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Hearing is but as the sowing of the Seed; talking is not sufficient to prove that fruit is indeed in the heart and life; and let us assure our selves, that at the day of Doom, men shall be judged according to their fruits. It will not be said then, Did you believe? but, Were you Doers, or Talkers only? and accordingly shall they be judged. The end of the World is compared to our Harvest, and you know men at Harvest regard nothing but Fruit. |
OCTAVO
A few words from our top Gizmo Correspondent, Colin Burrow
The American publishers Octavo have begun a series of electronic reproductions of early modern books, which combine the pleasures and detail of a photographic facsimile with the convenience - say it, pastability - of e-texts. So far they offer Hooke's Micrographia, Newton's Opticks, Shakespeare's Poems (1640), with a variety of goodies planned for future publication, including Johnson's Dictionary, Harvey on the circulation of the blood and Vesalius's De Humani Corporis Fabrica. The focus is on texts with a large visual component, but they are also promising some more texty texts such as Areopagitica in the near future.
What do you get? Well, the great thing about the series is that the texts come as PDF files which can be viewed with an Adobe Acrobat viewer. This is free, small, quite fast, and many people will have it anyway installed on their systems. It enables you to view the volumes in near-photographic quality (you can see things like show through from the previous page, splodges of ink, torn corners, even the indentations made by individual pieces of type -- although real bibliographers might grouse at the lack of good shots of watermarks). You can also zoom in, scroll down, and navigate through the volume by means of hyperlinks. Rudimentary keyword searches are possible as well as more sophisticated proximity searches. And you can paste text from what appears to be a photograph into a word-processor. Pages can be viewed in three levels of detail: Print (which is black and white and works fast), Browse (which is in decent colour, but which disables text copying), Read (which is in good colour quality and which enables copying text) and Examine (which is extremely high detail, with pixels only becoming visible at 800x magnification). Examine mode is slowish on a Pentium 166, but Read mode lets you, well, read. And Octavo have cleverly made it look as though you are turning the pages as you move through the volume.
The limitations are mostly those of the Adobe Acrobat Viewer. Copying text works quite well, except that if you copy the bottom half of one page on an opening you also as far as I could tell have to copy the text at the bottom of the facing page. Sometimes text pasted from the 1640 Shakespeare's poems lost its line-endings. But one can live with this once one knows it's a problem. There are nice touches: a problem with the 1640 volume is finding which of Benson's combined and retitled sonnets correspond to the numbers in Thorpe's Quarto. Octavo get round this by having a side bar which lets you hop to the poems in their 1609 numberings.
This is good stuff. And it is cheap: the Shakespeare volume is 25 US dollars plus 3 dollars postage. Now think of a wish list (Milton's Poems 1645, the Jonson Folio, Herrick's Hesperides ...). Me, I'm waiting for the Vesalius: can't wait to see all those bodies pulling their flesh off, and all for 75 US dollars...
To find out more, visit http://www.octavo.com.
MORE TEXTS AT RENASCENCE EDITIONS
Yet more e-texts have been added to Richard Bear's Renascence
Editions website at: http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~rbear/ren.htm. New texts include:
Spenserians and others may be interested in testing and commenting on the Search Engine for The Faerie Queene created by Matt Kozusko at the University of Georgia: http://virtual.park.uga.edu/~mkozusko/spenser/fqsearch.html.
MIDDLETON ON-LINE
Surely one of the best electronic texts on offer. Chris Cleary
maintains this site based at the U of Virginia, and has so far
produced electronic editions of three-quarters of Middleton's
work (ranging from plays certainly written by Middleton alone to
dubious collaborations). This is an attractive set of pages and
the texts are clear and intelligently annotated; each play's
notes starts with a brief but sensible introduction. One of the
best features is that interesting points of vocabulary are not
only glossed but also linked, hypertextually, to other instances
in Middleton. Some of the notes are more extended and also make
use of links. Coming soon: the rest of the plays, and full
textual apparatus. As Cleary notes, these editions are not
refereed, but they have been undertaken carefully. Head for
http://dayhoff.med.virginia.edu/~ecc4g/middhome.html.
ABRAHAM COWLEY ON-LINE ARCHIVE
New images are being added all the time at http://etext.virginia.edu/kinney/.
At present this site, maintained by Daniel Kinney, has two texts by Cowley - The Third Part of the Works of Mr. Abraham Cowley Being his Six Books of Plants (1689), and Translation of the Sixth Book of Mr. Cowley's Plantarum (1680) - which can be read and searched. It also has many pictures of Cowley, his works, and of many related sources.
As one would expect given its affiliation to the Electronic Text Center at Virginia, this site is sensibly organised and the reproductions are very good. The archive is introduced at http://etext.virginia.edu/kinney/about.html.
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.
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/.
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/
EARLY MODERN ENGLISH DICTIONARIES DATABASE
When complete, this could turn out to be outstandingly useful. As
it stands, it is already a considerable resource. The principle
behind this project, edited by Ian Lancashire, is to collect
early dictionary materials and make them searchable. Head for the
start page at http://www.chass.utoronto.ca:8080/english/emed/emedd.html.
Here you'll find a useful introduction to EMEDD, including a
history of the project, and reflections on the nature of
renaissance word-meanings etc.
The present EMEDD includes 18 works at various stages of completion:
The 11 of these which are currently in presentable form can be searched using 'Patterweb', a search device created by Mark Catt. This allows intelligent and flexible searching, e.g. with combination searches, searching through dictionaries individually or as a group. It is possible to search for words near each other (e.g. pawn near chess) or NOT near each other (pawn not near chess) which is a clever idea. The search page is http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/english/emed/patterweb.html. Available: Palsgrave, William Thomas, Mulcaster, Thomas Thomas, Coote, Minsheu, Cawdrey, Bullokar, Cockeram, Blount, Garfield.
EMEDD is part of the older and larger Edicta project which incorporates similar projects relating to French and Latin. Find out more, and use the links, at http://www.chass.utoronto.ca:8080/~wulfric/edicta/intro.htm.
Interestingly and conveniently a recent Special Issue of the on-line journal EMLS features uses of the dictionary database mainly relating to Shakespeare. Seek inspiration at http://www.humanities.ualberta.ca/emls/si-01/si-01toc.html Most of these essays grew out of Ian Lancashire's graduate course on Shakespeare's language offered at the University of Toronto in 1995-96.
SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS (1609)
The Web Development Group of the University of Toronto Library has just
published an edition of SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS (1609) edited by Hardy M. Cook
and Ian Lancashire as part of Renaissance Electronic Texts (RET 3.1).
Renaissance Electronic Texts is a "series of old-spelling, SGML- encoded
editions of early individual copies of English Renaissance books and
manuscripts, and of plain transcriptions of such works, published on the
World Wide Web as a free resource for students of the period", under the
general editorship of Ian Lancashire. The edition is at:
http://www.library.utoronto.ca/www/utel/ret/ret.html.
MONTPELLIER EARLY MODERN ENGLISH DOCUMENTS (MEMED)
...is at http://alor.univ-montp3.fr/MEMED/.
Currently this service is offering A Declaration of the Sentence and Deposition of Elizabeth, the usurper and pretensed Queen of England (1588), The Pater Noster, the Creed, and the commandments of God in English, with many other godly lessons, right necessary for youth and all other to learn and to know, according to the commandment and injunctions given by the authority of the king's highness through this his realm (1538), and William Elderton's A New Ballad declaring the dangerous shooting of the gun at court (1579).
All of these are in HTML format although it is planned that all documents will eventually be offered in RTF format as well (RTF will be more easily accommodated by your word-processing software). More transcriptions are underway.
Also now based at the University of Montpellier is the home-page of the Societe Francaise Shakespeare: http://alor.univ-montp3.fr/serinf/SFS/. This has details of the Society, and details of its activities and congresses since 1979.
The Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches sur la Renaissance Anglaise has a large collection of Shakespearean videos which have been catalogued at http://alor.univ-montp3.fr/serinf/CERRA/Shakespeare_Multimedia/ . The list gives a lot of information about each film and could help solve those 'who was that guy who played Macduff in that weird version which was all dark' questions.
AENEID BOOK 13 ONLINE
Maffeo Vegio's addition of a thirteenth book to the Aeneid has never much
impressed modern readers but it was a common and significant accompaniment
to Virgil's epic in the Renaissance. Web hero David Wilson-Okamura has put
the text online, made it searchable, and included Twyne's translation. Good
work!
REED UPDATES
The meta-page of annotated theatre research sites on-line, which is part of
REED's home page, has just been updated with the removal of some expired
links and the addition of new ones. We have also made some corrections to
the Publications List section of our home page, including the addition of a
link to the Video Catalogue for PLS and other Toronto mediaeval videos.
URLs for REED:
LITERATURE ONLINE LATEST
Apart from some rather nasty things like a free database of love poems
called Lionheart, LION has added much of value in the last year. Many of our
gripes about its software have not been addressed, and the site continues to
purr sporadically under the latest version of Netscape and hiss rather too
ofen under Internet Explorer. Java back/forward links seem still not to work
with any consistency, but we must learn to be patient and not expect to get
what we pay for. So this is just a report on the addition of various new
databases. Under the less useful reference section we now find the Cambridge
Encyclopedia and Biographical Encyclopedia. The Literary Databases, which is
where the real action is, now include Chadwyck-Healey's Editions and
Adaptations of Shakespeare (as reviewed in CD-ROM form by Colin Burrow in
Harvest, series 1). Although not new, we should also mention the
Eighteenth-Century Fiction collection (Swift, Richardson, Fielding all
covered, and Tristram Shandy (1760 London edition) has EVERY SINGLE PAGE,
squiggles, blank, black, and marble pages, reproduced photographically, so
hurrah for C-H's good taste). Works in progress and already available in
part include Nineteenth-Century Fiction and Twentieth-Century American
Poetry. And of course, many of the pre-existent databases continue to grow
and improve. So we still love LION: http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk/
LION was first reviewed in Harvest Series II, now available in the Digest here.
OXFORD TEXT ARCHIVE
OTA has redesigned its site to improve its functionality and navigation, and
to make use of the SGML metadata already encoded with their texts, so that
what you see is now what you get. The old address has a link to the new
site, which is at: http://firth.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/ota/public/index.shtml. OTA is in the process of putting free texts (remember, some are free, some
are free if you ask nicely, some cost, and some are very restricted indeed)
online, so rather than having, as before, to get by ftp a marked-up text
which you could not view, in future, we assume, you will be able to view it
in its glory within your browser, and then save it as html or plain text.
OTA is also in the process of making online texts searchable, that is,
Oxford is aiming to be the poor man's LION. We couldn't find anything that
was yet online, but the site is all there and ready for that day, and seems
well designed (links embedded within text are not always visible because of
the colour scheme, so just keep clicking at things).
The OTA was first reviewed in Harvest Series I, now available in the Digest here.
OCLC NOW HAS MLA BIBLIOGRAPHY!
Well, that says it all. The excellent, if rather over journalled and
under-bookish, MLA bibliography, previously available online to the lucky
few and to the rest of us on CD-ROM, is now to be had at OCLC FirstSearch.
There are various different URLs for either side of the big pond, but the
simplest to the basic homepage (follow links to FirstSearch) is
http://www.ref.oclc.org:2000/ or
http://www.ref.uk.oclc.org:3000/ (for the U.K.).
You still need a password, so if you know what you're doing, go direct to,
for example http://jake.prod.oclc.org:3057/html/fs_homepage.htm.
Enter your authorisation and password, follow links to the Arts and
Humanities Database area, and try out MLA online. Search criteria will be
familiar to users of the CD-ROM/telnet versions, but the web version is so
much better: records can be tagged and emailed, you can search for entries
under one heading and then follow links to other entries for particular
authors you approve of. Records seem to be displayed in reverse order of
addition, so you get the newest first and you can follow them down until you
recognise what you came up with last time you looked. Perfection, basically.
OCLC was first introduced eons ago; you can visit this intro in the Starter Guide here.
ENGLISH SHORT TITLE CATALOGUE ON THE WEB
Which, as Richard Serjeantson observed in his review of the telnet version
(Harvest, series 1), should be English Long Title Catalogue. We have finally
got into the 'Eureka' web version, and can confirm that, alongside LION, it
is the best, most useful, and most seriously hardcore service yet available
to our kind of folk. And remember, it amalgamates STC, Wing, and the C18
STC, so you are no longer forced to pursue careers across the period
divides. As usual there are different addresses for different customers. Go
to http://eureka.thames.rlg.org/web/
and they will ask for your password. Go to your subscribing institution
(library homepage for example) from within its domain (xxx.edu or xxx.ac.uk,
etc.) and you may be able to pick up a link direct to a page which bypasses
security. The first thing to do is 'select a file', if you don't want to
search the RLIN Bibliographic File to which Eureka defaults. There are so
many to choose from (anthropology, architecture, art) it's like a sweetshop
for librarians. But choose ESTC, and when you get there, it's best to go
straight on to the advanced search screen.
Here you can do wonderful things, and all we can really do is tantalise you with a few hints. You can search by keyword, author, author word, title, title word, subject, subject word, imprint, imprint word, imprint year, imprint place, publication year, record ID, country of publication, genre, language, words from general notes, exact citation, words from citation, location words, and shelfmark. You can combine two criteria straightaway with 'and', 'or', 'and not', and when you press 'send' it will display a list in brief format of possible results (typically authors with the same surname either side of the one you were looking for). You then tick the one you want and 'send' again for another brief list of results. Tick any or all and you get the wonderfully rich ESTC entries with all their accumulated information about contents and individual copies. If you conduct a new search you can click on 'review' for a list of the searches you've done, and then merge them to get only those entries by author X published between 1640 and 1660 with a certain bookseller's name on the title page, or whatever.
Once you've got to the full record display you will see things highlighted which can lead to serious serendipity doodah. Click on the imprint line for a list of similar imprints, from the same printer AND stationer to their collaborations with others. Click on the author for the obvious, on the title for similar titles, on other names, or initials, involved for lists of their other entries, and on the generic descriptions for lists of similar works; some of the 'subject' headings seem bizarre or random, but if this is allowed for you will find yourself on a fruitful browse through the literature of vernacular prophecy or anti-catholic polemic. And at this stage the long titles are a great advantage as you stand a chance of understanding something of the contents from them, especially when they are supplemented by statements of what sort of a work this is, and what it contains. And keep browsing, for you will find much tucked away in the notes from reporting libraries, the sort of 'This is Love's Labour's Won reissued with a different title page' thing which librarians like to keep to themselves. You can 'export' full entries to yourself in various formats, but as none of these will look quite as nice as the screen in front of you, the best thing is to print the current file as well.
There are a few odd glitches which will sometimes not take you to a work you know exists when you enter its exact title, but more general searches (author plus title word) will get you there in more roundabout fashion. ESTC on the web makes possible all sorts of sophisticated searches in minutes which used to demand days of poring over, cross- referencing, and copying from, STC or Wing. And remember that the entries list the UMI call number, so you can go straight to the microfilm if (heaven forfend) you actually want to read the text. Wondrous.
NB Netscape 2.x, 3.x, or 4.x, or Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 needed to access Eureka.
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.
JACK LYNCH MOVES
And all his splendid pages with him. Now at: http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Lit/.
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/.
ARDEN SHAKESPEARE SITE (ArdenNet)
With the 3rd series of editions in progress and an excellent CD-ROM, the
people at Arden Shakespeare are striving to monopolise academic
Shakespeare. The Internet's possibilities could one day make a bit of a
mockery of print dominance, so they've made a bold attempt to get into the
action in this arena as well.
Head for the Arden Shakespeare website at: http://www.ardenshakespeare.com/main/welcome.html.
There's a lot here - or rather, there's a framework for a lot here. This site depends on enthusiastic input from an imagined constituency of electronic scholars. The fact that this constituency has not been proved to exist anywhere else yet (although the FICINO list and its kind come close) is the problem: and the question facing us is, as CERES has trumpeted before, whether to be part of the problem, or part of the solution.
To get started you'll need to surrender some not very intimate information and think up a password. By the way, some would say that it would be a good idea not to use the same password for everything.
The site is organised under headings which cover a wide range of content. You should know that the following chirpy-sounding list mainly uses the ArdenNet's own wording:
CERES offers its two-penn'orth: as was hinted above, it's easy to summarise the state of play: the system is there, and the space available, to create a really substantial forum for electronic discussion. Whether we are yet at the technological watershed which will suddenly make this work well is unclear. Hope springs eternal, and Arden has many influential friends, so keep an eye on ArdenNet.
ARDENNET UPDATE
New: the publication, exclusive to ArdenNet, of research from
Eric Rasmussen and a team of graduate students purporting to shed new light
on the manuscript used to typeset and print the second quarto of Hamlet and
challenging the conventional belief that it was set from "foul papers".
Visit the Scholarship section for the full text of the paper. Additionally,
as usual, full listings of performances and recently released Shakespeare
books are available through the News and Reviews pages. Also included are
full details of Shakespeare Festivals throughout the United States and the
London Shakespeare's Globe Theatre season. ArdenNet is at
http://www.ardenshakespeare.com/ardennet/
DISSERTATION ABSTRACTS ONLINE
MLA continues to include citations for Dissertation Abstracts International
entries, but you may wish to go straight to the horse's mouth (providing
your institution subscribes): http://wwwlib.umi.com/dissertations/
Clearly UMI just don't care any more. Not only are they thinking the
unthinkable and preparing to digitise the 20,000+ microfilmed STC volumes,
but they are also doing the same with doctoral dissertations. You will be
shocked to discover that not only can you read and print off dissertation
abstracts, but for the most recent entries (and the most recent are
displayed first), you can add the dissertation to your shopping basket (just
as at any of the online bookshops, such as www.amazon.com or
www.bookshop.co.uk), go to the checkout, and for an even 50 dollars acquire
the right to download 15MB or so of digitised dissertation. You can then
print off a camera-ready, or perhaps oven-ready, text of the latest madcap
modern claptrap or promising scholarship. Extraordinary. You need a PDF
reader, but they tell you what that is and how to get it.
DAI leaves the UK well alone, and who can blame it? Fortunately, searchers for British dissertations are now almost equally well served by the Index to Theses website: http://www.theses.com/. Entries are displayed in no particular order, but as there are fewer, this is not yet a problem. A particularly silly feature is the fourfold discrimination 'quick search', 'simple search', 'standard search', 'advanced search' (the latter is encoded with such complicated logic that you need a Ph.D. in information analysis just to use it - very British), but the 'simple' and 'standard' do allow you to do interesting and useful things like searching by University and by title keywords using and/or.
And, a reminder that musicological theses are abstracted at: http://www.music.indiana.edu/ddm/.
ARTS AND HUMANITIES DATA SERVICE
The Joint Information Systems Committee of the United Kingdom's Higher
Education Funding Councils (or rather, the JISC of the UK's HEFCs) fund
this attempt to collect and catalogue and offer good quality electronic
resources on-line. Those who are in love with the Internet's fragmented
side and who enjoy picking up a text of Milton in Perth and then a text of
Marvell in the other Perth won't see the point of it, but there is
something to be said for a body which considers the best ways of creating
publicity, access, and protocols for serious research resources which have
often taken a lot of effort to produce. Also, the one thing education
systems need is lots of committees, as any member of the NAFH working group
of the PTTP committee of CERES can tell you.
So far the literary material is basically the Oxford Text Archive and the link from AHDS sends you straight there. We already have a link to OTA on our web page so that's not a great advance. The History materials are more impressive although AHDS again acts as a central linking hub. One of CERES' most oft-repeated sententiae is that there is a lot of potential here and it could become a wonderful resource (particularly in this case for its interdisciplinary possibilities) BUT that depends on the contributions made by people like us. At this stage the food for thought here is mainly for those who are thinking of putting resources on-line themselves. Find the AHDS at http://ahds.ac.uk.
INTERNET PUBLIC LIBRARY: ONLINE LITERARY CRITICISM COLLECTION
The Online Literary Criticism Collection contains links to 1180 critical and
biographical websites about authors and their works that can be browsed by
author, by title, or by literary period. The Renaissance list is at:
http://www.ipl.org/cgi-bin/ref/litcrit/litcrit.out.pl?pd=British:+1500-1700.
It includes mention of familiar names like EMLS and Renaissance Forum and a
few self-contained articles on the web. A list of authors at the bottom
leads to a page of links to discussions of the author, and his or her works
are then cross-referenced separately. All structure and little content as
yet, but with time this could become a useful bookmark.
EUROPEAN OPACS
A smattering of useful online union catalogues. For Italy:
http://opac.sbn.it/.
For Germany: http://dbix01.dbi-berlin.de:6100/DBI/login.html.
Also worth investigating is the Karlsruher Virtueller Katalog (KVK), which
marshals a number of opac resources:
http://www.ubka.uni-karlsruhe.de/kvk.html.
Still no sign of a web based catalogue at the Bibliotheque Nationale, but
the site is so pretty in other respects that we'll give the URL anyway:
http://www.bnf.fr/index.htm.
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/.
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.
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/
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
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.
SWEET 'N' LOW
The Shakespeare Society of the Low Countries has just opened its home- page
at http://shakespeare.let.ruu.nl/
The page is bilingual, Dutch and English, and includes tables of contents
for past issues of the Society's journal, Folio, and some Shakespearian
links. In the years to come, they are hoping to extend the site into a
useful resource for all scholars who are interested in Shakespeare studies
in general, and in Dutch and Flemish contributions to Shakespeare
scholarship, translations, performances and so on, in particular. Any
suggestions are welcome.
ELIZABETHAN REVIEW
This is an on-line journal of less standing than some and, I am
afraid to report, takes an unhealthy interest in the question of
whether the Earl of Oxford wrote Shakespeare's plays. Still, some
of its output is on-line and there may be things of interest. You
can find ER at http://www.elizreview.com/.
MONTAIGNE STUDIES
The journal's homepage includes tables of contents of past issues
but not electronic versions of the articles. Included also is the
'Bibliotheca Desaniana' which includes bibliographical details
and facsimile title-pages of editions from the first to Dali's
selection from Cotton's translation. Links from here to some
French renaissance texts and resources. Head for:
http://humanities.uchicago.edu/humanities/montaigne/index.html.
RENAISSANCE FORUM
The Autumn 1997 (2.2) issue of Renaissance Forum is available on
the WWW from http://www.hull.ac.uk/renforum/index.html. Contents include: Steve Longstaffe, 'What is the English history
play and why are they saying such terrible things about it?'; David
Siar, 'Jean E. Howard's Postmodern Marxist Feminism and the
Economic Last Instance'; and Anny Crunelle-Vanrigh with a Kristevan
view of Hamlet's First Soliloquy. Plus reviews by Nick Cox, J. C. Davis, Lisa Hopkins, Romauld I. Lakowski, Mark E. C. Perrott, Jeffrey Powers-Beck and J. A. Sharpe
of books by or edited by Simon Barker, David Bevington, David
Cressy, Christopher Durston and Jacqueline Eales, R.A. Foakes, Sean
Kelsey, William Lamont, Diarmaid MacCulloch, Julia Reinhard Lupton,
Derek Roper, John Russell Brown, David L. Smith, Richard Strier and
David Bevington, and Michael Taylor.
Renaissance Forum 3.1 is also out, based at http://www.hull.ac.uk/renforum. Articles include...
EMLS
Early Modern Literary Studies 3.3 (January, 1998) is now available at
http://purl.oclc.org/emls/emlshome.html. This EMLS is a special issue called 'The Internet Shakespeare:
Opportunities in a New Medium' and includes articles by Paul Werstine on
'Hypertext and Editorial Myth', Anne Lancashire on 'What Do the Users
Really Want?', Ian Lancashire on 'The Common Reader's Shakespeare', Donald
Foster on 'A Romance of Electronic Scholarship; with the True and
Lamentable Tragedies of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Part 1: The Words', R.G.
Siemens on 'Disparate Structures, Electronic and Otherwise: Conceptions of
Textual Organisation in the Electronic Medium, with Reference to Electronic
Editions of Shakespeare and the Internet', and a foreword and afterword by
Michael Best. Also included are a note on 'Production Resources at the
Whitefriars Playhouse, 1609-1612' and a good clutch of reviews.
Early Modern Literary Studies 4.1 is also out, based at http://purl.oclc.org/emls/emlshome.html. Articles include...
RENAISSANCE NEWS AND NOTES
The latest issue of Renaissance News and Notes, including information and
registration forms for the 1999 RSA conference, has just been put on the
RSA website (http://www.r-s-a.org).
EXPLORATIONS IN RENAISSANCE CULTURE
Another nice journal website, with information and tables of contents. URL: http://www.smsu.edu/English/eirc/eirc.html.
BIDS AUTOJOURNALS
Find out about this service at http://www.bids.ac.uk/news/autojnls.html. The deal is that BIDS will e-mail the Contents Pages of journals when they
are catalogued at BIDS - which is very frequently. If you love browsing the
periodicals shelves then this will spoil your fun, but do you really catch
everything of interest? Really?
One wonderful feature is that you can customize your own list of journals from the huge list at BIDS. Although it can take quite a while to trawl through and choose the ones you want, this can be very useful as it points to which periodicals aren't there. BIDS is great, but it is not perfect. Then again, the MLA Bibliography doesn't do this (or we don't think it does anyway). If your institution is with the programme, enjoy!
SIDNEY-L ARCHIVED
Archives of the Sidney-L e-mail discussion list are now available for
viewing and searching at http://info.uoguelph.ca/archives/sidney-l.html.
A reminder that the Sidney Journal website is just next door at
http://www.uoguelph.ca/englit/sidney
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/
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.
portraits
There is a general Elizabethan site at http://tudor.simplenet.com/.
This is good stuff: the enthusiastic owner tells stories and puts down the
facts. There are also plenty of pics of the main players in the Tudor
period. The site also includes material on Tudor architecture, including a few
examples not in the CERES list of renaissance buildings on the web. The best yield from this site is probably a nice row of Elizabeth portraits at http://tudor.simplenet.com/elizabeth/gallery.html.
There is typically gorgeous stuff from Luminarium at http://www.luminarium.org/renlit/elizface.htm. Lots of portraits, beautifully presented, although with (hem hem) an ungainly use of terminal long 's'. Luminarium's list of links is very good, connecting to genealogies, biographies, etc. Don't get excited by the thought of an Elizabeth I Barbie Doll. That link does not work: outrageous! Plenty of other good things at http://www.luminarium.org/renlit/elizlink.htm.
elizabethan bacon?
Permit yourselves a small chuckle at the description of a Hilliard painting
as 'Elizabeth and her Son' at http://www.sirbacon.org/gallery/liz2.html. In fact the Baconians who run this site have a very good explanation for
all this: Elizabeth's two sons were Essex (of course!) and Francis Bacon.
To find out exactly what was going on here I had to pass through the main
page of the site (http://www.sirbacon.org) which features Bacon riding a
motorbike decorated with the words 'Francis Bacon Is Shakespeare'. The next
page I reached said that Bacon's plays have been attributed to 'William
Shakespeare, an illiterate peasant'. At this point I came over all
intolerant and set fire to my computer. I did not find out exactly what was
going on. But I did see a very attractive page with the astrological charts of the
Queen and her (gulp) son, Francis Tudor Bacon (double gulp). It looks
lovely at http://www.sirbacon.org/links/charts.htm, but it means, er, whatever you decide, dear reader.
works
For Elizabeth's works (poems, speeches, letters) head for Luminarium again.
You can link to online versions of her works from here, some of which are
held at Luminarium itself. Others are at Toronto (head for
http://library.utoronto.ca/www/utel/rp/indexauthors.html).
The Brown Women Writers Project, which has featured in our pages many times before, is due ever more respect for its contribution to the Elizabeth trawl. There are various collections at http://swansong.stg.brown.edu:1081/dynaweb/. Two are particularly relevant to CERES, one being 'In Her Own Words: Elizabeth I Onstage and Online'. This has some detailed contextual material and texts of the surviving speeches. It is a high-level resource and the software does a decent job. The other thing to check out here is 'Renaissance Women Online', with its many texts, contextual materials, and more general essays. This is another example of how those working on women's writing are making particularly good use of the opportunities offered by electronic media.
DynaWeb's strategy of using multiple windows makes it very clear where you are in the database. In the end, this adds an enormous amount to these materials, outweighing the disadvantage of the smaller window size. If you prefer a more conventional approach, you can get to the Elizabeth materials (and find out that 'In Her Own Words' is also a series of performances) in a more run-of-the-mill format via http://www.wwp.brown.edu/rich/QEIhome.html. For more information on DynaWeb software, see http://www.inso.com/.
handwriting
Samples of Elizabeth's handwriting abound. There's a copy of the queen's signature at
http://www.handwriting.org/images/samples/qelizab1.htm. You can find Henry VIII's scribble at the same site, and between the two
English monarchs in the index of 'Political Leaders' is Ross Perot.
Bizarre. They have several samples of Bill Clinton, all (fortunately) in
ink. Other versions of the signature include http://www.mala.bc.ca/~Lepage/Eliza.htm and http://tudor.simplenet.com/elizabeth/signature.gif(too clear to be true?). As far as more prosey autographs go, there is a nice image of a document in which Elizabeth grants lottery cash to the Free Grammar School in Bury St Edmunds, available at http://www.suffolkcc.gov.uk/libraries_and_heritage/sro/e5_9_102.html.
elizabeth's sayings
In an unusual perspective, five of Elizabeth I's most famous sayings are connected to five different
kinds of creativity by the good people at bemorecreative.com. Now CERES
didn't find itself very inspired by this, but you may feel that cynicism is
our biggest problem. Think creatively by starting at http://www.bemorecreative.com/one/612.htm.
elizabethan costume
If you're interested in Elizabethan costume, your best bet is to find your own path through the shimmering depths of
http://www.dnaco.net/~aleed/corsets/general.html.
This site has everything from the history of the Elizabethan corset to
instructions on how to make a genuine Elizabethan bumroll. Much of the site
is made up of instructions on how to make your own garments, but there is also
general historical material. You can even search the wardrobe accounts of Mary Tudor and Edward IV, an excellent feature which, sadly, wasn't working
when CERES had a go. Still, if anyone finds out how many black lace
petticoats Edward IV had, you know who wants to know. There are links to
pictures of Elizabethan costume all over this site, and there is a good
annotated bibliography from which you can leap to Amazon.com to order the
books in question. If CERES gave out some kind of award, this site would get two; Drea Leed, creator of this site, we salute you!
JAMESTOWN REDISCOVERY
The Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities keeps a website
at http://www.apva.org/. Excavations and discoveries continue on the site of James I's settlement in
Virginia. This site offers historical background, description of recent
discoveries, plans for the future, and information about visiting. Some of
the pages use a fairly basic question and answer format, but the information
and presentation are usually interesting.
Williamsburg Online also has Jamestown pages, which are aimed at potential visitors and have background information. Find out what's available at http://www.williamsburg.com/james/james.html. The main site at http://www.williamsburg.com is a feast of colonial American fun.
AND ROANOKE TOO
Lots of recent archaeology in Roanoke too, some of which is described on the Web.
A good starting point is http://scrtec.org/track/tracks/t00428.html.
This is a kind of public service thingummy called Trackstar, featuring lists of resources aimed at education. From here you can reach various resources related to discoveries about the mysterious lost colony.
The most interesting link is to news of a discovery in 1996 of a possible
Croatan Indian site, at http://www.nando.net/newsroom/nao/nc/030696/nct_1686.html.
One potentially very useful resource is run by Tom Langford of the International Internet Genealogical Society. For CERES purposes what is offered here is information (numbers and names) about settlers heading for colonies in the Americas. It has information about individual ships and about settlements, so you can get a list of the Roanoke settlers. It is not exhaustive or complete, but it is substantial. Start from http://www.primenet.com/~langford/.
Curiously enough, you can get Ralph Lane's account of the first Roanoke colony, and John Smith's account of Jamestown, via the list of Historical Documents put online by the National Center for Public Policy Research, URL: http://www.nationalcenter.org/HistoricalDocuments.html. The NCPPR's list of documents, set out in chronological order, is presumably designed to convert anyone who reads too many of them to 'Conservative' views, so CERES urges considerable caution in the use of this site. For an alternative view, head for the relevant section of Hakim Bey's 'The Temporary Autonomous Zone' at http://www.notam.uio.no/~mariusw/bey/taz/taz.html#labelGoneToCroatan.
There are links to various sources of online information about the Lost Colony from http://www.kidinfo.com/American_History/Colonization_Roanoke.html. However, it is possible that many CERES members are well-informed and/or self-conscious enough not to want to visit any site called Kid Info.
Some of John White's engravings made during his time in the Roanoke colony can be seen at http://www.philaprintshop.com/debry.html as part of their De Bry series. The Philadelphia Print Shop is actually trying to sell you things at this site, but CERES emerged with wallet unscathed, although the pictures are great.
FLORIMENE ON THE WEB
This project is at heart a teaching resource, using electronic
media to guide students through 17th century staging via the
example of Florimene. Started in 1988, it has (not surprisingly)
changed its method considerably and the genesis of the current
WWW format takes up some space on the site, but it is
interesting. The material on staging is impressively technical
and represented in wonderfully bilious colours which recall the
great days of 1980s computing. For content and for its
demonstration of what can be done, this is worth a visit:
http://artsci.washington.edu/drama/flori1.html.
TYBURN TREE
A website devoted to public execution in early modern England,
including texts (a couple of homilies), selections from other
contemporary documents (Kyd, Pepys, Boswell, Newgate Calendar), a
few dying speeches, images, bibliography, and links. The site is
unfinished and apologises for this; its current sponsor clearly
wants to hand it over to someone else. Nevertheless, some stuff...
http://www.wantree.com.au/~halligan/tyburn.htm.
CULTURAL READINGS: COLONIZATION AND PRINT IN THE AMERICAS
NEW ON LINE EXHIBITION
This collaborative web site presents and interprets a wide variety of texts
- books, manuscripts, illustrations, maps, and artifacts - generated by
Europe's colonization of the Americas. Comparative and broad in scope, the
exhibition investigates Spanish, French, English, and Dutch 'readings' of
the New World and the 'readings' of Europeans made by many Native cultures.
Topics covered include the literature of colonial promotion; printed images
of Natives; Native responses to print; missionary activities; Indian
languages; the geographies of the New World; and captivity narratives. The
web site also contains essays by Louise Burkhart, Sabine MacCormack,
Michael Ryan, Daniel Slive, and Karim Tiro; bibliography; and web links.
Materials shown in 'Cultural Readings' are drawn from the collections of
the Jay I. Kislak Foundation; the Rosenbach Museum & Library; the
University of Pennsylvania's Department of Special Collections; and the
University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Find it at http://www.library.upenn.edu/special/gallery/kislak/index/cultural.html.
NICE LINKS
Carlo Bajetta has been busy surfing and has come up with a long and cultured
list of links to all sorts of necessary (and a few sorts of unnecessary)
places, some of which may be new to you. So if you don't trust us to tell
you what you need to know, have a look at:
http://www.unicatt.it/library/milano/BancheDati/surf2.htm
RESOURCES IN ART HISTORY
Adrienne DeAngelis of Rutgers has started up a site called 'Resources in
Art History for Graduate Students', located at
http://www.eden.rutgers.edu/~acd.
This lists fellowships, grants, internships, symposia and other types of
assistance for graduate students in art history and related fields.
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
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.
