Early Modern Resources

The site has 1700+ images, 200+ complete alchemical texts, extensive bibliographical material on the printed books and manuscripts, numerous articles, introductory and general reference material, a searchable database (Adam McLean)

In the 17th century, there existed, just outside the City of London, an area famed and feared for its lawlessness, the ‘sanctuary’ or ‘liberty’ of Whitefriars, colloquially known as Alsatia. The project here is to gather the documents and materials, analyse them and seek to understand the part it played in the making of London.

An online exhibit of political cartoons (Lilley Library)

seminar paper by Matthew Shaw (British Library Research Archive)
originally given at University of Birmingham, March 2006

(Was ‘Folk Magic in Britain’) An exploration of objects, such as witch-bottles, written charms, horse skulls, that that were concealed in and around buildings as spells or counter-spells; sections on each of the various kinds of object, links, book list (Brian Hoggard)

An essay about theatregoing experiences in London around 1600 (Andrew Gurr)

Searchable database of information from the Bath Chronicle 1770-1800 (Bath & North East Somerset Council)

fully searchable electronic (SGML) edition of the King James Bible (University of Michigan Humanities Text Initiative)

Introductory bibliography and more specialised bibliographies on Erasmus, Luther, Bucer, Zwingli, Calvin and Ignatius of Loyola (William Harmless)

NB: link to download MS Word document
article by Lynne Robson (Warwick Centre for the Study of the Renaissance)
From Renaissance Journal, 2:1 (2004)

30,000 ballads online, from the Bodleian Library’s collections, fully indexed and searchable by author, title, subject etc. There are also woodcut images and some musical scores (Bodleian Library)

This exhibition features seventy prints by Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) that highlight the artist’s contributions to European culture and religious experience.

Links to various online versions of the Anglican prayer book, including the 1552, 1559 and 1662 editions (Reformed Episcopal Church)

PhD thesis (1998) by Karen Stanbridge, a comparative study of British Catholic legislation examining the processes leading to the legislation and their outcomes (Theses Canada Portal)

Book extract: chapter by Alexander Murdoch from British history, 1660-1832 : national identity and local culture (Basingstoke, 1998) (Edinburgh Research Archive

This website makes available a database of thousands of prints and book illustrations from early modern Britain in fully-searchable form. It also offers ancillary facilities aimed to enhance users’ understanding and appreciation of the material it presents, such as various resources contextualising prints and printmaking, as well as original research on British prints to 1700.

A collaborative, interdisciplinary research project on the South Sea Bubble (which burst in 1720), focusing on its cultural history and influence on the arts, includes bibliography, essays, historical outline (David McNeil et al)

transcription (in XML format) of N. Bailey’s Universal Etymological English Dictionary (Liam Quin)

Digital edition of casebooks of Simon Forman and Richard Napier, two of the most popular astrologers in early modern England… Their casebooks are probably the richest surviving records of medical practice before 1700.

Links to online source materials and web resources (Internet Archive of Texts and Documents)

a searchable catalogue and scanned images of more than 14,000 cause papers relating to cases heard between 1300 and 1858 in the Church Courts of the diocese of York

a scholarly online edition of Newton’s alchemical manuscripts, which include laboratory notebooks, indices of alchemical substances, and his transcriptions from other sources (William R Newman, Indiana University)

essay by Vanessa Harding (Birkbeck ePrints)
In Imagining early modern London: perceptions and portrayals of the city from Stow to Strype, 1598 -1720 (Cambridge UP, 2001)

a relational database documenting the known careers of Church of England clergymen; can be searched by persons, locations, etc.

online exhibit of images that ‘trace society’s changing attitudes toward money from the Reformation and the Church’s injunctions against usury, to the Industrial Revolution and the emergence of modern capitalism’ (Baker Library, Harvard College)

online exhibition exploring Europeans’ attempts ‘to “read” native cultures of the Americas’ (and vice versa); six thematic sections, including ‘promotion and possession’, ‘viewers and the viewed’, ‘colonial fictions, colonial histories’ (University of Pennsylvania Library)

The project seeks to uncover people’s experience of religious change and devotional practice between 1550 and 1700; neglected resources, including letters, pictures, and interrogations, to shed light on the stories people told about their religious lives… a range of academic publications, an expanded project website featuring teaching and learning resources, case studies, and a research diary, and a major exhibition.

annotated digital edition of Daniel Defoe’s early periodical, in weblog format, facilitating reader interaction and ongoing discussions about the text, early modern print culture and modern digital technologies; fully searchable (Christopher Flynn, Natalie Roxburgh)

A resource for the language of eighteenth-century ‘sensibility’; 24 ‘key terms’, such as ‘benevolence’, ‘sense’, ‘taste’, are explored through extracts from primary texts (Corey Brady et al)

Poetic miscellanies are vital to understanding the diversity of eighteenth-century literary culture. In mapping the contents of these popular collections, the Digital Miscellanies Index will enable researchers to know, with greater precision and scope than ever before, who was reading what, when and how.