CERES Harvest 5.1
20 July 2004

INTRODUCTION
It has been an unconscionably long time since our last Harvest; but the gears have got grinding again, and with a little luck we may work up some head. This issue, the first in our fifth series, sees a slight change in editorial composition; while Gavin Alexander and Raphael Lyne continue to serve as editors of CERES itself, the task of editing Harvest has fallen to Christopher Burlinson and Andrew Zurcher, with the assistance of contributors such as Tom Charlton, who has supplied the major review (of the online Dictionary of the Scots Language) at the core of this issue. Over the next few months Christopher and Andrew will be putting into place a set of regular routines for collecting news, both of conferences/seminars and of new internet resources; please feel free to get in touch if you would like to point us to any web material of especial worth, or if you would like us to distribute CFPs, announcements, or other information. Please note too that the CERES website-including our Harvest archive, our links pages, and the many current projects hosted by our COPIA service-continues to reside at the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge: http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/ceres/

Because this issue of Harvest has been so long in the making, it has been necessary to take a fresh look at many old favorites. Some of the core internet services for Renaissance research on the internet have, of course, undergone substantial development over the last few years, and both new content and new functionality have changed the landscape of the possible in internet sleuthing. Among the many familiar names, however, there are a number of new arrivals, among them the Ovid Collection at the University of Virginia's Electronic Text Center, and the Glasgow Emblems Project.

It may also be useful to say a few quick words about our own home-grown developments. Many of you will have seen the CERES-built palaeography course, English Handwriting 1500-1700: An Online Course, a project that united the usual CERES team with a range of graduate transcribers, college library collections, palaeographers (special thanks to Elisabeth Leedham-Green), and generous funding bodies. The course, at http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/ceres/ehoc/, is undergoing its first annual overhaul over the next few months, and will be well worth a fresh visit in the autumn (and if you haven't been there yet, please be our guest!). Work has also continued on Hap Hazard: A Manuscript Resource for Spenser Studies (http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/ceres/haphazard/), for which Christopher Burlinson and Andrew Zurcher have completed editing the entire diplomatic correspondence relating to Edmund Spenser's secretarial career in Ireland (identifying more than a few new documents in the process), complete with textual notes and an introduction; further supplementary materials, including historical annotations, biographies, and palaeographical analysis, will appear over the next calendar year. Further planned additions to Hap Hazard and to the other COPIA projects will be announced in our next issue of Harvest.

ELECTRONIC RESOURCES

ONLINE EMBLEM BOOKS

ENGLISH EMBLEM-BOOK PROJECT
http://emblem.libraries.psu.edu

Hosted by Penn State Univeristy, and making use of books from their library, the English Emblem Book Project is one of the best-known, and one of the best, of these resources. It provides very fine page-images (with non-edited texts) from English emblem-books, and English translations of continental books, from the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The site includes texts by Ayres, Harvey, H.G., Hugo, Paradin, Quarles, R.B., Whitney, and Wither. This is a very substantial and useful body of material, and the emblems are usefully indexed by title, rather than just number, even though the (often brief) Latin titles don't always help a user to search for a particular image or text as easily as might be. The unedited texts also mean that it is hard to search for particular words or phrases: the site points the user towards Penn State's English Poetry Database - http://www.lias.psu.edu/helps/dcetext.html - for this. The site is quite thin on supplementary material, too, but there are (briefish) bibliographical notes on the emblem-books, and also a useful secondary reading-list.

ALCIATO'S EMBLEMATUM LIBER
http://www.mun.ca/alciato

William Barker, Mark Feltham, and Jean Guthrie at the Memorial University of Newfoundland provides digitized images of Andrea Alciato's Emblematum Liber (Book of Emblems), published in several editions after 1531, which had enormous influence over subsequent emblem-books. The site allows you to look at Latin and English versions side-by-side; there is useful commentary on the emblems, which frequently links to equivalent emblems in Geoffrey Whitney's Choice of Emblemes (1586), and in French translations of Alciato on the Glasgow University Emblems Website (see below). This allows consideration of the adaptation and re-design of emblems and images, although it sometimes makes the page start to appear overcrowded with frames - click on the numbers at the bottom of the page to return to a clearer page. There is also some very good supplementary material, and the site provides thumb-nails of the images, which, in spite of its currently more limited range of material, might make it potentially more searchable than the English Emblem-Book Project. Although it was last updated more than a year ago, the editors promise an edition of Mignault's De Symbolis, and other supplementary materials; this is still a site to watch.

GLASGOW UNIVERSITY CENTRE FOR EMBLEM STUDIES
http://www.ces.arts.gla.ac.uk/html/centre.htm

The University of Glasgow's Centre for Emblem Studies is a focus for a number of developing online resources, as well as seminar series and publications that are also advertised on its website. These resources will be particularly useful to those studying French emblem-books. The Glasgow University Emblems Website - http://www.emblems.arts.gla.ac.uk --provides electronic versions of different French translations (Lefevre, 1536 and Aneau, 1549) of Alciato: easily navigable from one to the other, and with rather small (and occasionally unclear) images and edited texts. The Centre for Emblem Studies has also recently received a major AHRB grant (running from 2004 to 2006), to digitize the whole corpus of 16th century French emblem-books. Details of this project, which looks extremely impressive and will obviously be worth bookmarking, are given on http://www.ces.arts.gla.ac.uk/html/AHRBProject.htm. The site also provides a link to the Stirling Maxwell Collection at Glasgow, a major collection of sixteenth- to nineteenth-century emblem-books and related literature, though, sadly, few images: http://special.lib.gla.ac.uk/collection/stirling.html.

MNEMOSYNE IMAGE ATLAS
http://www.mnemosyne.org/mia/

Mnemosyne is an interdisciplinary group of Dutch scholars, whose 'Image Atlas' is an enormously absorbing, compendious, and very searchable collection of medieval and early modern images, not just from emblem books (a list of the books used is accessible from the home-page, but the site provides only the images, not the texts, of these emblems) but also from illuminated manuscripts, printers' devices, and so on: mainly Dutch, and from Dutch university libraries. The site feels a bit untidy and rambling, and has some of the commercial advertisements and quirky design that you might not expect from a university website, but it contains an astonishing amount of material. Try entering 'crocodile' into the search box, as it recommends, and see how much it comes up with.

GERMAN EMBLEM BOOKS
http://images.library.uiuc.edu/projects/emblems

Hosted by the University of Illinois Library, this site is an extremely ambitious and apparently on-going project to digitize the library's collection of German emblem-books. It is a very high-quality site, and very searchable (by emblem topic as well as keyword).

EMBLEM PROJECT UTRECHT
http://emblems.let.uu.nl/emblems/html/index.html

The Emblem Project Utrecht describes its focus as Dutch love-emblem-books of the seventeenth century, but is much broader in scope than this might suggest. It is an international project (with contributions from Glasgow, among other centres), and aims to provide digitized images of 25 sacred and secular emblem-books (nine were online at the time of writing). The site is clearly designed and very searchable (with thumbnails), and has a lot of excellent supplementary material.

OTHER ONLINE RESOURCES

Updates to EARLY ENGLISH BOOKS ONLINE (EEBO)
http://eebo.chadwyck.com

First of all, the URL for this service has changed to reflect the consolidation of EEBO and the various services heaped under the name of Chadwyck-Healy; but much else is happening underneath the surface, too. Foremost among such developments is the ongoing work of the Text Creation Partnership (TCP; see http://www.lib.umich.edu/tcp/eebo/proj_stat/ps_partners.html), an initiative founded in 1999 by EEBO, the University of Michigan, and the University of Oxford to create SGML-encoded texts of all 25,000 titles appearing in the EEBO library. Now with the contributions of a much larger group of institutions (see the TCP site to find out if your institution is participating), the TCP has completed the encoding of over 6,000 texts, which are available, readable, and searchable to members of participating institutions. EEBO has also finally got underway with the addition of the British Library's celebrated Thomason Tracts-political tracts, broadsides and newspapers collected by George Thomason between the outbreak of the English Civil War and the Restoration-digitization of which should be completed in 2005. So far, a mere 800 of a total 22,000 items have been added, but new additions will be deposited on a regular basis. A number of improvements have recently been made to EEBO's functionality, too; well and truly gone are the days of the corrupt PDF transfer, but now it is again possible to download entire volumes in a single (often enormous) file, and it is also possible to pre-sort search results by author, date, or title-a simple improvement that seriously improves efficiency for large searches, in particular, or searches for popular, often-printed titles. EEBO continues to go from strength to strength.

Updates to RENASCENCE EDITIONS
http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~rbear/ren.htm

While EEBO is still fiddling with its TCP, our preferred free-access Renaissance text providers go on doing what they do best: providing good, readable editions of important, underserved, or otherwise desirable works. At 191 texts (some of them salvaged from Virginia Tech's old ERIS project) from Ascham to Wroth, Renascence Editions is close to its 200-text mark, when its race will finally be run. While Richard Bear, the editor, carefully warns against complacent scholarly use of these adequate but often not flawless editions, prepared entirely by volunteers in their spare time, they remain very useful for student use, and for quick reference/searching.

SHAKESPEAREAN PROMPT-BOOKS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
G. Blakemore Evans, ed. The Bibliographical Society of Virginia
http://etext.virginia.edu/bsuva/promptbook/

This impressive free-access, online presentation of G. Blakemore Evans' research on seventeenth-century Shakespearean prompt-books (and other stage texts) is a delight to use. In all, eight print volumes of textual study, originally published by the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, are re-presented here, covering eleven plays from The Comedy of Errors to Henry VIII (some plays in multiple versions). The project aims to collate the various surviving manuscript witnesses to seventeenth-century productions of Shakespeare's plays; this research is supplemented with a substantial set of illustrations (here very sensitively deployed in high-resolution JPEG images), to which the University of Virginia's Electronic Text Center has added an online search facility.

THE OVID COLLECTION
and 'Ovid Illustrated: the Renaissance Reception of Ovid'
http://etext.virginia.edu/latin/ovid/

This lavish presentation of Renaissance materials relating to Ovid-another fine project hosted by the University of Virginia's Electronic Text Center, designed and written by Daniel Kinney and Elizabeth Styron-delivers a huge, sometimes bewilderingly huge, corpus of texts and images. Everything that you could ask for from such an ambitious project is seemingly here: a range of important texts and translations of Ovid's Metamorphoses, including high-resolution digitizations of all the text and woodcuts from several of the most interesting editions, a fine introduction with meticulous textual notes, a substantial bibliography and set of links, and various critical and visual resources.

BOETHIUS, CONSOLATION OF PHILOSOPHY
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/latin/boethius/consolatio.html

These pages present the Latin text of Boethius's Consolatio Philosophiae in the Bryn Mawr edition prepared and annotated by James O'Donnell (2nd edition, 1990), following Weinberger's 1935 text. The site also includes the English translation of the Consolatio produced by W.V. Cooper for the 1902 Dent edition. The design of the site is straightforward and spare, and not easily navigable; but the texts are the stars here, and they are presented cleanly and clearly, and come with the usual Electronic Text Center search facility. The site also includes a select bibliography and a metrical introduction to quantitative verse.

Updates to the MILTON READING ROOM
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/

The Milton Reading Room is always under active development, under the assiduous cultivation of editor Thomas H. Luxon of Dartmouth College. The site now includes texts of most of Milton's major poetry in English, and an increasing amount of his prose: recent additions include Areopagitica, Colasterion, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, Of Education, and The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, while in-progress versions of The Reason of Church Government, Tetrachordon, and A Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes are also available. New reading and critical resources are constantly being added, and the quality and quantity of annotation seems to be improving steadily-it is well worth having an updating look from time to time.

Updates to the PHILOLOGICAL MUSEUM
http://www.philological.bham.ac.uk/index.html

Dana Sutton's excellent site presenting Renaissance 'humanistic' neo-Latin texts has moved from the University of California, Irvine to the University of Birmingham, and is now co-edited by Martin Wiggins (Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham). The list of works in 'The Library' is under constant expansion, and now includes nearly eighty Latin texts, with commentary, from the Seymour sisters' In Mortem Divae Margaritae Valesiae Navarrorum Reginae Hecatodistichon (1550), through the works of Peele, Fitzgeoffrey, Alabaster, Camden, Bacon, and Phineas Fletcher, to Milton and Richard Bentley. All of these texts include useful introductions. The editors also keep the exhaustive 'Analytic Bibliography of On-line Neo-Latin Texts' scrupulously up to date (last revision 13 July 2004), and supply a separate list of 'recent additions'-making regular check-ups very efficient.

VIRTUAL JAMESTOWN
http://www.virtualjamestown.org

Virtual Jamestown describes iself as 'a digital research, teaching and learning project that explores the legacies of the Jamestown settlement and "the Virginia experiment"', and hopes 'to shape the national dialogue on the occasion of the four hundred-year anniversary observance in 2007 of the founding of the Jamestown colony'. It seems to be aimed at least partly at use in schools, and is in fact an excellent site with a great deal of archival material (cartographical, historical, legal, and so on), some of which is still apparently in the process of being put online. The 'Maps and Images' section contains copies of the famous White / De Bry drawings, as well as a number of contemporary maps.

MARTEAU CURRENCY CONVERTER
http://www.pierre-marteau.com/currency/converter.html

A European currency converter for the early eighteenth century written by Olaf Simons and Matthias Böhne, this tool is obviously not of direct application for most Renaissance scholars; and yet those of us with a focus, or even a passing interest, in book history may occasionally find it very convenient. As the editors self-deprecatingly and simply comment of their elegant design, 'the tool offers conversions between all kinds of number systems. Without much effort you can get from systems of 72 and 5 into sytems of 3, 16 and 12. Our pages should be easy to handle...' And they are. Even if just as a reminder of what kinds of useful reference resources should be possible on the internet, this is worth a quick inspection.

ONLINE CATALOGUE RESOURCES AT THE NATIONAL ARCHIVE
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/

The National Archives (formerly the Public Record Office) have invested substantially in an overhaul of their website over the past two years, and now provide a number of new and very efficient catalogue, document-ordering, and reproduction services online. For starters, note the new URL; while the old pro.gov.uk address still bounces you to the new address, it would be wise to update your bookmarks. It is now possible to search all the records of the National Archives online using the catalogue (formerly known as PROCAT), giving us access to full ISAD-G-compliant descriptions of over 9.5 million items. The NA website also gives handy access to the other major archival catalogue resources, for items held in county record offices, local institutions, etc.: the National Register of Archives, the Archon Directory of Archives, the Access to Archives umbrella catalogue, the Manorial Documents Register, etc. To get started, go to http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/academic/

And while you're at the National Archives, you might also try stopping in for a quick gander at some of the visual treasures very satisfactorily displayed in a new online 'exhibitions and treasures' page, such as these images from materials relating to Tudor and Stuart history: http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/museum/dates.asp?date_id=2

NEW FROM THE BRITISH LIBRARY
http://www.bl.uk

The online catalogue services at the British Library continue to improve (and, at the giddy rates they continue to charge for reproductions, it's the least they can do). When visiting the catalogue portal (http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/listings.html), note particularly the improved functionality of the manuscripts catalogue, where the range of search categories for index searching has been expanded considerably; the new addition of a catalogue of maps, via CURL and using a new version of COPAC (note that you will have to restrict the search to the BL holdings, if you want only BL maps); the new digital catalogue of Medieval and Renaissance illuminated manuscripts; and the fascinating (altogether too fascinating?) in-progress database of bookbindings. The BL has already installed a powerful new, integrated catalogue on site in St Pancras, which should be available to website users later in the summer; with this catalogue update, it should become possible to order documents online before your visit (at last; next stop, the Bodleian).

REVIEW:
'The Mither Tongue': the Dictionary of the Scots Language online
by Tom Charlton
http://www.dsl.ac.uk/dsl/

Commenting on the 1603 accession of James VI of Scotland to the English throne, Thomas Dekker suggested in The Wonderful Year that 'the people of both Empires' spoke 'a language lesse differing than english within it selfe, as the prouidence had enacted, that one day those Nations should marry one another'. Yet the notion of a perfect union, analogous to the perceived linguistic and cultural similarities and so warmly advocated by James himself, faced daunting obstacles in the legal and political autonomy of Scotland. The influx of Scottish nobles into London exacerbated differences as much as it overcame them - these too were manifested linguistically: members of the English political elite complained that they found James's accent impenetrable, and the earl of Suffolk suggested that someone should teach English to Sir Robert Ker (his future son-in-law), 'as he is a Scottish lad' and 'hath much need of better language'.

Deriving from a strain of Northumbrian Anglo-Saxon, Scots has always had a complicated relationship with its dominant cousin south of the border, and has struggled to achieve recognition as a language in its own right, often being dismissed as a collection of variable English dialects. James had written of the need for 'a King to purifie and make famous his owne tongue'. But the success of Basilikon Doron in two London editions of 1603 has obscured how heavily it drew on the Scots language of an earlier advice book for James's son, Henry, 'anent [concerning] a Kings Christian Duetie towards God'. James criticised his tutor George Buchanan for forcing him to learn 'Latin ere I could well speak Scots', and his poetry likewise exhibited an affinity towards Scots as a language, over English, exploiting it as a potent and expressive literary resource to describe 'the Springtyme sproutar of the herbes and flowris'. Indeed, as a Renaissance poet with a penchant for the Petrarchan sonnet, James published Ane Schort Treatise conteining some Reulis and Cautelis to be Obseruit and Eschewit in Scottis Poesie in 1585, and wrote at a time when Scots was reaching the pinnacle of its achievement as a literary language.

With the recent online launch of the Dictionary of the Scots Language (DSL), scholars, critics, and general users now have a readily accessible Scots language resource with which to study the use poets such as James made of their language. A composite electronic edition of the two key reference dictionaries for the Scots language - the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue (DOST), and the Scottish National Dictionary (SND) - the DSL is the culmination of over 85 years of Scots lexicography. Sir William Craigie first mooted the idea of an historical dictionary of Scots in 1919, whilst at work on the Oxford English Dictionary. This dictionary was to document the language 'flourishing as a literary medium from about 1375 to 1600', for Craigie believed that 'few traces of the older literary language' remained after 1700. The SND continued the history of the language from the eighteenth century into the Scots' Renaissance of the twentieth. Hugh MacDiarmid's injunction 'Not Burns - Dunbar!' suggests an attempt to overcome the terminal decline of which Craigie had bemoaned and to rediscover this 'literary Scots', but it also indicates that Scots had not disappeared as a language and a distinctive voice, no matter how it may have altered within the later period.

In the face of a somewhat motley linguistic and literary heritage, bearing the imprint of English, Gaelic, Welsh, Latin, Old Norse, and Old French, a dictionary seeking to assert the distinctiveness of Scots confronts an arduous challenge. Craigie sought to overcome this by offering a full account of Scots before 1600, but was more conservative in his selection of words with no historically significant deviation from meanings to be found in English. Within the

DSL this can be counterproductive: any critic seeking to ascertain why the courtier-poets in Scotland under James VI were referred to as the 'Castalian band' has to refer to the OED to find any mention of the spring on Mount Parnassus. In the DSL, 'castalian' is found only as a variant-spelling in the DOST's definition of 'castellane': 'one of the garrison of a castle'. Recent editors of the DOST have praised Craigie for including within his remit words which 'expressed some aspect of society unique to Scotland', and Craigie himself claimed that it was 'obvious' that the dictionary was 'not merely a linguistic record', so it is hardly churlish in this instance to criticise a dictionary for not providing more in the way of literary history. The editorial intent to remain linguistically true to the distinctiveness of the Scots tongue has led to the omission, in both major historical dictionaries of the language of the British Isles, of a sense that has a peculiarly distinct usage within Scottish history.

The DSL will be of invaluable use to historians and critics responding to the challenges presented by the 'New British History' to the insular history of English exceptionalism and its wilful amnesia towards Britain's outlying states. In his seminal 1975 article, 'British History: a Plea for a New Subject', John Pocock suggested that the loss of Scottish records to Cromwell and, ultimately, shipwreck in the (English? British?) revolution left the nation ill-placed to write their history and articulate paradigmatic linguistic and mental structures in which they might think of their identity as a nation. Within its search functions, the DSL website offers the user the chance to 'search bibliographies', a feature that goes well beyond other familiar online dictionaries such as the OED. The sheer range of sources on offer in this dictionary should go some way to rectifying Pocock's concerns by revealing just what material is out there to be found: Acts of the Scottish Parliament, Exchequer Rolls, manuscripts of the 'auld laws', and local and family records, as well as literary, historical and polemical prose.

The influence of Scottish political theorists in the early modern period has often been alluded to: John Knox, George Buchanan and other proponents of Calvinist resistance theories are habitually cited as a factor in the ideological developments leading up to, and careering through, the revolution of the 1640s. Before his celebrated De jure regni apud Scotos, Buchanan published a 1571 tract on the deposition of Mary, A Detection of the Doings of Mary, Queen of Scots, in Latin, English, French and Scots, in which version it is cited in the dictionary. The DSL should provide an important impetus towards rediscovering the significance of the initial Scottish context for such texts.

One of the sharpest denouncements of the divine right of kings was articulated by Knox's successor as head of the Scottish reformed Kirk, Andrew Melville. Bemoaning royal interference in the institution of the church, 'he inveyghed against the bloodie guillie (so he termed it) of absolute authoritie'. Once again, political theorising of international significance is expressed in a turn to the Scots language. Melville's 'bloodie guillie', or 'large knife', is to be found in the DSL, but it is a term which reveals a number of problems with its design as a website. The home-page of the DSL site defaults its search to 'Headword Form'. Typing 'guillie' in at this stage provides no results: though it does suggest a number of variant-spellings from the SND, including 'gullie', it offers no suggestions from the DOST - the dictionary which historically covers the period in which Melville preached. To retrieve 'guillie' as a variant-spelling of 'gully' in the DOST, one has to use the 'Full-Entry' search facility. Given the huge variation in spelling practices in older Scots, the 'headword' search yields a very limited success-rate, and its role as the default search position must be questioned. On the other hand, using the 'Full-entry' search can leave the user trawling through a large number of retrieved entries as they search for the word closest to that actually sought - type 'gully' into that search facility and the first result provides the SND's definition of 'the disturbance in the water at the mouth of a tidal river when the ebb from the river collides with the sea'.

The decision to use the DOST and SND as separate databases can occasionally aggravate this lack of balance between the two principal search facilities, to provide more 'hits' than necessary, and obfuscating historical continuity in language use between the periods covered by the two dictionaries. For those keen to retain the distinction established by Craigie the website does offer the option of searching each dictionary separately, a useful tool for scholars of the Renaissance in particular. But there is a tendency for the web-site to feel, in its full use, like an unwieldy agglomeration of two separate dictionaries rather than a successful synthesis into the one online facility. Some technical issues have been addressed well. Though 'yogh' causes something of a problem for users without Unicode-capable browsers (those below Internet Explorer 6) and has to be represented as a tiny GIF image, the search facility will hunt for '-yogh-', and even '3' - though not perfect, it is a pragmatically reliable route around typographical difficulties. Other minor problems suggest that the DSL has found the transition into a website difficult. Entries are cramped, particularly those from the older DOST, with citations clustered into a single paragraph after the definitions. This suggests an all-too-accurate reproduction of the printed copy, where space was at a premium, and little attempt to exploit the white-space afforded by a web-page to create more accessible and readable entries. Some of the innovations of the OED, such as the dateline, have been eschewed at slight cost, and are most noticeably missed when, as discussed above, the layout of the entry makes the historical flow of the citations difficult to determine.

The DSL has digitised, collated and converted over 22 volumes of lexicographic material into a single electronic format. The further material supplied on the 'Information Pages' of the site provides guidance for use, technical information, a brief outline of the DSL project, a useful history of Scottish lexicography, and reproduces the preliminary material from its parent dictionaries. This reveals an acknowledged debt to the work of past lexicographers, in particular William Craigie, but it also has the effect of placing the dictionary in its online form within the context of the study of Scots: the project staff of the DSL, under the direction of Victor Skretkowicz, have done an admirable job of providing a linguistic resource that should prove of great benefit not only to further historical study of the Scots language, but also for those interested in the political and cultural aspects of Scotland in the early modern period and beyond.

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