Teaching

The following is a list of websites which members of the Centre have found useful in their teaching in the field of the material text. The list makes no effort to be comprehensive (many well-known resources are not included). Several sites could be placed in more than one category, but entries have not been cross-referenced. If you wish to contribute to the list, or to report broken links, please email Andrew Zurcher (aez20@cam.ac.uk).

border

LIBRARY SITES

Cambridge Digital Library. Contains a number of digitized Islamic manuscripts from the University Library’s collections, and a selection from the Newton papers.

Bibliothèque Nationale de France. A large and expanding collection of digitized images from the BN collections, many with searchable texts.

Early MSS at Oxford University. This site provides access to over 80 early manuscripts now in institutions associated with the University of Oxford.

Folger Shakespeare Library Digital Image Collection: LUNA. This currently contains over 40,000 high-resolution images from the Folger’s collections.

The Parker Library on the Web: an interactive, web-based workspace designed to support use and study of the manuscripts in the historic Parker Library at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

The Virtual Manuscript Library of Switzerland. The goal of the e-codices project is to provide access to medieval and selected early modern manuscripts held in Switzerland via a virtual library

The National Library of Wales ‘Digital Mirror’, containing digital reflections of the Library’s treasures. From Wales’ earliest printed book to Illingworth’s cartoons.

The Warburg Institute Library Digital Collection. Digitized early printed books and manuscripts from the Warburg collection.

The Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, Germany. Contains a list of digitization projects. Available in English (click the tab to the left).

border

ANGLO-SAXON / ANGLO-NORMAN

The Electronic Sawyer. An online version of the revised edition of Sawyer’s Anglo-Saxon Charters section one [S 1-1602] prepared under the auspices of the British Academy/Royal Historical Society Joint Committee on Anglo-Saxon Charters.

Electronic Beowulf: This online Guide is the complete ‘Help’ facility for the Electronic Beowulf, version 2.0 (2003), a set of 2 CD-ROMs published by British Library Publications, 96 Euston Road, London NW1 2DB, England.

border

MEDIEVAL

DScriptorium is devoted to collecting, storing and distributing digital images of Medieval manuscripts (D is for Digital).Inscribe provides scholars and the general public interested in medieval books and documents with online training on the diverse areas found within palaeography. Topics covered include general palaeography, the history of medieval scripts, diplomatic, codicology and illumination.

Medieval Imaginations: Literature and Visual Culture in the Middle Ages provides a database of images to enable you to explore the interface between the literature and visual culture of medieval England.

The Medieval Bestiary. Images, bibliographies and scholarship relating to animals in the middle ages.

The Association for Manuscripts and Archives in Research Collections. AMARC is an association of those interested in or working on or with manuscripts and archives. It arranges one-day conferences, often in interesting places, and it promotes exhibitions, publication, fellowship and shared enjoyment of research and discovery. It publishes a Newsletter, probably the most up-to-date and most wide ranging source of information available about manuscript research.

border

EARLY MODERN

Annotated Books Online. A digital archive of early modern annotated books, including several marked up by Gabriel Harvey.

An online exhibition of Milton-related materials in the Old Library of Christ’s College, Cambridge, created as part of the celebration of the 400th anniversary of Milton’s birth.

Atlas of Early Printing. An interactive site designed to be used as a tool for teaching the early history of printing in Europe during the second half of the fifteenth century.

Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts 1450-1700. A complete catalogue of literary manuscripts by 237 British authors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

DEEP. Database of Early English Playbooks allows scholars and students to investigate the publishing, printing, and marketing of English Renaissance drama in ways not possible using any other print or electronic resource.

Early English Books Online (EEBO) contains digital facsimile page images of virtually every work printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and British North America and works in English printed elsewhere from 1473-1700 – from the first book printed in English by William Caxton, through the age of Spenser and Shakespeare and the tumult of the English Civil War.

The EEBO Introductions Series provides scholars with a forum for the exchange of information and ideas relating to some of the less frequently discussed early modern printed texts available in Early English Books Online.

Early European Books (EEB) is a subscription service offering high-resolution colour images of European printed books to 1700. The first tranches of books on the site are mainly taken from the Royal Library, Copenhagen and the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Florence, and will be of particular interest to historians of science, as the project has gone out of its way to take in Brahe and Kepler, as well as volumes annotated by Galileo. The project reproduces bindings as well as pages, and is searchable by bibliographic features as well as authors, titles and owners. It will in time be fully integrated with the Universal Short Title Catalogue and with the provenance records at CERL (the Consortium of European Research Libraries).

English Broadside Ballad Archive at University of California Santa Barbara aims to archive all of the surviving ballads published during the heyday of the black-letter ornamental broadside ballad of the 17th century—estimated to stand at some 8,000 extant works.

Footprints of the Lion: Issac Newton at Work’. An exhibition of the Macclesfield Collection of Newton’s Papers at Cambridge University Library.

The Garden, the Ark, the Tower, the Temple’. A copiously-illustrated online exhibition concerning ‘Biblical Metaphors of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe’.

Networking the Republic of Letters, 1550-1750. Using digital methods to reassemble and interpret the correspondence networks of the early modern period.

The Newton Project is a non-profit organization dedicated to making his unpublished and published works freely available.

The Library at UPenn contains a series of tutorials on “The Early Modern Material Text”, which introduce viewers to book production in the period, and suggest that how old books were made and sold just might affect their “meaning” then and now.

The Philological Museum Analytic Bibliography of On-Line Neo-Latin Texts. A frequently updated ur-site for early modern digitized texts.

Private Libraries in Renaissance England. The digital index for the printed PLRE volumes, including a number of early modern library catalogues/probate inventories searchable by title, author and owner.online. Over 3.9 million words are currently available and more are on the way.

Reading East is a catalogue of early modern printed texts that attest to contact between Europe and the East, and that are held in Dublin Research Libraries. The catalogue offers a selection of books about the East, covering a variety of genres, with a detailed description of each text that includes a bibliographical report, copy-specific information, images, and links to relevant online resources. The website also hosts descriptions of the libraries involved in the project with direct links to their websites, essays about some of the texts present in the catalogue, and a bibliography of relevant resources.

Website accompanying the publication of Roger Morrice’s ‘Entring Book’, covering the years 1677 to 1691.

Union First Line Index of English Verse, 13th-19th Century. An amalgamation of the major first-line indexes, which is a wonderful tool for identifying poems found in manuscript miscellanies and other ‘anonymous’ environments. The bulk of the material is 1500-1800.

Universal Short Title Catalogue. A collective database of all books published in Europe between the invention of printing and the end of the sixteenth century.

The online database of the Virtuelles Kupferstichkabinett project (an image database) at Wolfenbüttel, Germany. Enter the database under the ‘Suche’ tab. Information about the project is under ‘Projekt’. Under ‘Glossar’ you will find some handy PDFs, such as a list of the technical terms used with short definitions, a list of handbooks used and a list of abbreviations used on prints. The lists will be translated into English in the coming year. A manual is underway. The database is searchable with 24 criteria or terms. In the upper left you start with ‘Alle Wörter’. Click on the little arrow right of select another criterion. You can combine up to three criteria. All have index lists, but you can do a free search with every criterion. Search with the button ‘Suchen’ in the lower right (depending on your screen you may have to scroll a little). For prints with astronomical subjects choose ‘Schlagwort (keyword) and search for ‘Astronomie’ or ‘Astrologie’ For mathematics: Mathematik, Geometrie, Perspektive. For physics: Physik (though this has a poor catch). For botanics: Botanik. The majority of the prints entered are loose sheets, including illustrations taken out of books. If you want to have all book illustrations – bound or loose – select ‘Anmerkungen’ and enter ‘illustration’.

border

ENLIGHTENMENT

The Digital Miscellanies Index is a freely available online database of the contents of more than 1500 poetic miscellanies published over the course of the eighteenth century.

The William Blake Archive is a project of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Virginia, initiated in 1992; it now now contains fully searchable and scaleable electronic editions of many copies of all of Blake’s 19 illuminated works.

The Thomas Gray Archive is a collaborative digital project and research archive devoted to the life and work of eighteenth-century poet, letter-writer, and scholar Thomas Gray (1716-1771).

border

MODERN

Book Traces is a crowd-sourced web project aimed at identifying unique copies of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century books on library shelves.  Our focus is on customizations made by original owners in personal copies, primarily in the form of marginalia and inserts.

The Dickinson Electronic archive is a creative and critical collaboratory for reading Dickinson’s material bodies and for featuring new critical and theoretical work about Emily Dickinson’s writings, biography, reception, and influence.

The Modernist Journals Project is a major resource for the study of modernism in the English-speaking world, with periodical literature as its central concern. Our primary mission is to produce digital editions of culturally significant magazines from around the early 20th century.

Marginalia: Six Personal Libraries. Drawn from the holdings of Houghton Library, selections include works with marginalia from the personal libraries of notable literary and cultural figures, notably Thomas Carlyle, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, John Keats, Herman Melville, and Hester Lynch Piozzi.

border

INDIAN

Online Tagore Variorium Includes text files of every version of each of Tagore’s works, unique collation software, a search facility, a checklist of Tagore’s manuscripts and a comprehensive bibliography.

border

IRISH

Irish Script on Screen. Digital images of Irish manuscripts, together with relevant commentary.

border

ISLAMIC

The School of Abbasid Studies, originally founded in the 1980s as a cooperative venture by scholars at the Universities of Cambridge, St. Andrews, and Leuven promotes, fosters the academic study of material texts from the the Abbasid dynasty (758-1258 CE). The website provides free access to online journals, chapters, and papers dealing with the Abbasid dynasty.

border

SCANDINAVIAN

This independent website offers examples of illuminated Icelandic manuscripts in the categories of legal compilations, religious texts, and Latin encyclopedias.

The website of the Arni Magnusson Institute at the University of Iceland provides descriptions and photographs of nine of the most famous medieval Icelandic manuscripts.

The website of the library at the University of Lund, Sweden, provides access to photographs of some seventy medieval manuscripts in their collection.

The website of the National Library of Denmark provides easy access to photographs of thirty-three medieval and Renaissance manuscripts in their collection; photographs of other Latin manuscripts are also included.

The ‘facsimiles’ page of the the Norwegian online Handbook of Norse Philology provides images of medieval manuscripts that are referred to in the Norwegian and German editions of the Handbook.

border

TIBETAN

Guardians of the Sacred Word, a 1996 exhibition celebrating the splendour of Tibetan manuscript covers.

Manuscript pages from the Dharmapala Thangka Centre.

Asian Classics Input Project, digitizing ancient Buddhist and Yoga scriptures.

border

PALAEOGRAPHY

Tutorials in medieval and early modern palaeography

Digital facsimiles of manuscripts relevant to Anglo-Saxon, Celtic and Scandinavian Palaeography and Codicology.

Online Images of Manuscripts containing Old English.

Archetype. Free software for digital palaeographical analysis, with extensive image mark-up and comparison tools and a number of large open-access datasets.

border

MUSIC

Chopin First Editions Online. An unprecedented virtual collection providing direct access to some of the most important primary source materials relevant to the composer’s music.

CLAMOR. A digital archive of twentieth and twenty-first century Spanish music in performances, including programme notes, photographs and scores.

Early Music Online has digitised from microfilm more than 320 anthologies of printed music from the 16th century. The earliest, a collection printed by Ottaviano Petrucci, dates from 1503. Highlights of the collection include sacred music by Josquin des Prez, Thomas Tallis and William Byrd; secular songs from Nuremberg, Paris and Lyon; lute music from Venice and organ music from Leipzig. Over 9000 individual compositions have been digitised. The editions all come from the British Library; the project is a partnership between Royal Holloway, University of London, the British Library and JISC.

Online Chopin Variorum Edition. An online edition of some of Chopin’s major piano works, facilitating detailed comparison between numerous manuscript and printed witnesses.

border

ART

Vincent Van Gogh: The Letters. An online counterpart to the acclaimed six-volume print edition of Van Gogh’s letters, offering all 902 letters to and from the artist, richly annotated and illustrated, with facsimiles, transcriptions and translations.

border

BIBLIOGRAPHY/HISTORY OF THE BOOK

British Armorial Bindings at the University of Toronto. Its purpose is to create a comprehensive catalogue of all the coats of arms, crests, and other heraldic devices that have been stamped by British owners on the outer covers of their books, together with the bibliographical sources of the stamps.

Impositor at the Folger Shakespeare Library–an online tool to automatically arrange digital images from the collection into simulated impositions (the laying out of pages into the formes of printed sheets).

History of the Book. a networked resource focused on the production and reception of materials related to the history of the book and literacy technologies, broadly conceived. This ongoing project is being developed by Professor Johanna Drucker, working with staff and students based at UCLA to provide an online environment for research and learning.