various Dr Faustus materials: the original 1604 text, known as the A text, as well as the original 1616 text, the B text, alongside modernized versions of each. In addition, the site displays the links between the A and B texts side by side for comparison. The source text, The English Faust Book, is entered in its entirety and can be viewed as such, or it can be viewed alongside the A or B text where similar portions of each have been linked to one another. There are also scholarly notes and glosses in the form of hypertextual links in the English Faust Book. Eventually, a modernized version of the source text will be entered as well. In addition, the textual variants for Doctor Faustus and for all of Marlowe's other works will be entered, allowing users to select which variant version of either the A or B text or of the various historical collations they would like to read from. Soon the rest of Marlowe's works, including translations, will have received similar treatment.
ZWINGLIAN REFORMATION BIBLIOGRAPHY
The annual bibliography 'Neue Literatur zur zwinglischen Reformation' is
available not only in printed form (in the yearbook 'Zwingliana'), but also
on the net. URL: http://www.unizh.ch/irg/biblio.html.
SHAKESPEARE AND ASTROLOGY
A site exploring how examining Shakespeare's interest in astrology may
provide answers to problems of dating, textual variants, etc. With
particular ref. to Titus Andronicus, Winter's Tale, Antony and Cleopatra,
and Hamlet. The URL is: http://www.sonnet.co.uk/egma/.
WORLD SHAKESPEARE BIBLIO ON CD-ROM
It must be good because it has just been awarded the Besterman Medal, given
by the Library Association (UK) for the year's outstanding bibliography.
This is the first time it has been awarded to an electronic publication.
Full details are available at the World Shakespeare Bibliography website:
http://www-english.tamu.edu/wsb.
ERASMUS SOCIETY ON THE WEB
For a description of the Erasmus Of Rotterdam Society's goals and
activities, recent news, and the table of contents of the _Erasmus of
Rotterdam Society Yearbook_ 17 (1997) head for the following URL:
http://www.sfu.ca/~pabel/ers.htm.
CRRS (TORONTO) AND FICINO HOMEPAGE
CERES has mentioned the impressive list of resources at the Centre for
Reformation and Renaissance Studies site already. But anywhere with a
picture of a bookwheel can't be mentioned enough:
http://citd.scar.utoronto.ca/crrs/index.html.
It also gets a mention now because we can finally tell you where the
homepage of the FICINO discussion group (sponsored by CRRS) is...
http://citd.scar.utoronto.ca/CRRS/FICINO.html.
CHAPMAN'S ODYSSEY
Project Bartleby at Columbia has one Renaissance text on its list, the 1857
edition of Chapman's Odyssey. Useful, and very nice-looking. URL:
http://www.columbia.edu/acis/bartleby/chapman/.
COMPUTER & LETTEREN (UTRECHT)
The intimidatingly-titled Competence Center for Electronic Document
Engineering has an impressively businesslike and serious site with various
multimedia projects, including emblems, Dutch printers' devices, an
iconographic database, etc. This definitely merits a serious look-through by
a bibliographer, and CERES would be glad to hear of anyone's experiences:
http://candl.let.ruu.nl/.
BIBLIOTHECA AUGUSTANA
Another rather splendid classical website, the incipient Bibliotheca
Augustana is run by Ulrich Harsch, and is devoted to making Latin texts
(ancient, medieval, post-medieval) freely available in electronic form. At
present it includes works by Ambrosius, Boethius,
Comenius, Copernicus, Dante, Descartes, Einhard, Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim,
Isidore, Lactantius, Melanchthon, Morus, Cornelius Nepos, Spinoza,
Theophilus presbyter, Ulfilas and Vergil, and several more are planned
(Caesar, Catullus, Cicero, Diocletianus, Donatus, Francesco of Assisi,
Horace, Livius, Lucrece, Ovid, Petrarca, Sallust, Tacitus). Wot fine lists.
http://www.fh-augsburg.de/~harsch/augusta.html.
For those interested in Dante, the Bibliotheca offers e-texts of the Quaestio de acqua et terra, of the two Eclogues, and of Epistola III (and a new HTML version of Jim Marchand's e-text of Epistola XIII); De vulgari eloquentia will be available shortly.
EARLY MODERN LITERARY STUDIES NEW ISSUE
This has finally appeared, heralded by a mighty apologia cross-posted to
many lists CERES members subscribe to. For those who depend only on us,
issue 3.1 is at http://purl.oclc.org/emls/emlshome.html. Or the U.K. mirror:
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~emls/emlshome.html. The issue includes Steve Sohmer on "12 June 1599: Opening Day at Shakespeare's Globe", Randall Martin on "Isabella Whitney's 'Lamentation upon the death of William Gruffith'", Emma Roth-Schwartz on "Colon and Semi-Colon in Donne's Prose Letters: Practice and Principle", and Jeffrey Kahan on a possible source for Caliban, as well as a host of reviews.
Included alongside issue 3.1 is the first in the EMLS Special Issue Series,
edited by Ian Lancashire and Michael Best, and entitled New Scholarship
from Old Renaissance Dictionaries: Applications of the Early Modern English
Dictionaries Database.
COPAC UPDATE
COPAC is an internationally accessible catalogue giving unified free access
to some of the largest university research library collections in the UK and
Ireland. A *new release* of COPAC has just been made available containing a
number of changes such as new libraries (incl. The University of London
Library), more local data, and extended search facilities. To access COPAC
you can use the Web Interface at: http://copac.ac.uk/copac/. Or the Text Interface using telnet: telnet copac.ac.uk. Username and password are both 'copac'.
CESARE RIPA'S ICONOLOGIA
The ORBIS Foundation (the Hungarian centre for computer applications in art
history) is preparing an annotated CD-Rom edition of Cesare Ripa's
Iconologia. The first issue (to be published in December 1997) will
comprise: the full text of eight Italian editions of the Iconologia and
every illustration (c. 150 - 400 engravings per edition); a critical
comparison of the Italian editions with notes on textual variants;
comprehensive annotations; the full Hungarian translation of the first
illustrated edition of 1603, with Hungarian footnotes; two English versions
(the full text of the 1709 London edition, and the full text of a hitherto
unpublished 17th century English translation in manuscript (British Library,
MS Add. 23195); an iconographic index on the basis of the ICONCLASS
international iconographic descriptive system; and the full text of all the
cited sources. It will also contain the full text of a number of sources
used by Ripa, including works by Boccaccio, Comes, and Dante.
Further information and a sample (the article on Avaritia) can be found at http://vega.ceu.hu:80/medstud/or/ripa.htm.
The hypertexts of Ripa's sources will be made freely available on the web; the first of these texts, Pietro Vasolli da Fivizano's Italian translation of Horapollon's Hieroglyphica (printed by Giolito, Venice 1547), is already online at: http://vega.ceu.hu:80/medstud/or/horap/horapollo.htm.
CAMBRIDGE ENGLISH FACULTY WEBSITE
Well, we could hardly fail to mention this could we? All Colin Burrow's own
work, it will soon include all course reading lists online - accessible only
from within cam.ac.uk - and already contains information on the Faculty's
teaching staff, under- and post-graduate courses, and a cute 'House of Fame'
history of Cambridge critics, all of which is accessible to anyone who wants
to know. Long overdue. Find it at http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/.
INTERNET LIBRARY OF EARLY JOURNALS
The ULs of Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester and Oxford are engaged in the ILEJ
project, which aims to provide Internet access to pages and indexes of the
following: Notes and Queries 1849-69, Blackwood's Magazine 1843- 63, The
Builder 1843-63, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 1758-78,
Gentleman's Magazine 1731-1831, The Annual Register 1758-78. Full-text
searching will be possible for some titles, although most pages will be
available as scanned images. Notes and Queries is the first journal
available: twelve volumes 1849-55 are already up and running, with the rest
to follow soon. For information and participation details, e-mail Thaddeus
Lapinski at tsl@bodley.ox.ac.uk or visit the project website: http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/ilej/.
HOBY'S CASTIGLIONE HTML TEXT
Richard Bear at the University of Oregon has produced a neat but
unspectacular HTML edition of Hoby's 1561 translation of The Courtier. Only
the title page is there in facsimile but the rest (taken from Raleigh's 1900
edition) is all present and (apparently) correct. Links help you navigate
from section to section, but this is not a multi-media project by any means.
URL: http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~rbear/courtier/courtier.html.
GLOBE WEBSITES
Not surprisingly the Globe Project has spawned a good website based at
Reading. It includes a Virtual Reality tour of the Globe (which means some
Quicktime movie clips), and an archive of material on staging, with
information on performance at the Globe in both its incarnations. URL:
http://www.rdg.ac.uk/globe/.
There's an American Globe website which offers less specifically Globe- ish content and links to lots of acting and teaching on-line resources. Its URL is http://www.shakespeare.uiuc.edu. This will take you to the low-graphics version. If you have a good Internet connection (i.e. not a modem) and an up-to-date browser (Netscape or Explorer version 3) then you could go for the 'High Bandwith' option which has more graphics and frames etc. The URL for going straight there is http://www.shakespeare.uiuc.edu/frametop.html.
ARDEN WEBSITE
Details about the Arden CD-ROM and a brief history of the Arden Shakespeare
from its website at http://www.ardenshakespeare.com/.
VIRTUAL DREAM
A very ambitious project indeed to produce a VR performance of MSND live on
the Internet, using spanking new VRML techniques (whatever they might be).
The project is looking for participants to help in the performance. There's
a website with details and the working script at http://www.shoc.com/vrmldream/.
DANTE RESOURCES
Otfried Lieberknecht has a Homepage for Dante Studies:
http://members.aol.com/lieberk/welcome.html. And let's not forget about Dante Alighieri - A Guide to Online Resources: http://orb.rhodes.edu/encyclop/culture/lit/Italian/Danindex.html.
LATIN PLACE NAMES
If you want to be the kind of person who knows that Books printed in
Bratislava may tell you they are printed in Bosania, Bosonium, Bozanum,
Bozonium, or indeed Brecislaburgum there are two websites providing handy
quick-reference guides: http://www.lib.byu.edu/~catalog/people/rlm/latin/names.htm and http://crane.ukc.ac.uk/semls/cathlibs/towns.htm.
EARLY MODERN ENGLISH SOURCES
This site provides links for mainly historical resources. It has, amongst
other things, e-texts and bibliographies on various topics. URL:
http://www.quelle.org/emes/research.html.
SIDNEY-L
The SIDNEY-L e-mail discussion list is intended to serve as an online forum
for scholars and students of Sir Philip Sidney, the Countess of Pembroke,
Lady Mary Wroth, and other members of the Sidney family and Sidney Circle.
To subscribe to the list, send email to: listserv@listserv.uoguelph.ca. In the body of the mail message, type: subscribe sidney-l Your Full Name. To post to the list, send email to: sidney-l@listserv.uoguelph.ca. For more information contact the owner of the list, Gerald J. Rubio, at grubio@uoguelph.ca or visit the Sidney Newsletter and Journal homepage at
http://www.uoguelph.ca/englit/sidney.
BROTHERTON COLLECTION MANUSCRIPT VERSE
CERES is showing its age! We remember the days when this was a creaky
telnet link! (At least we think we do.) Can it be that haven't
mentioned this seriously scholarly internet search facility, enabling
you to rummage (virtually) through the individual items of English
poetry contained in the 17th and 18th century manuscripts in the
Brotherton Collection of Leeds University Library? No full texts, but
first and last lines and lots of bibliographical information. The
website expresses the hope that in time it may extend to include
material in other collections. Let's hope so. The items in question
range from contemporary copies of poems by writers like Dryden and
Pope at one literary extreme to popular tags and epitaphs at the
other. Many of the manuscripts are miscellanies and commonplace books
which have never previously been indexed, and their contents have
consequently remained largely unknown to scholars.
Pay respects to http://www.leeds.ac.uk/library/spcoll/bcmsv/intro.html.
CHRIST CHURCH PICTURE GALLERY
Like most Oxbridge colleges Christ Church has a website, but its
coverage of the excellent picture gallery there make it stand out:
details of exhibitions and reproductions from the Renaissance Italian
collection via http://www.chch.ox.ac.uk/.
THE GALILEO PROJECT
This site is dedicated to the life and work of Galileo and to the
science and scientists of his era. It offers a great deal of serious
information on a well-organised site. Amongst other things it has
fairly detailed biographies of some 600 major figures in European
Renaissance science: http://es.rice.edu/ES/humsoc/Galileo/.
ELECTRONIC MARLOWE
CERES has already mentioned this site for its texts of Dr Faustus; it
is now on the verge of being complete, with an electronic edition of
the rest of Marlowe's works. This edition collates many earlier
editions of the plays: for instance, users may select the 1590 Octavo
version of Tamburlaine the Great, Part 1 or view instead Robinson's
1826 collation. By selecting from the pop-up menu above each text,
viewers may choose between approximately twenty versions of each of
Marlowe's works. It is anticipated that every text will be available
for viewing with textual variants any day now. Find it at
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/Texts/Marlowe.html.
THE ELIOT-PHELIPS COLLECTION CATALOGUING PROJECT
The University of London Library has just completed the first phase
(funded by HEFCE) of a project to catalogue and conserve the
Eliot-Phelips Collection of publications printed in or relating to
Spain. The collection consists primarily of approximately 3500 books,
pamphlets, and official documents, supplemented by smaller numbers of
maps, manuscripts, and prints. Over 50% of the printed material is
from the hand-press period. Of the 971 items catalogued up to July
1997, 139 were printed before 1600, 195 between 1600 and 1699, and
213 between 1700 and 1830.
A fuller account of the project, together with a more detailed description of the material in the collection, is now available on the Web. It can be seen via the University of London Library home page (URL: http://www.ull.ac.uk/ull/) or directly at URL: http://www.ull.ac.uk/ull/EP/EPIntro.html. For further information, contact Julia Walworth, Head of Special Collections (jwalworth@ull.ac.uk) or Patricia Noble, Project Officer (pnoble@ull.ac.uk).
MR WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE AND THE INTERNET
This site has been around for a while but after its recent revision
it is a capacious and useful starting point not only for Shakespeare
resources but for Renaissance literature more generally. And, it has
moved to a new address http://daphne.palomar.edu/shakespeare/.
COMPUTERS AND TEXTS ON-LINE
Volume 15 is now on-line! Of particular interest is Jean Chothia's
review of the Arden Shakespeare CD-ROM, with a response co-written by
Jonathan Bate. The central contention in the Computers and Texts review
is its use of the Arden 2 editions rather than the new Arden 3. URL
for C and T 15 is http://info.ox.ac.uk/ctitext/publish/comtxt/ct15/index.html.
BIBLIOFIND
Just in passing, you can search through a vast catalogue of rare,
antiquarian, and second-hand books at http://www.bibliofind.com.
WORLDWIDE ENGLISH DEPARTMENTS ETC.
List of English Department Homepages Worldwide:
http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/english/links/engdpts.html. List of History Departments Around the World: http://chnm.gmu.edu/history/depts/departments.qry?function=form. College and University Home Pages - Alphabetical Listing: http://www.mit.edu:8001/people/cdemello/univ.html.
WITCHCRAFT RESOURCES
The Witchcraft Bibliography Project site offers an extensive bibliography
on witchcraft (downloadable as a file, over 100 pages) at http://www.hist.unt.edu/witch.htm. See also The Salem Witch Museum site at http://www.salemwitchmuseum.com/.
EMLS MAKES ITS MOVE; NEW ISSUE OUT NOW
EMLS (Early Modern Literary Studies) is an old favourite. It has been based
at the University of Alberta's Department of English since the September
1997 issue (3.2). All of which makes very little difference to
web-searchers since its permanent address (PURL) has stayed the same:
http://purl.oclc.org/emls/emlshome.html. However, the contact addresses have changed, with various things now based at Alberta. So check out the website to make sure you get details right. Oh, and issue 3.2 is ready for access: Articles by Dennis Kay, Chris Fitter, Victoria Burke and Elizabeth Clarke of the Perdita Project, and various reviews.
TLS ARCHIVE ON-LINE
This service is only available to those who pay up for a subscription to
the paper TLS, but it is pretty good. There's a searchable archive of
issues since October 1994, and they are available from six months after
publication. The URL is http://www.the-tls.co.uk.
GASCOIGNE ON-LINE George Gascoigne's The Steele Glas & the complaynte of Philomene(1576) is now available online at http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~rbear/steel/steel.html. This is one of the many electronic texts under the aegis of web-hero Richard Bear, who has for some time been on-line Spenser king. Catch him at http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~rbear/ren.htm.
LEAR/CORDELIA WEBSITE
The question 'is Lear's fool actually Cordelia?' may seem to some to lend
itself to a one-word answer. However, there is a website dedicated to the
proposition at http://www.ar.com.au/~rgm/student.html.
PARISH BOUNDARIES
A useful new research project based at Exeter, UK, which will reconstruct
and make available in electronic map form the boundaries of all the
pre-1850 parishes, townships and other local administrative districts of England and
Wales. It will be published as a CD-ROM. If you can't wait to find out
more, the man with the plan is Roger Kain, r.j.p.kain@exeter.ac.uk.
EARLY MODERN CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY AT CUNY
The colloquium series of the CUNY Renaissance Studies Program, Renaissance
and Early Modern Cultural Geography: The Places of Identity, 1500-1700, can
be viewed under '1997-98 Colloquium Series' on the CUNY website:
http://web.gc.cuny.edu/dept/renai/.
Papers for these colloquia will be made available on the website as they
are received. At the moment, Malcolm Smuts's paper, 'Rituals of Power and
National Identities in Seventeenth-Century Britain', appears on the
website.
CONFRATERNITIES
The Society for Confraternity Studies has set up an electronic discussion
list. Persons interested in joining the list should send the usual command
subscribe confrat Your Name to: listserv@unc.edu. The Confraternities
journal published by the SCS has its own web site (including archives) at:
http://citd.scar.utoronto.ca/CRRS/Confraternitas/index.htm. The SCS gathers scholars working on medieval and Renaissance confraternities, lay religious associations, and popular devotion or spirituality.
CLASSICS SEARCHING VIA KENTUCKY
There is a very flexible and impressive web-searching resource based at the
U of K: http://www.uky.edu/ArtsSciences/Classics/lexindex.html. It searches just about every on-line classics-related resource, via bibliographies, dictionaries, encyclopaedias, rhetorical devices, etc. etc. etc. Quite an achievement.
BRITISH ACADEMY SERVER
Worth a mention as we've only just realised it exists: http://britac3.britac.ac.uk/.
REED WEB SITES UPDATED
The associated group of Web sites for the Records of Early English Drama
project at Victoria College, University of Toronto, has just undergone its
annual upgrade and revision. They now have even more links to early music
and archival sites plus (for the first time) a full listing of the REED
collections in progress with the names and e-mail addresses (where
available) of their editors. The publication list has been up-dated to
include their latest collection, Bristol, edited by Mark C Pilkinton, now
available from the University of Toronto Press.
ONLINE TRANSLATOR
It's hard not to be excited by the thought of a web page which
can turn stilted English sentences into dazzling French, Italian,
Spanish, German, or Portuguese. Well, Altavista have exactly that
on their web site - a beta (trial) version of translation
software produced by the boffins at Systran.
There's a Press Release at http://altavista.digital.com/av/content/pr120997.htm. The Direct Translation Page is http://babelfish.altavista.digital.com/.
It doesn't yet seem to be available at any of Altavista's mirror sites.
The service is cutely named after a creation of Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. The babelfish was a small red fish which when placed in the outer ear would cause any speech that passed through it to be translated into the language of the ear's owner. Altavista's service can deliver prose which looks a bit like it's been swallowed by a red herring and has turned up on your dinner plate, but it is a lot less ticklish than a fish in the ear.
The facility is almost frighteningly good at humdrum epistolary prose, such as you might want to send to French, German, Italian, Portuguese, or Spanish libraries or academic institutions. It obviously can't cope with old spelling, so you will need to help it out if you don't want some highly amusing creole to emerge:
Las! ne reverray-je plus ceste beaute parfaite,
Donc me faudra il mourir sans esperer aucun secours?
Mow! reverray I more ceste perfect beauty,
Therefore will be necessary for me it to die without expecting any
help?
Like anything else working on one of today's mainframes, the service operates at a speed you will not believe. We have seen the future and it employments.
VITTORIA COLONNA WEBSITE
So far there are translations of about 60 sonnets, and more to
come, along with other Colonna materials, at http://mason.gmu.edu/~emoody.
HELEN VENDLER'S SONNETS ONLINE
The first chapter of Helen Vendler's The Art of Shakespeare's
Sonnets can be found in the on-line Books pages of The
New York Times. The address is
http://search.nytimes.com/books/first/v/vendler-sonnets.html. You need to subscribe to get in; those in the US can do so for free.
CONTENTS
The following Feature section is organised according to the following headings. Please select from the index or scroll through below.
The Cambridge Music Faculty recommends a start at one of two places: Royal Holloway and Bedford and The American Musicological Society. Royal Holloway's pages are a very rich though haphazard set of humanities links with a musical skew; the AMS pages are rather less chaotic, and very comprehensive.
Other fairly good links are at:
The serious stuff, though (and please let us know if we're missing something obvious), is limited...
RISM
The Repertoire International des Sources Musicales (International Inventory
of Musical Sources) represents a worldwide effort to identify and describe
sources of music and writings about music from the earliest times through
ca. 1825. The RISM Home Page is a joint production of the RISM
Zentralredaktion at Frankfurt/Main, Germany, and the U.S. RISM Office at
Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.A. and is located at
http://www.rism.harvard.edu/RISM/.
It hosts a number of databases, the directory to which is at
http://www.rism.harvard.edu/rism/DB.html.
Very useful and fully indexed is the database of music mss after 1600. Their
blurb: the RISM Series A/II Database contains bibliographic records for
music manuscripts written after ca. 1600 and, in most cases, before ca.
1850. Records include information in standard bibliographic categories as
well as graphical images of music incipits.
Others:
The RISM-U.S. Libretto Database contains bibliographic records for more than
11,000 printed and manuscript libretti for musical stage pieces from the
earliest manifestations through the beginning of the twentieth century.
Presently included in the database are records for all libretti in the
Albert Schatz Collection at the Library of Congress.
The RISM Libraries Directory identifies more than 5,500 libraries world-wide
that hold music materials relevant to RISM series. All libraries are
identified by name and RISM siglum. Other information provided can include:
address, phone/fax numbers, links to relevant Internet resources, and
literature about the library.
The RISM Bibliographic Citations Database contains references for all
thematic catalogues and other secondary sources cited in the RISM A/II Music
Manuscripts Database and the RISM-US Libretto Database. The database can be
searched from hyperlinks in those databases, or directly from a database
search menu.
DOCTORAL DISSERTATIONS IN MUSICOLOGY ON-LINE
This is an excellent, and very comprehensive, searchable database, incorporating and continuing the American Musicological Society's published
listings: http://www.music.indiana.edu/ddm/.
UL MUSIC CATALOGUE
The new Cambridge University Library music catalogue contains ca. 12,000
entries for musical scores created since 1989, and includes nearly all music
manuscripts (except medieval liturgical and some other early mss). This is
its principal attraction. For instance, every one of the 239 intriguing
items in MS Dd.2.11 are separately entered, so the whole contents can be
browsed by a search on the classmark, and individual items can be pulled up
by their title. If you have a suspicion that there must be a number for
Willoughby, 'Willoughby's' in the title field will bring you 'My lord
Willougby's tune' from this ms. The catalogue can be browsed under 'other
catalogues' at ul.cam.ac.uk.
SIXTEENTH-CENTURY PRINTED TABLATURES
This seems a very professional job. Its blurb: Sixteenth-century printed
tablatures for the lute, vihuela, guitar, and cittern is a site offering an
experimental database of printed tablatures for plucked-string instruments
from 1500-1599. It is primarily concerned with bibliographical information
relating to Lute, Vihuela, Guitar, and Cittern tablatures; it also contains
information on three lesser-known instruments: the Bandora, the Mandora, and
the Orpharion. Each section contains basic information regarding a specific
instrument: brief organological descriptions, explanations of tablature, and
links to more detailed bibliographical and biographical information. This is
an ongoing project; eventually, each book will be analysed as to contents
and individual incipits of the pieces (in tablature) will be placed in a
searchable thematic catalogue. Visit this project at http://www.lib.duke.edu/music/lute/home.html.
THE CLASSICAL MUSIC PAGES
This web site [tells you that it] provides you almost everything you need
concerning classical music - its history, biographical information about
composers (with portraits and short sound examples), explanations of the
various musical forms and a dictionary of musical terminologies. Start at http://w3.rz-berlin.mpg.de/cmp/classmus.html. This is an ongoing project, but already it offers a fairly comprehensive set of extracts from the New Grove, with hypertextual links; certainly useful, if you really don't want to leave your desk.
THESAURUS MUSICARUM ITALICARUM (TMI)
TMI is run by the impressive Computer & Letteren at Utrecht University. The aim of the project is to publish in hypertextual format a series of 16th and early 17th-century Italian music treatises, although it is still incipient. A very full prospectus is at
http://candl.let.ruu.nl/.
THESAURUS MUSICARUM LATINARUM This is a repository of Latin music theory texts, considerably more advanced: gopher://iubvm.ucs.indiana.edu/11/tml
LEXICON MUSICUM LATINUM
Prospectus for the printed volume, with
bibliography and links relating to Medieval music theory; a German site:
http://www.badw.de/musik/lml.htm.
THEMA: (Music) THEory of the Middle Ages
At present, this database
comprises hypertext transcriptions of 18 manuscript copies of 14 Latin
theoretical treatises related to musica mensurabilis of the thirteenth
century. A little beyond our brief. http://www.uga.edu/~thema/.
GREG LINDAHL
Greg Lindahl has a personal but not unuseful set of pages, with an especial
liking for ballads and Thomas Ravenscroft; much is scanned in, so facsimiles
of entire volumes can be printed off. For the main page, go to http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/home.html; for ballads, try http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/ballads/ballads.html. He provides an early music bibliography at http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/articles/music_bibliography.html.
JEFF LEE
Jeff Lee has a similar set of music pages, with MIDI files of Coprario's
'Funeral Teares' and links for lutenists: http://www.gate.net/~shipbrk/music.html. His scary homepage includes a link to a fun set of 'rules for children to
write by' from 1611, with pictures of good and bad pen posture: http://www.gate.net/~shipbrk/.
LULLY WEB Project
The University of North Texas LULLY WEB Project, a multimedia thematic
catalogue of the University's Lully collections, is at: http://www.library.unt.edu/projects/lully/lullyhom.html.
CARNEGIE MELLON
The trusty Carnegie Mellon English Server has some stuff: http://english-server.hss.cmu.edu/music/.
HNH
HNH, the umbrella company for NAXOS, provides composer's biographies with
surveys of their output, as well as a glossary of musical terms, with links
to information on Naxos recordings. Information depends on a record being
there to support it, so there is no Ferrabosco or Eccles; the glossary is
limited: no 'melisma', but 'modal' is useful enough. Not bad despite the
filthy mercantilism: http://www.hnh.com/hnh.htm.
TRANSCRIBING AND READING WHITE MENSURAL NOTATION
A labour of love from another muso punter, this site gives a multimedia tutorial in Renaissance music notation from the mid-16th century: http://www.uconect.net/~raybro/index1.html.
THE ENGLISH DANCING MASTER
A project to enter Playford's first edition
(1651) is underway at: http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/org/sca/src/contributed/pc2d@andrew.cmu.edu/dance/playford.html. It includes audio and visual illustrations and is nearly finished. A parallel project by Jeff Lee seems further on: http://www.gate.net/~shipbrk/playford/index.html.
ENGLISH LUTE MANUSCRIPTS AND SCRIBES 1530-1630
One of the most impressive finds was the gobsmackingly vast 1994 Oxford
D.Phil. of Julia Craig-McFeely, ENGLISH LUTE MANUSCRIPTS AND SCRIBES
1530-1630, which one can download in its entirety, piece by piece, thanks to
the author's generosity. The files are under the aegis of a fellow lute
lover, who must have done the converting to html, no simple task:
http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/julia/. It comes either in plain text or hypertext (with pictures). Try the
bibliography for starters, or the contents: http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/julia/toc.htm.
THE PURCELL PROJECT
Pleasant audibles on offer at: http://web.ftech.net/~honeyg/purcell.htm. Links to a basic multimedia biography and the BL's tercentenary Purcell exhibition (also multimedia) are at:
http://portico.bl.uk/exhibitions/purcell/overview.html.
MORE MIDI TUNES
Including a fair few Campion, Dowland, Byrd: http://www.bcpl.lib.md.us/~cbladey/guy/html/midis.html.
MEDIEVAL.ORG
Says little about itself but hosts a great deal of low-level
information, including Early Music frequently asked questions (FAQs), such
as 'what was the first opera?', the infinitely regressive equivalent of
'what was the first novel?'; the site also has links to huge amounts of
information on recordings, so a search on a composer will tend to take you
here: http://www.medieval.org/emfaq/.
MUSICA BRITTANICA
This is usefully listed by its publishers at
http://www.stainer.co.uk/musica.htm.
For those interested in lyric poetry and song, there is no on-line Doughtie or Fellowes, and the best thing in the meantime is to keep an eye on VERSIFICATION, as mentioned below in 'Internet Resources': http://sizcol1.u-shizuoka-ken.ac.jp/versif/Versification.html.
Again, one can start at Royal Holloway and Bedford's list of music journals: http://www.sun.rhbnc.ac.uk/Music/Links/journals.html. Or go direct to http://www.sscm.harvard.edu/jscm/Welcome.html for the JOURNAL OF SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY MUSIC. JSCM is published by the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music and provides a refereed forum for scholarly studies of the musical cultures of the seventeenth century. These include historical and archival studies, performance practice, music theory, aesthetics, dance and theatre. The JSCM also publishes critical reviews and summary listings of recently published books, scores, recordings, and electronic media. The journal is still working out its full potential, but already has hypertextual links within articles to illustrative examples, both graphical and audio. Clearly the on-line music journal is better placed than many WWW efforts to assert its superiority over traditional media.
The other place to go is MUSIC THEORY On-Line at http://boethius.music.ucsb.edu/mto/mtohome.html. This is the organ of the Society for Music Theory, and offers articles, reviews, book anouncements, dissertation listings, etc. with a theoretical skew but with no restrictions of period, so I learnt from here of a dissertation on the background to Morley's 'Plain and Easy Introduction', and a new book on German musica poetica.
A good list of lists, including med-and-ren-music and rendance (details for both of which are in the CERES Starter Guide) at http://www.medieval.org/emfaq/misc/lists.html.
EARLYM-L is worth a look. It is a very lively list, accommodating performers, listeners, musicologists, and is archived at gopher://olymp.wu-wien.ac.at/11/.earlym-l. Its home page is: http://www.wu-wien.ac.at/earlym-l/. Rather clearer information on subscription is at http://www.medieval.org/emfaq/misc/earlym-l.html.
In the meantime there are some very expensive applications which enable you to play with MIDI synthesisers, but very little devoted solely and sensibly to inputting text and notes. Some lists of software are available at: http://www.sun.rhbnc.ac.uk/Music/Links/software.html and http://www.users.dircon.co.uk/~ara/notation.htm. Better, though, is the CTI's page: http://www.lancs.ac.uk/users/music/research/sware.html. This will take you to free software like Muzikator and Mozart; these tend either to crash or not to cope well with combining words and music (or even with managing 2 notes vertically on one stave in one case), as 'Calliope' does so beautifully, and as other less elegant but very expensive applications can. So as yet none receives a recommendation.
CERES enters the world of virtual tourism!
One of the results of the Internet's world-shrinking capacity is the greater availability of information about, and pictures of, beautiful and interesting places. It happens that some of England's palaces and country houses are very well-served by web pages. So CERES decided it would be a good idea to undertake a characteristically obsessive search.
The pages below offer one or more of the following:
The priority in what follows is not so much to cover every country house or palace, but rather to find Internet materials relating to them. If you have suggestions (either for websites not included, or names which could be searched), then do get in touch. Typing a name into an Altavista seach will often take you to the right place, although you could always find yourself on a photo-tour of a Bed and Breakfast.
One thing CERES should not mention is a site which invites you to enter your name and find out if you could be related to stately home-owners. They'll sell you a picture of 'your' house if you don't keep your wits about you: http://www.infokey.com/hon/caslist.htm. Actually there may in some bizarre way be an academic use for this, but...
This feature is organised under the following headings; choose from the index or scroll through below.
AN UNSPEAKABLY EXCELLENT SITE
Professor Hugh Lester of Tulane University, CERES salutes you! His site 'Period and Style for Designers' is at http://www.tulane.edu/lester/text/lester.html. It is a gem: carefully chosen, concisely described, clearly presented pictures of a remarkable diversity of materials. The 'English Renaissance' and 'English Baroque' areas are most directly within the
remit of CERES, but all the sections are good. Check out building
exteriors and interiors, and furniture and objects as well, from the
Pyramids to Frank Lloyd Wright.
SCAFFOLD - WWW ARCHITECTURAL SITE
Currently under construction (appropriately enough), with only some
images and text in place: so far Indian architecture, Vitruvius, and
Renaissance Italians are represented, plus some general architectural
materials. Head for http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/george/scaffold.html.
RUBENS PROJECT
If you are interested in viewing and downloading architectural and
artistic images on a large scale then this Australian project run
from ANU will be of interest. Using secure servers, registration, and
(to access its full glory) payment, it is a pretty major undertaking.
Head for http://rubens.anu.edu.au/ and find out more. CERES found
that Netscape and Internet Explorer were not entirely happy with the
secure server set-up and did not load some pages. From the outside it
looked like perseverance would be worthwhile.
VOICE OF THE SHUTTLE ARCHITECTURE PAGE
Links galore at http://humanitas.ucsb.edu/shuttle/archit.html.
WELCOME TO BRITAIN!
A tourism site which will give useful information as well as cool
maps showing where all the 'heritage attractions' (what a lovely
phrase!) are: http://www.britain.co.uk/.
AND FINALLY
A gentleman from Finland by the name of Risto Hurmalainen has created
a list of, with links to, his 100 favourite old British buildings.
Many a treasure hides therein: http://www.dlc.fi/~hurmari/castles.html.
HURRAH!
Naturally some of the best buildings and artworks are owned by our
dear Royal family. Although Earl Spencer tells us they are
old-fashioned, in fact they have a far better website than he does,
with plenty of palace(s) information at http://www.royal.gov.uk/.
BURGHLEY HOUSE, LINCS
Thanks in part to Stamford's claim to be the 'finest Stone Town on
the Internet' Burghley House has a healthy web presence. Lose no time
in zapping to http://www.stamford.co.uk/burghley/index.html.
There is some historical information but not surprisingly the main
pleasure of this site are the pictures of house, grounds, furniture,
of the excellent art collection, and of the extraordinary Heaven Room
and Hell Staircase painted by Antonio Verrio. Actually the
reproduction of the latter is disappointing.
You can reach a slightly better Hell Staircase via the Burghley House page at http://www.demon.co.uk/citygate/. There's a little more detail about the building of Burghley here.
But it gets better! The Italian paintings from Burghley went on tour in 1996 and the result is a superb virtual art gallery with nice reproductions and interpretive notes under the auspices of the the Lakeview Museum in Peoria, Illinois. Don't miss http://www.giovanetto.com/burghley/burghley.html. Click on the picture-title for a bigger picture.
CASTLE HOWARD, YORKS
Vanbrugh-tastic! And it has its own website which is informative and
idiosyncratic: http://www.castlehoward.co.uk/. The photos are arty and moody rather than actually worth looking at. Ho hum. There are, though, some nice reproductions of architectural drawings.
The Castle Howard website people complain that the only portraits of Vanbrugh (and those of the Kit-Cat club) are in the National Portrait Gallery which has a policy not to allow Internet reproductions. Boo! Although Hurrah! for the NPG's own website which is useful as a guide to what's on show, with a few pictures: http://www.npg.org.uk/.
BLENHEIM PALACE, OXON
Still on the Vanbrugh trail, but sadly less to ogle electronically.
There's a small amount of information about the palace and Vanbrugh
himself at http://ernie.bgsu.edu/~smorgan/publick/blenheim.html.
A rare CERES mention of someone's holiday snaps - but there are
several pictures at http://www.english.upenn.edu/~rstack/album.html.
HARDWICK HALL, DERBYS
Just visiting info: http://www.openworld.co.uk/britain/pages/H/HAR45QJa.html.
And there's a tiny picture and some information (also about architect
Robert Smythson) at http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/town/parade/taf24/hardwick.htm.
CHATSWORTH, DERBYS
Derbyshire tourist info gives the basics about Chatsworth, and also
HADDON HALL, EYAM HALL, MELBOURNE HALL, etc. Find it at
http://www.derbycity.com/derby2/stately.html.
WOLLATON PARK, NOTTS
Some historical information and pictures of this house at
http://www.innotts.co.uk/~asperges/woll.html.
These pages have a style of design which is, let's say, not to
everyone's taste. If it is (!) you can link to many others under the
proprietor Jeremy Boot's auspices, many of which concern the
activities of radio hams.
AUDLEY END, ESSEX
Not a great deal to shout about except the bare essentials at
http://www.locata.co.uk/info/audhse.htm.
HATFIELD HOUSE, HERTS
The barest essentials are at http://www.kidsnet.co.uk/places/hatfield.html. Better is http://www.britain.co.uk/pages/H/HAT95NQbA.html which has
several pictures: don't forget to click on the left picture for
larger version, and on the right-hand ones to swap them round. It'll
make sense when you get there.
CERES did find one other picture, but it was a holiday snap linked to a 1995 holiday diary from a 16-year-old girl. Good taste intervened.
WILTON HOUSE, DORSET
Again, nothing, except details so bare they make previous use of term
'barest' seem unwise: morsels on Dorset's great houses (also
ATHELHAMPTON HOUSE, BREAMORE HOUSE, etc.) at
http://www.lds.co.uk/dt/houses.html. There's a tiny picture of ATHELHAMPTON at http://www.shogun.demon.co.uk/dorset/athelham.htm.
HAMPTON COURT PALACE
The charming people at The Discerning Eye Internet Services have
produced a virtual tour, with pictures, music, and historical
information. Check it out if you will at
http://www.the-eye.com/hcintro.htm
.
There's information and a bit of illustration at http://www.realtennis.gbrit.com/ which, as its URL suggests, is most interested in the royal tennis courts. This site also has material on the history of tennis.
Grose Educational Media has thoughtfully but rather curiously decided to reproduce a 1919 article by Ernest Law which discusses Shakespearean performances at Hampton Court, which is the only surviving building in which Shakespeare's plays were performed. Head for http://www.entrenet.com/~groedmed/hampton.html.
LONGLEAT HOUSE, WILTS
Basic info and two pictures (one of the house, one of giraffes) at
http://www.wctb.co.uk/longleat.htm.
No internet search would be truly complete without one consiracy theory. Sure enough (and not suprisingly since nearby Warminster is said to be Britain's UFO capital) Longleat is said to have been built on a UFO crash-site. Find out not much more at http://www.webentity.co.uk/sci-fi/news/19961020-ukufo.html.
BOLSOVER CASTLE, DERBYS
Tourist info at http://www.locata.co.uk/info/bolscas.htm but the
interesting thing about Bolsover is the geophysical survey undertaken
by English Heritage in order to establish the layout of an earlier
formal garden. This is pretty interesting and there are various
pictures of the castle as well as 3-D underground image things. Go to
http://www.eng-h.gov.uk/reports/bolsover/. Link from here to English Heritage and to other geophysical surveys available in HTML format (most of which look rather further back in time).
WINDSOR CASTLE, BERKS
You can get some sense of the variety of interiors and exteriors
through the pictures (and few words) at http://www.johansen.com/hotelnet/windsor/home.htm. The best thing here is the 1607 bird's eye view by John Norden.
GREENWICH HOSPITAL, LONDON
Christopher Wren's gargantuan building is now the Royal Naval College
which allows CERES to make its first ever recommendation of a
Ministry of Defence web page. There's good coverage in words and
pictures at http://www.mod.uk/histbldg/RNC_DOH.HTM. Link from here to other historical buildings under the aegis of the MoD.
KNOLE, KENT
Description at http://www.britain.co.uk/pages/K/KNO50RPc.html. There are pictures of the house and deer-park at http://www.sevenoaks-uk.com/town.htm#knole.
KENILWORTH, WARKS
There is information and an eye-twisting moving panorama graphic
(addictive but dangerous) at http://www.celcat.com/kworth/castle.html. Link to pictures and context - don't forget to click on the tiny pictures to obtain larger versions - at
http://www.celcat.com/kworth/castle.html.
Cahiers Elisabethains recently featured an article by Mary Hazard entitled 'A Magnificent Lord': Leicester, Kenilworth, and Transformations in the Idea of Magnificence'. Link to abstract in French or English from the CE website http://serinf2.univ-montp3.fr/CERRA/AbsCE31.html.
PENSHURST PLACE, KENT
There's a pretty good virtual tour with only mildly annoying music at
http://www.i-way.co.uk/~sid/pens.html. At this site you'll find scanty biogs of some Sidneys (Philip, but not Robert), details of the building of the house, and other
historical context. It doesn't replace books, far from it, but it
can, er, bring certain things to life. Link from here to visitors'
info at http://www.seetb.org.uk/penshurst/.
THE QUEEN'S HOUSE, GREENWICH
There's some historical information on the National Maritime Museum's
website (the Queen's House is on their patch) at
http://www.nmm.ac.uk/tm/queen.html. Link from here to '25 Facts about the Queen's House' and details of how you can get married there, Inigo-Jones-style.
BEAULIEU, DORSET
It has its own web pages but very scanty material:
http://www.itl.net/features/nmm/Beaulieu.html.
INIGO JONES
The Globe theatre website based at Reading promises more links to
Jonesy materials, and currently offers interesting photos and
drawings of the Globe's indoor theatre, which is based on designs by
Inigo Jones, probably for the Cockpit: http://www.reading.ac.uk/globe/Data-Base/Images/Jones.html.
There are more Globe-related architectural drawings and photos at http://www.reading.ac.uk/globe/Data-Base/Pictures.html. See also an article on architectural style and the Globe at http://www.reading.ac.uk/globe/Data-Base/Articles/RDN1Ronayne.html with links to drawings of interiors by Jones and Robert Smythson.
CHRISTOPHER WREN
There's a good collection, with pictures, of Wren's buildings in
London and information about those elsewhere at
http://www.uk-guide.com/london/wren-lon.htm.
His biography is part of the Galileo Project; see under 'Internet Resources'.
SIR JOHN VANBRUGH
There is a small biography at
http://ernie.bgsu.edu/~smorgan/publick/vanbrugh.html- a page brought
to you by the owner of the Restoration Drama Homepage,
http://ernie.bgsu.edu/~smorgan/publick/resthome.html.
VITRUVIUS
There's a German Vitruvius homepage which has biography and
bibliography, plus links to other Vitruvian and general architectural
sources: http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~kdw0101/WWW/SC/Vitruvia/vitruvius.html.
The following review is divided into several sections; please choose from the index or scroll through below.
LION (and we do love a good acronym) is wondrous, and we are already finding it indispensable. However, it is important to know its limitations, and to realise that for all its comprehensiveness and speed, it is still a very blunt instrument where research is concerned. But it is clearly the most significant online literary resource to date, and with its clear intent of housing a comprehensive and ever-expanding range of services under one roof, it looks like it will keep the lead it already has on any rivals; it is here to stay. If your academic institution is not already thinking of subscribing, put that thought in its mind. Even if LION's usefulness to you is restricted to the most mundane of its capabilities - tracking down quotations and phrases you cannot place - it is likely to save you time, and it has not always been possible to say that about the infliction of technological developments on our working lives in the last decades. First of all, though, a guided tour.
LION has distinct URLs for the UK (http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk/) and the States (http://lion.chadwyck.com/); obviously, as ever, use the one closest to you. The home page looks the same whether or not you have subscribed to the database. If you haven't, some links will be turned off, and others will take you to information about the service rather than to the service itself. If you have been granted access temporarily you may have been given a special URL and password (e.g., for reviewing purposes). But in most cases, LION lets subscribers straight in by recognising the IP (Internet Protocol) address of the computer accessing it. This may be a library computer; in the event of large-scale licenses being granted, it may be any computer within a certain domain (e.g. cam.ac.uk). [If you need to know your IP address, you can get LION to tell you what your computer is telling it by going to http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk/envtest.cgi]. Multiple-user licenses will allow a limited number of concurrent users to access each database; these tend to allow more users for the more popular databases (verse) than for the less (Early English Prose Fiction), so it is just possible that access will be denied because 5 other people are also trying to get to grips with Nashe and Greene. Information about arranging trials is of course available at the home page.
As well as recognising your computer, LION will recognise your browser software; sort of. There are two versions of Literature Online. One uses 'frames', which means that some areas of the page remain intact when you download some new stuff. This protocol has speed advantages, but it is also governed by a more complicated logic. Where traditionally each page you saw had a separate URL, so that your browser knew what it was showing you, with frames this is not the case. So if you try to use the back/forward buttons on your browser, you may find that things get rather muddling (see below). The frames version of LION is optimised to run with Netscape Navigator version 3.0 or higher, which uses Java scripts to reinstate an intuitive back/forward option presented within the page rather than via your browser's toolbar. Internet Explorer 3 also has frames capability, so if you access LION with this software you will get the frames version, but the back/forward option may not work. As usual, you are most likely to have problems with older browsers and non-Windows 95 machines. We have not experimented with every configuration of hardware and software, but in many cases problems arising from the frames version of LION can be avoided by going to the non-frames version, whither you will be sent automatically if LION recognises that you have a non-frames-aware browser such as Netscape Navigator 1.2. Follow the links, or go straight to http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk/noframes/home/home. In essence this is exactly the same as the frames version, except that LION's own buttons are on the left instead of the right, and the whole is painted a more lurid orange. Some procedures have more stages to them, but the non-frames version is in no way less powerful or flexible. You may also find it faster, for complicated reasons involving caches which you don't want to know about.
The browse option will give you a list of every word which occurs in a
title/author field in the whole database, with the number of occurences, so
you can browse the entire lexicon if you have the patience. By using ctrl
and then clicking you can select any number of these, to arrange a multiple
author search, or a title search like:
"arcades" OR "arcadi" OR "arcadia" OR "arcadian" OR "arcadians" OR
"arcadias" OR "arcadie" OR "arcady" OR "arcadye"
This is how LION displays an ideal search by the way, for clarity's sake,
though of course you would get the same results from:
arcades or arcadi or arcadia or arcadian or arcadians or arcadias or arcadie
or arcady or arcadye
The software will show you 50 entries at a time unless you tell it to show
more (up to 99). This is worth adjusting on some occasions, so as to avoid
multiple pages of search results which can get in the way of a quick browse
back and forth.
Having specified your search criteria and got some results you may wish to get back to your search box (to make some alterations) by using your browser's 'back' button. Do not be surprised if on going back to the search page you find that it is now blank again. This may not always happen, and it will happen less if you use the non-frames version of LION, or the Java back/forward facility incorporated in the frames version. But to avoid it, notice that clicking the search icon in the results page allows you to 'refine search'. This will take you straight back to the search page, with your search criteria preserved. Usually.
A summary of the stages of searching the master index...
You might want at this point to save or print your text. There are various options. You could cover some with the mouse, and copy and paste it somewhere else. You could select all the text via 'edit' on the menu bar, though with older, smaller RAMed machines there may be a limit to the amount of text the computer can paste in one go. You could do clever things with the right mouse button if you know how to do that. Note that this is another stage at which the frames version of LION may upset you. If you have a page of text in front of you and try to save it as a file, your computer may save the upper frame of icons because that was the last thing it downloaded and that is where it is. So you may need first to click on the text itself; there will be no visible effect, but your computer will now be where you are. Another question is in what form to save the text. If you save it as a file, you will have to save it as html (.html or .htm). This includes all the codes around the text telling your machine how to display it. If you try to save it as text (.txt) you will still get all the html codes. Only by copying and pasting will the text and only the text be translated into .txt. BUT, saving as html has advantages, such as preserving italics, which are lost when text becomes txt. And if you have swanky Word 97 for Windows 95, you word processor will be able to display html files anyway. Bear in mind that in some situations you will want to print off the text but will not be that fussed about keeping an electronic copy. In which case consider printing direct from your web browser, a much underused option. In the non-frames version you will get all the supporting icons and pictures, but not in the frames version, which will give you only the text part of the page (but remember to click on the text first...!)
Using Master Index you can also retrieve a number of hits by sampling (you specify the number). There is not much point to this, except for journalists and students wanting to stick a pin in the complete poems of X (in which case, better surely to browse the contents page of a real live book), or to get a representative selection of poetic sentiments on the theme of meadows or lust.
A word about LION's texts. A number of factors have the potential to vitiate the texts available on LION. For copyright reasons many of the texts on LION are less than up to date. Where possible, particularly in their earlier databases (poetry and drama) C-H have taken texts from modern editions out of copyright. This tends to mean that they are by Grosart. If this does not worry you, read Sprague's tactful remarks on the good reverend's shortcomings in his edition of Daniel's poems. Where this has not been possible, they have gone back to the original printed text. In some cases (like the excellent new Early English Prose Fiction database) they seem to have done this as a first option, so, delightfully, we get not Feuillerat's Sidney's Arcadia, but an edition of the 1593 text. Minor authors, represented sometimes in their entirety from the original texts, complete with preliminaries, are often better represented than very major ones, available only via a poor and incomplete 'collected' edition. Also, the electronic versions of original texts are usually more satisfying, and easier to navigate, than the e-texts of modern collected editions. It is much simpler to survey and sample the complete works of a writer if, say, his 20 publications are listed on screen as such - and are then available complete with publication details from the title page and preliminaries - rather than splattered across a single collected edition which doesn't give their dates and hasn't included dedications. In this medium 20 small virtual volumes are easier to work with than one big one. In general, then, expect a mish-mash of both old and modern spelling editions, and adjust your searches to allow for this. But be aware that some of the texts are riddled with errors, either because of poor typing or checking, or because scanning is rather haphazard (a poorly printed e will often be read by the character recognition software as a c, for example). In many cases, a text (and in some cases an author) is simply not there at all. Recent changes in copyright law (i.e. the extension of the copyright period) mean that while Hebel's Drayton was on the verse CD-ROM, it is not on LION. So if you are using LION for cross-sectional lexical searches of the whole of English Literature, you will need to acquire a sense of what is missing. There are pleasant surprises, however. It looks like where a text was first printed only in recent times (and a great many women's manuscript works fall under this category) C-H have in some cases been able to get hold of e-texts of (portions of) copyright editions. So some texts are well-edited, and accurately digitised. LION is in many ways most useful not for providing access to electronic versions of texts we all possess, but in allowing ready and alternative access to the sorts of texts which one can most often only read on UMI microfilms, the sort of 2 copies in the world texts like Markham's English Arcadia [imagine your reviewer's excitement!] or Gamage's Linsi-Woolsie. It is also great for containing vast amounts of lousy C18-C19 poetry and drama - and, indeed, for searching through it with no nose for quality -, and so is particularly well adapted to reception history sorts of projects (I found a frightening number of poems about Sidney at Zutphen).
The division of portions of text means that any lump of data with a title can be accessed separately. So one can go direct to a single sonnet, which will appear on a page of its own. One can then back up to its context, and display the whole run of sonnets, or whatever. At first this is really annoying. But once you start using LION not just to browse texts, but to conduct tightly specified searches, your annoyance transfers to the texts which are not so generously pieced up. Machines with less than 16MB RAM have problems displaying large files, and where the smallest portion of a novel or play is 50 or 300K, the computer will freeze up and think a lot before it finishes processing it. Not to mention the more familiar slow downloading problems. So if you are not downloading such a text to keep but just to glance at the occurrence of a word or phrase, time can be consumed. But LION is very well organised in telling you the size of every file it offers you, and in giving a reasonable amount of text surrounding each 'hit', so you can decide when to bother, and when to use LION to direct you to a place in a paper book.
Annotations are a problem. Texts, like Jonson's editions of his own works, which come already annotated have had their notes included in the databases, but these are always in separate files, one file per note. This is the most irritating feature of LION. It is simply not possible to see all the notes at once, to know what is in a note before downloading it (although its size is displayed), or, if one wishes to download a text for keeps, to include the notes in the text's file. Sometimes such annotations are essential to a text, but the software discourages one from bothering either to read them, or to download each and every one if one is compiling one's own library of e-texts (which, by the way, is fully allowed by C-H who accept that they cannot hope to keep hold of every bit of text, but know that they will remain unique in providing the facility to search them all). Why oh why cannot the software find a way of sticking the relevant notes at the bottom of the page?
So much for the digression, and for the master index. Now for ways of searching the meat of the databases...
Each of the databases can be searched in one of three ways
SEARCH ALL
1. This option allows searching of the full texts (including dedicatory
matter, etc.) by keyword or author; once again, fill either or both boxes
either directly or by browsing and selecting; then press the search button.
This is the best way to search all the literary texts in LION for
occurrences of words; as noted above truncations are essential for old
spelling, as are boolean operators; remember to allow for some needlessly
preserved old-spelling oddities like vv for w; truncations are also good for
getting a variety of word-forms from a common stem. For instance, 'Sidne* or
Sydne*' will find most references to Sidneys, Sidneians, Sidneides, and the
Sidneyesque.
2. Having submitted your search, you will have returned to you a 'Summary of Matches'; these are listed by database, and each entry tells you how many hits are in each database, and under how many separate entries (e.g. there may be only three hits in only one text so you will be told 3 matches and 1 entry). Click on the highlighted database names and you will enter the particular database (e.g. early prose fiction)...
3. Summary of matches within database. This page lists each entry (not each match) separately by author and title of work; it tells you how many matches are in each entry, and offers the table of contents icon; scroll down this page, and if necessary any following pages for 50+ entries (though you can again circumvent this by specifying that the search display up to 99 entries per page). Click on an interesting looking one, either the highlighted title (i), or the TOC icon (ii)...
4. (i) Context of matches. This page tells you more precisely what the hit
is, and gives you a good few words of context, usually enough to determine
whether or not to go further. This page will also offer a number of ways
into the text: for instance, just the text, or the text plus prefatory
matter, or the whole edition from which it is taken...
(ii) Contextual table of contents, which works as described above when
we got there via the Master Index
5. Text. This will be flagged with icons (called 'first hit' or 'next hit') which will jump you to the point in the text at which the match(es) occur(s). It will also offer you the contextual TOC, which you may want to look at if you came direct via 4 (i).
At each of the above stages you can start a new search or refine your search. As noted in the master index section, once you have started to look at information specific to one database (stage 3 above), clicking on the search icon (the magnifying glass) may take you to a search box for that one database only. We are slightly confused by this, as it appears to work inconsistently by database, and by frames/non-frames interface. Clearly C-H should allow access to both sorts of search page from every point in such a search.
Going back and forth is the whole problem with frames, and the reason why you may need to consider using the non-frames version - except perhaps for printing things off - even if your browser displays frames. Typically you will search all the databases at once, you will get a summary of matches, you will view the summary for a particular database, and perhaps you will look at the context of a particular entry. Very often you will not download the text, because you are really only browsing. You will then press the 'back' button on your browser to go back up to the summary of matches in order to view the entries in another database. In frames, you will probably get a blank screen; pressing 'back' again will take you back to the search page, which will be empty or will perhaps contain a search you conducted previously; to get your search results, you will have to resubmit your search. If this happens, and LION's own back/forward buttons don't work, use the non- frames version of LION, which ought to work more logically. It took us a while to work this out, because C-H don't like to trumpet their shortcomings too loudly. Even without frames you may still find your search criteria have been lost when you back up to the search page; the best way round this is to use 'refine search' to get back to this page, though, as noted above, sometimes this will give you the wrong sort of search page. Clearly, C-H need to think about making it possible to jump straight from any point in a search back to a previous one; for example (most obviously) from a full text within a particular database to the summary of matches across all the databases. The safest thing to do if you are worried about losing your search criteria is to use a clever clipboard like 'Clipmate' (available from HENSA) to keep the criteria safe, or to copy them once entered (using the browser's edit menu, which, as we are constantly observing, you must get into the habit of using to copy URLs from Harvest to your browser's address box; we worry about you...) into a dummy word processor document. It is very vexing to come up with a beautiful search term like fresh field* or freshe field* or fresh feeld* or freshe feeld* only to find it lost.
While we're on the subject of search criteria, we very much like the 'near' option. This finds two words within 10 words of each other (it doesn't matter which order you give them in). If you add a full stop and a number you can alter the range to, say, within 5 words, or 20: hand near.15 foot. By the way, LION does not allow, as does AltaVista's advanced searching, parentheses like the following, and it ought to: (fresh field* or freshe field* or fresh feeld* or freshe feeld*) near pastures new*. Because fresh field* or freshe field* or fresh feeld* or freshe feeld* near pastures new* will only match the last variant to 'pastures new*'.
HAVE WE COVERED EVERYTHING?
No. There are many features we have scarcely touched on, such as quick
referencing links from the full text page to the dictionary, and other
pieces of padding. We are aware that some of the information above is
confusing, and that in some cases this is because we are confused. But this
confusion is heuristic. Be confused by our confusion, and you will be half
way to acquiring the instincts necessary to cope with LION's eccentricities.
We hope that you will be encouraged to explore LION, or to arrange a trial
at your institution. It is certainly a way forward. But they must improve
their software. In particular, navigation is poor, and their grasp of the
point and function of hypertextual layers to texts is not good, though they
are hampered by the rather impossible constraints of the ways they chose to
input and demarcate the zillions of bytes of information they possess when
they first began to input them many years ago. Chadwyck-Healey are certainly
to be congratulated on what they have come up with so far. LION's databases
are awesome; their computers search it and return results to you with
exemplary speed; and the appearance of LION is attractive and user-friendly.
Searches are flexible, though do not quite allow the complexity sometimes
needed. It is to be hoped that they will respond to criticism, that they
will improve texts when they can, that they will replace Grosart editions
with better texts as these come out of copyright, and that they will find a
way of filling some of the big name gaps like Spenser. As an indication of
their momentum, just look at what is coming soon to LION:
AND, the next upload of Literature Online will include further literary databases including Editions and Adaptations of Shakespeare, English Prose Drama, and a collection of contemporary English Poetry. There will also be an update to ABELL.
SUMMARY
LION is a very fine thing. But, for the very expensive service that it is,
it is also a very flawed thing. Its software will improve, and like all
online services you will always find it easier to use with a powerful PC/Mac
and the most up to date browser. But it will never get rid of all its typos,
or the omissions and emissions of the poorer of the editions it has had to
use, and I for one am not about to start e- mailing C-H every time I detect
an error. So it will find you a great many things you would never have known
about without it, though it will not find all the things it might if it were
100 percent accurate, or if it contained absolutely every English literary
text, as one day it will. And if you use it not to find new stuff but to
search texts you have read or at least heard of for occurrences of words and
phrases, know that it may miss a few. It will usually find you what you
need, but sometimes it won't, because that poem is set in Ardadia, and this
is addressed to VVatson. Use it with a wariness of its weaknesses as well as
an understanding of its strengths.
For more information on LION, see recent coverage in Harvest III.iii here.
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