Research Guides: ENGL 413/MARS 420: The History of Books: Research Databases and Resources

Databases and Online Resources

Early American Imprints, Series I: Evans
Full-text archive of nearly 37,000 early American publications based on Charles Evans' American Bibliography: A Chronological Dictionary of all Books, Pamphlets, and Periodical Publications Printed in the United States of America from the Genesis of Printing in 1639 down to and including the Year 1800. Includes Early American Imprints, Series I: Supplement from the Library Company of Philadelphia.
Early English Books Online - Proquest Platform This link opens in a new window
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.
Eighteenth Century Collections Online
Full-text searchable facsimile pages of approximately 150,000 items published in the British Isles, colonial America, the United States (1776 - 1800), Canada, and territories governed by Britain during any period of the Eighteenth Century, in any language; plus all relevant items printed wholly or partly in English, or other British vernaculars, in any part of the world. ECCO includes a variety of materials from books, directories, Bibles and sermons to shipping lists, advertisements and works by many well-known and lesser-known authors, all providing a diverse collection in History, Geography, Science, Technology, Medicine, Law, Philosophy, Religion, Social Sciences, Literature, and the Fine Arts. ECCO is based on the British Library's Eighteenth Century Short Title Catalogue (ESTC).

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Electronic Beowulf
Electronic Beowulf is designed to meet the needs of general readers, who require a full, line by line, translation; of students, who want to understand the grammar and the meter and still have time in a semester to study and appreciate other important aspects of the poem; and of scholars, who want immediate access to a critical apparatus identifying the nearly 2000 eighteenth-century restorations, editorial emendations, and manuscript-based conjectural restorations.
English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC)
The English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) lists over 480,000 items published between 1473 and 1800.
First Folio of Shakespeare's Play (Bodleian Library)
The digital facsimile of the Bodleian First Folio of Shakespeare's plays.
Internet Shakespeare Editions Facsimile Viewer
Facsimile view of Shakespeare's works.

ITER Gateway to the Middle Ages and Renaissance
The Iter Bibliography (400-1700) indexes over 2,000 journals and 100,000 books, covering articles, reviews, book chapters, dissertations, and essays in conference proceedings, Festschriften, encyclopedias and exhibition catalogs. Purdue’s subscription is limited to the Iter Bibliography and does not include other resources listed on the Iter website.
JSTOR
Full-text digital archive of over 2600 scholarly journals, especially strong in Social Sciences, Humanities, Economics, and Mathematics.

MESA (Medieval Electronic Scholarly Alliance)
The Medieval Electronic Scholarly Alliance (MESA) is a federated international community of scholars, projects, institutions, and organizations engaged in digital scholarship within the field of medieval studies.

Middle English Compendium This link opens in a new window
Offers three major Middle English electronic resources: the Middle English Dictionary [MED], a HyperBibliography of Middle English prose and verse, based on the MED bibliographies, and a Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse, as well as links to an associated network of electronic resources.
MLA International Bibliography This link opens in a new window
This database is a classified listing and subject index of scholarly books and articles on modern languages, literatures, folklore and linguistics which has been compiled by the Modern Language Association of America since 1926. The electronic version includes the Bibliography's entire print run and currently contains more than 2 million records.
Sabin Americana: History of the Americas, 1500-1926 This link opens in a new window
Based on Joseph Sabin's landmark bibliography, this collection contains works about the Americas published throughout the world from 1500 to the early 1900's. Included are books, pamphlets, serials and other documents that provide original accounts of exploration, trade, colonialism, slavery and abolition, the western movement, Native Americans, military actions and much more. With over 6 million pages from 29,000 works, this collection is a cornerstone in the study of the western hemisphere.

UCLA Catalogue of Digitized Manuscripts (2006-2013)
This site was designed to enable users to find fully digitized manuscripts currently available on the web. In 2013 active development on the CDMMSS ceased, and in 2015 the site was retired.

Parts of a Book

Image source: Thad McIlroy, The Future of Publishing

Reference and Secondary Sources

Brown, Michelle P. and Patricia Lovett. The Historical Source Book for Scribes. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999.

Brown, Michelle P. Understanding Illuminated Manuscripts: A Guide to Technical Terms. California: The J. Paul Getty Museum in association with The British Library, 1994.

Carter, John and Nicholas Barker. ABC for Book Collectors. Delaware: Oak Knoll Press, 2006. (Available online)

Clemens, Raymond and Timothy Graham. Introduction to Manuscript Studies. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007.

de Hamel, Christopher. A History of Illuminated Manuscripts. New York: Phaidon Press Limited, 2002.

de Hamel, Christopher. Gilding the Lilly: A Hundred Medieval and Illuminated Manuscripts in the Lilly Library. Bloomington: Indiana University, Lilly Library, 2010.

de Hamel, Christopher. The Book. A History of the Bible. New York: Phaidon Press Limited, 2001.

Derolez, Albert. The Palaeography of Gothic Manuscript Books, from the Twelfth to the Early Sixteenth Century, Cambridge Studies in Palaeography and Codicology. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003.

Dictionary of Latin Abbreviations

Gaskell, Phillip. A New Introduction to Bibliography. Delaware: Oak Knoll Press, 2000.

International Medieval Bibliography, 1967. (HSSE Library: Periodicals 016.9401 In8)

Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn, Maidie Hilmo and Linda Olson, Opening Up Middle English Manuscripts: Literary and Visual Approaches. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012.

Middle-English Dictionary, containing words used by English writers from the twelfth to the fifteenth century, Francis Henry Stratmann; Henry Bradley, 1891. (HSSE Library 423 St8m)

Middle English Dictionary. Hans Kurath; Sherman M Kuhn (Sherman McAllister), 1952- (HSSE Library 423 K96m )

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (HSSE: Reference 920.042 D56 2004)

Oxford Companion to the Book (HSSE: Reference Z4 .O946 2010). Vol. 2 contains entries on many topics in book history and printing.

Parkes, M. B. English Cursive Book Hands, 1250-1500 (1969; reprint Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004).

Roberts, Jane. Guide to Scripts Used in English Writings up to 1500 (2005; re-issued London: British Library, 2011).

Twyman, Michael. The British Library Guide to Printing. University of Toronto Press, 1998.