Literatures in English - Early Modern Period

Catalogs

_ESTC: English Short Title Catalog (through the British Library)
The English Short Title Catalogue provides extensive descriptions and holdings information for letterpress materials printed in Great Britain or any of its dependencies in any language—as well as for materials printed in English anywhere else in the world. Coverage is from the beginnings of print to 1800 including all recorded English monographs printed between 1475 and 1700.

Dictionaries

The Concise Oxford Companion to Irish Literature
A Dictionary of Shakespeare (Oxford)
Dictionary of Shakespeare (Peter Collin Publishing)
Lexicons of Early Modern English
LEME searches and displays word-entries from monolingual English dictionaries, bilingual lexicons, technical vocabularies, and other encyclopedic-lexical works, 1480-1702.
The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare
The Oxford Companion to English Literature
OED: Oxford English Dictionary

Full Text Resources

Bible in English (990-1970)
The Bible in English contains twenty versions of the Bible. In addition to the twelve complete Bibles, there are five New Testament works, two Gospel works and William Tyndale's New Testament, Pentateuch and Jonah translations. For scholars of English literature, particular attention has been given to the Renaissance period. All the most significant texts from Tyndale to the King James Bible, including the highly influential Coverdale, Bishops' and Geneva Bibles, appear. For researchers in the development of the English language, texts from all eras are included, with emphasis upon versions that closely represent its contemporary state. For biblical and theological scholars, texts from the Protestant, Roman Catholic and non-conformist traditions are represented. The complete English text of each edition is included, with all prefatory matter, notes, running heads and glossaries. Each individual text may be browsed, or you may search on keywords within a particular time period, book, version or testament.

Early English Books Online (EEBO-TCP)
A growing collection of searchable texts (13,246 documents as of September 2006) listed in Pollard & Redgrave's Short-Title Catalog of printed materials published in the English language from 1475 to 1640, in Wing's Short-Title Catalog of works dating from 1641 to 1700, and in Thomason Tracts, a compendium of broadsides on the English Civil War printed between 1640 and 1661. The Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership (TCP) will create 25,000 searchable and readable editions that link immediately to the corresponding ProQuest image files.
To search all EEBO titles (almost 125,000) and view full-page images, use the ProQuest version below.

Early English Books Online (ProQuest)
Full images from the more than 96,000 works listed in Pollard & Redgrave's Short-Title Catalog of printed materials published in the English language from 1475 to 1640, in Wing's Short-Title Catalog of works dating from 1641 to 1700, and in Thomason Tracts, a compendium of broadsides on the English Civil War printed between 1640 and 1661. Documents may be viewed online using the DjVu Plugin or downloaded using Adobe Acrobat. Users may search by author keyword, title keyword, subject keyword, or bibliographic number. In addition, users may choose to search only within the illustrations, and may limit searches by originating collection, source library, language or date. Among the resources are over 200 editions of the works of William Shakespeare. Searchable by keywords in the citation only. To search within the texts, use the EEBO-TCP version.

Early English Prose Fiction 1500-1700
Includes over 200 complete works of fictional prose by writers from the British Isles. The entire text of each work is presented, including prefatory matter, author annotations, illustrations, contents pages, appendices, dedications, and errata. Users may search by author, title, keyword, gender of the author, and by publication date.

English Poetry Database 600-1900
Virtually the entire canon of English poetry from Anglo-Saxon times to 1900; in all more than 165,000 poems by 1,250 poets drawn from 4,500 printed sources. Users may search by keywords and may employ Boolean operators. A complete, searchable bibliography of contained works is also available. Certain categories of material have been excluded from the database: translations into English verse after 1800, hymns published after 1800, works in languages other than English, verse drama intended for the stage, and poems never published or only published in contemporary newspapers, journals or miscellanies.

 English Prose Drama (PhiloLogic)
Plays published in English prose from the early 16th century to the end of the 19th century, covering over 1600 works.

English Verse Drama 2000 works 13th century through 19th century
More than 2,000 works by around 450 named authors and approximately 230 anonymous works. English Verse Drama contains works acted on or intended for the stage, which are either wholly or predominantly in verse. Masques, entertainments, translations and adaptations are included, along with certain closet dramas omitted from the English Poetry Full-Text Database. The entire text of each verse drama is included.

Literary Theory
Key texts from the history of literary theory and criticism.

Renascence Editions
An online repository of works printed in English between the years 1477 and 1799

Riverside Shakespeare
The complete text of the Riverside edition of the works of William Shakespeare. Users may browse individual works or search for words and phrases, both in individual works and in groups of works. Also includes an extensive bibliography.

Sixteenth Century Renaissance English Literature (1485-1603)
Repository of Renaissance writings, plus articles about the era.

Women Writers Online. Texts from 1400-1850.
Women Writers Online is a service of the Brown University Women Writers Project. The texts cover a period from 1400 to 1850. This collection includes a significant number of texts from Renaissance and Restoration England. Another focus are women writers of the Romantic period. All of these texts can be browsed, searched (individually or collectively), and read conveniently online. SGML tagging supports very detailed analysis.

WordHoard

WordHoard is a philological tool and concordance. In its current release WordHoard contains the entire canon of Early Greek epic in the original and in translation, as well as all of Chaucer and Shakespeare, as well as Spenser's Shepheardes Calendar and Faerie Queene.

Top

Indexes/Bibliographies of Journal Articles and Books

ABELL: Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature
ABELL includes more than 700,000 bibliographic records in English and other European languages comprising scholarship on the English language, literature, bibliography, and traditional culture of the English-speaking world.

Arts and Humanities Citation Index
Available through Web of Science (Comes up as an option at the bottom of the opening screen)

Humanities Abstracts
Bibliographic citations from more than 450 periodicals in topics such as archaeology, art, classics, film, folklore, journalism, linguistics, music, the performing arts, philosophy, religion, world history, and world literature. Records added since 1994 have abstracts, and many citations have links to the full text of the article. Humanities Abstracts is searchable by keyword, author, title, and a variety of other fields. Articles in periodicals not held by NU libraries may be requested online through the Interlibrary Loan Deparment using the 'ILL' button at the top of the screen.

Humanities International Index
Humanities International Index is a comprehensive database covering journals, books and other important reference sources in the humanities. Humanities International Index provides cover-to-cover indexing and abstracting for over 1,700 journals and contains more than 1.6 million records. The database includes all data from American Humanities Index plus bibliographic records from a multitude of international journals, books and reference works. This database provides citations and abstracts for articles, essays and reviews, as well as original creative works including poems, fiction, photographs, paintings and illustrations. Humanities International Index is a unique, essential collection for comprehensive coverage of the humanities.

ITER: Gateway to the Middle Ages and Renaissance
Iter provides citations to articles in approximately 230,000 records indexed from the complete runs of more than 400 scholarly journal titles covering the Renaissance and Middle Ages in Europe. Also under construction is a separate file comprising approximately 46,000 records encompassing monographs, material published in monographs, and collected essays. Users may search by subject, author, title, keywords, and publication date. Includes: Iter Bibliography, Iter Italicum, International Directory of Scholars (IDS), International Directory of Renaissance and Reformation Associations and Institutes (IDRRAI), Scholars of Early Modern Studies (SEMS), Renaissance Quarterly (RQ Online), Baptisteria Sacra, Electronic Capito Project.

MLA
The MLA International Bibliography consists of bibliographic records pertaining to literature, language, linguistics, and folklore. The database provides access to scholarly research in nearly 4,000 journals and series. It also covers relevant monographs, working papers, proceedings, bibliographies, and other formats. Users may search or browse by author, title, subject and by several other fields using the 'Search Builder' feature. In addition, searches may be limited by language, publication type and publication year or range of years. The database includes a searchable thesaurus, and allows subject searches to be focused using 'role indicators' and 'subfield codes.'

World Shakespeare Bibliography
The World Shakespeare Bibliography Online provides annotated entries for all important books, articles, book reviews, dissertations, theatrical productions, reviews of productions, audiovisual materials, electronic media, and other scholarly and popular materials related to Shakespeare and published or produced between 1965 and early 2004. The scope is international, with coverage extending to more than 98 languages and representing every country in North America, South America, and Europe, and nearly every country in Asia, Africa, and Australasia. The more than 95,249 records in this version cite several hundred thousand additional reviews of books, productions, films, and audio recordings.

Reference - Quick Lookup

Biography Resource Center

Literature Resource Center

OED: Oxford English Dictionary

Oxford Reference Online:

• The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature
• The Concise Oxford Companion to American Literature
• The Oxford Companion to American Literature
• The Concise Oxford Companion to Classical Literature
• The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature
• The Oxford Companion to English Literature
• The Concise Oxford Companion to Irish Literature
• The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms
• A Dictionary of Shakespeare
• The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare
• The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry in English
• A Dictionary of Writers and their Works

XREFERPLUS:

• Dictionary of Shakespeare, Peter Collin Publishing
• The Bloomsbury Dictionary of English Literature
• The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English
• The Columbia Companion to the Twentieth-Century American Short Story