Literary Research and the British Renaissance and Early Modern Period: Strategies and Sources (Literary Research: Strategies and Sources, Volume 8)

Literary Research: Strategies and Sources Series Editors: Peggy Keeran & Jennifer Bowers Every literary age presents scholars with both predictable and unique research challenges. This series fills a gap in the field of reference literature by featuring research strategies and by recommending the best tools for conducting specialized period and national literary research. Emphasizing research methodology, each series volume takes into account the unique challenges inherent in conducting research of that specific literary period and outlines the best practices for researching within it. Volumes place the research process within the period’s historical context and use a narrative structure to analyze and compare print and electronic reference sources. Following an introduction to online searching, chapters will typically cover these types of resources: general literary reference materials; library catalogs; print and online bibliographies, indexes, and annual reviews; scholarly journals; contemporary reviews; period journals and newspapers; microform and digital collections; manuscripts and archives; and Web resources. Additional or alternative chapters might be included to highlight a particular research problem or to examine other pertinent period or national literary resources. 1. Literary Research and the British Romantic Era by Peggy Keeran and Jennifer Bowers, 2005. 2. Literary Research and the Era of American Nationalism and Romanticism by Angela Courtney, 2008. 3. Literary Research and American Modernism Era by Robert N. Matuozzi and Elizabeth B. Lindsay, 2008. 4. Literary Research and the American Realism and Naturalism Period by Linda L. Stein and Peter J. Lehu, 2009. 5. Literary Research and Irish Literature by J. Greg Matthews, 2009. 6. Literary Research and the Literatures of Australia and New Zealand by H. Faye Christenberry and Angela Courtney, 2010. 7. Literary Research and British Modernism by Alison M. Lewis, 2010. 8. Literary Research and the British Renaissance and Early Modern Period by Jennifer Bowers and Peggy Keeran, 2010.

Literary Research and the British Renaissance and Early Modern Period Strategies and Sources

Jennifer Bowers Peggy Keeran

Literary Research: Strategies and Sources, No. 8

THE SCARECROW PRESS, INC.

Lanham • Toronto • Plymouth, UK 2010

Published by Scarecrow Press, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 http://www.scarecrowpress.com Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom Copyright © 2010 by Jennifer Bowers and Peggy Keeran All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bowers, Jennifer, 1962– Literary research and the British Renaissance and early modern period : strategies and sources / Jennifer Bowers, Peggy Keeran. p. cm. — (Literary research: strategies and sources ; no. 8) Includes bibliographical references and indexes. ISBN 978-0-8108-5697-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8108-7428-2 (ebook) 1. English literature—Early modern, 1500–1700—Research—Methodology. 2. English literature—Early modern, 1500–1700—Information resources. I. Keeran, Peggy, 1959–. II. Title. PR421.B68 2010 820.9'003—dc22 2009048527

⬁ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American

National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction

ix

1

Basics of Online Searching

1

2

General Literary Reference Resources

20

3

Library Catalogs

45

4

Print and Electronic Bibliographies, Indexes, and Annual Reviews

72

5

Scholarly Journals

96

6

Seventeenth-Century Periodicals

118

7

Contemporary Reception

154

8

Manuscripts and Archives

183

9

Genre

220

10

Translations and Lexicons

251

11

Microforms and Digital Collections

265

12

Web Resources

293

13

Researching a Thorny Problem

333

Bibliography

349

Index

355

About the Authors

383 v

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Martin Dillon, our editor at Scarecrow Press, for his valuable recommendations regarding this book and for the Literary Research: Strategies and Sources series. We’d also like to thank Ed Kurdyla, former editorial director at Scarecrow, for his support of the series; Blair Andrews, associate acquisitions editor, who helped with finding the painting on the cover; Kellie Hagan, our production editor, who patiently worked through all the final details with us; and Barbara Berliner, our wonderful indexer. The authors of the other volumes in the series inspired us, and we challenged ourselves to meet the high quality of their work. Scott Howard and Betty Meagher provided us with feedback about the content of the book, as well as expert advice when we needed to clarify certain details. Chris Alexander was a calm and steady presence during the mad rush to get the manuscript completed and was instrumental in formatting the images properly and addressing other last-minute details. Finally, we’d like to thank Dean Nancy Allen for granting us time to work on the project, and our colleagues for discussing aspects of the content with us. We truly appreciate the encouragement, patience, and support of our families, friends, and colleagues throughout.

vii

Introduction

Literary Research and the British Renaissance and Early Modern Period: Strategies and Sources sets out to cover the best practices and to describe important reference resources, both print and electronic, that can be used in conducting literary research on this era. Although the primary emphasis is on literature produced in England, the guide also covers literature from Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. Recognizing that every literary era presents scholars with particular challenges, this volume seeks to address specific research characteristics integral to studying the period, including a more inclusive canon and the predominance of the Bard, a dual environment of print and manuscript production, the challenges of reading early modern handwriting, a lack of reviewing media, the role of translations, and researching nonstandardized genres. Central to our volume and to literary research of the era are the equally valid approaches to studying this literature through the more traditional “renaissance” lens, or through the varying theoretical approaches falling under the rubric “early modern.” A cursory glance at recent academic publishers’ catalogs demonstrates the concurrent use of the terms renaissance and early modern. Sometimes both terms are even employed in the same title, such as Rhetorical Affect in Early Modern Writing: Renaissance Passions Reconsidered (Palgrave MacMillan, 2003) or Renaissance Tropologies: The Cultural Imagination of Early Modern England (Duquesne University Press, 2008). Our intention in writing a guide to Renaissance and early modern British literature that includes both terms is to take into account the two dominant approaches used by scholars to studying the literature written during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We understand the term renaissance to be used for traditional critical approaches to the era with research grounded in the classical foundations of humanism, while early modern emphasizes the cultural, political, historical, ix

x

Introduction

and societal aspects of literature and frames the period as containing the roots of our modern era. Although renaissance was coined in the nineteenth century and early modern is a late-twentieth-century theoretical concept, both terms continue to be influential and vital ways to organize and explain this literary period. In this guide we hope to provide scholars who adopt either or other critical approaches to the period with the research strategies, reference sources, and relevant historical context to effectively assist them in their research endeavors. Leah Marcus’s essay, “Renaissance/Early Modern Studies,” published in 1992, posits that the change in nomenclature from renaissance to early modern illustrates a moving away from interpreting the period as a time of re-naissance, cultural rebirth, the reawakening of an earlier era conceived of as (in some sense) classic; we are coming to view the period more in terms of elements repeated thereafter, those features of the age that appear to us precursors of our own twentieth century, the modern, the postmodern.1

In contrasting the two approaches, which she describes as “chronologically shifty”2 with regards to exact dates to describe the period, she suggests that Renaissance studies identifies itself with the classical past, and that it is “concerned with questions of origin, influence, and filiation”3 while early modern approaches see the concerns of modernism and postmodernism in embryo—alienation, a disjunction from origins, profound skepticism about the possibility for objectivity (in literary studies or anywhere else), an emphasis on textual interdeterminacy as opposed to textual closure and stability, and an interest in intertextuality instead of filiation.4

This early assessment of the difference between the two approaches still seems to be a relevant model. A more recent overview of the field, Fernie, Wray, Burnett, and McManus’s Reconceiving the Renaissance: A Critical Reader, recognizes the shift in critical perspectives toward literature of the period, which the editors attribute to the impact of critical theory. Fernie et al. describe the post-theory Renaissance as “an intensely fraught and turbulent period, in which constructions of class, race and gender were negotiated, in which doubts and anxieties freely circulated, and in which the very idea of Englishness was thrown into question by local and newly global perspectives.”5 They stress that Renaissance studies now cover a broad range of approaches from the traditional to the postmodern, to investigations of very specialized subtopics to those that cross disciplinary boundaries.6 Our research guide recognizes the

Introduction

xi

multiple ways that scholars study sixteenth- and seventeenth-century British literature and attempts to incorporate strategies and sources that will meet their needs, no matter what methodology is employed. The two centuries covered in our volume were a dynamic period in British history, witness to significant social and cultural changes. Often described as cataclysmic, the Reformation initiated a far-ranging upheaval across all elements of society. Religious conflict continued to be a central feature throughout the period, as manifested in the ongoing struggles between Catholics and Protestants, the development of increasingly influential religious sects, widespread efforts for religious freedom, and the Wars of Three Kingdoms. Political and religious change were intricately connected; the trial and execution of Charles I in 1649 served to break the previously dominant idea of the king as the divine representative on earth and laid the groundwork for a more representative government. Technological advances were also instrumental in creating change. The development of moveable type and the printing press in the fifteenth century greatly affected the production and distribution of books and other printed materials, which became more affordable and, consequently, available to a broader audience. The Reformation, with its emphasis on reading the Bible directly to obtain spiritual enlightenment, and the printing press together contributed to the availability and distribution of texts in vernacular English, with a resulting increase in literacy across a wider segment of society. A more literate population was also receptive to reading secular works, such as those central to a humanist education. At the beginning of the sixteenth and into the seventeenth century, this intellectual movement continued to influence the development of English literary expression, based as it was on the study of classical authors and texts, and to cultivate a more permeable exchange of ideas. The development of natural philosophy and experimental science contributed to a new conception of the world and the traditional cosmic order was overturned as innovative discoveries, such as those by Copernicus, Brahe, and Kepler, repositioned the world within the universe. These centuries also witnessed the emerging nation-state, especially as England came into contact with other countries and peoples through its efforts to colonize the Americas, manage its conflicts with Ireland and Scotland and administer the initial union with Scotland on James I’s coronation, and establish trade on an international scale. With wealth no longer entirely dependent on land ownership, the rise of commerce extended wealth to a broader spectrum of the population so that social mobility became possible for some, especially the merchant class, and the urban centers developed into influential centers of power.7 All of these changes impacted ideas of personal, social, and national identity that were represented in the period’s literature, whether in epic or lyric

xii

Introduction

poetry, dramatic comedies and tragedies, romantic and dystopian/utopian prose literature, or in narratives of travel and exploration. Scholarly studies over the past thirty years have broadened our conception of the early modern era, so that the field is not only centered on traditionally canonical figures like Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne, Milton, and Dryden, but also includes women authors such as Lady Mary Wroth, Aemilia Lanyer, Isabella Whitney, Anna Trapnel, Katherine Philips, and Aphra Behn, and lesser-known male writers like Michael Drayton, Richard Barnfield, and Barnaby Riche. While literary studies of the era continue to focus on drama and poetry, a wider range of genres is also receiving critical attention as new methodologies make diverse sources—such as conduct books, periodicals, spiritual autobiographies, or political tracts—valid texts to examine. The current disciplinary field is no longer a static, male Renaissance composed primarily of canonical plays and poems but a rich and varied one of multiple voices and types of literary expression. And as early modern literature is studied increasingly within historical and other contexts, this guide recognizes the importance of supporting research methodologies that account for contextual perspectives. Although the period has been apportioned in several ways and includes literature labeled Renaissance, early modern, Elizabethan, Tudor, Stuart, long seventeenth century, Reformation, and Restoration, we have selected beginning and end dates for our research guide based on the Library of Congress subject heading, English literature—Early modern, 1500–1700. Covering the prolific literature produced during these two centuries generates its own challenges, especially in finding a balance between the overwhelming number of reference and scholarly sources available for Shakespeare in particular and those for other less-canonical figures who aren’t as extensively represented in standard reference tools, such as the female authors notably absent from the Index of English Literary Manuscripts. Renaissance and early modern authors’ names are not spelled consistently between sources. For this volume we have decided to use the Library of Congress name authority spellings of Walter Raleigh and Aemilia Lanyer, but the researcher will encounter variant spellings, such as Ralegh and Emilia Lanier. We have selected, evaluated, and compared sources that most likely will be essential resources for many literary research projects, and also include examples of more specialized author and period sources. Literary Research and the British Renaissance and Early Modern Period: Strategies and Sources is designed primarily for graduate students studying English literature but would also be valuable to scholars exploring the literature outside their own period or disciplinary specialty, for new English literature subject-specialist librarians, or for advanced undergraduate students.

Introduction

xiii

The volume begins with an overview of basic search techniques for online catalogs, databases, and Google search tools to provide a foundation for search strategies presented in later chapters. The second chapter on general literary reference sources covers other research guides, encyclopedias, companions, chronologies, and biographical sources, and chapter 4 on bibliographies, indexes, and annual reviews examines both print and electronic tools. The research environment is continually evolving and this process is reflected in chapters about the changing nature of the library catalog and its effect on search strategies, as well as the increasing availability of primary sources in digital form, including printed texts, manuscripts, periodicals, broadsides, images, and historical material. This availability is discussed specifically in chapter 6 on seventeenth-century journals and in chapter 11 on digital projects, as well as more generally throughout the volume. Other chapters address the particular challenges of researching genres in the period, literary translations, manuscripts and archival research, and investigating contemporary reception to a particular author and her or his work. Standard research tools, such as scholarly journals and microform collections, are also discussed as is the role played by freely available resources on the Web (all of which were accessed during the summer of 2009). The final chapter, “Researching a Thorny Problem,” demonstrates how many of the research tools and strategies presented in the volume can be employed to explore a question that perhaps has no definitive answer; in this case, using sources and strategies to assess reaction to Margaret Cavendish’s natural philosophy by her female contemporaries. Our primary goal in creating this guide is to emphasize the research process, provide scholars with advice about specific tools, and recommend effective search strategies so that they can investigate literary topics of the British Renaissance and early modern period with confidence and discernment. Please note that additional resources in related disciplines are available online at www.literaryresearchseries.org. NOTES 1. Leah S. Marcus, “Renaissance/Early Modern Studies,” in Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies, ed. Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1992), 41. 2. Marcus, 42. 3. Marcus, 42. 4. Marcus, 43. 5. Ewan Fernie, Ramona Wray, Mark Thornton Burnett, and Clare McManus, eds., Reconceiving the Renaissance: A Critical Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 1.

xiv

Introduction

6. Fernie et al., 2. 7. This overview is indebted to Constance Jordan and Clare Carroll’s introduction to the period in the Longman Anthology of British Literature, vol. 1B, “The Early Modern Period,” ed. David Damrosch, 2nd ed. (New York: Longman, 2003), 641–61. For additional overviews, see David Loewenstein and Janel Mueller, eds., The Cambridge History of Early Modern Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002) and Andrew Sanders, The Short Oxford History of English Literature, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

Chapter One

Basics of Online Searching

In 2007, a website called YouTube posted a very funny Norwegian Broadcasting video, “Introducing the Book,” which aired originally on a television show titled Øystein og jeg.1 In the sketch, a medieval monk in a monastery calls “the Medieval Helpdesk” for assistance with a new technology called “the book.” The frustrated monk, baffled by the fact that the book will open on one side but not the other and exasperated in general with this new form of publication, laments that it is a sad advancement over the easier-to-use scroll, which didn’t require pages to be turned or the knowledge that the book can’t be opened at the spine. The sketch clearly pokes fun at the ignorance of noncomputer types by illustrating how silly their questions can sound to those in the know. Yet this video also illustrates how quickly something we know well can suddenly become incomprehensible, with the technology itself barring access to beloved resources. The content remains the same, but the access changes. This is a reality in the ever-changing Web environment, one scholars must learn to take in stride. New features and refinements are added daily to Web-based resources. Countering all this uncertainty is a basic understanding about the current structure of library-related resources; knowing how and why records are retrieved during a search will give you a foundation from which to work, whatever happens in the future. The world of scholarly research is in a transitional phase. The first significant shift occurred late in the twentieth century when card catalogs were transformed into online databases, then with the advent of the Web into Web-based catalogs. Print bibliographic reference tools, too, moved into this electronic world. Online access allows scholars much more flexibility as searchers, but at the same time it can be complicated. To use resources effectively and knowledgeably, it behooves researchers to learn more about 1

2

Chapter One

how standard online tools actually work: how are they organized, and how are records retrieved? As scholars, it is important to develop solid online searching skills. You need to feel comfortable and confident that you are finding everything of relevance to your topic, not just something of relevance. There are differences between types of search engines for finding resources—between a library catalog and Google, between a library catalog and the Modern Language Association International Bibliography (MLAIB), between a library catalog and a union catalog—and between the types of sources you will find using these Web-based tools. A search entered in one bibliographic database with great success might not work at all in another database, requiring a new strategy; and neither of the searches used in these two databases will necessarily work in Google. To effectively draw out information, you need to know how systems are searched and how data is retrieved. Learning good search techniques and having strong evaluative skills are both key to your success as a literary researcher and scholar. Following are some practical steps to help you conduct research consistently and intelligently, and allow you to feel a sense of control. Understanding the content of this chapter is vital and will serve as the foundation for the chapters in the rest of this book. STEP 1: WRITE THE RESEARCH QUESTION AS A TOPIC SENTENCE By writing down the research question as a topic sentence, you are defining core ideas about your topic; this allows you to see the central concepts to be explored. From this initial step you can then build search strategies to find relevant sources. For example, if you’re curious about patronage and politics in relation to the masque in the Renaissance and early modern world, you could write “I want to explore how politics and/or patronage were either incorporated into or served as external forces upon the masque of the Renaissance and early modern period.” Or perhaps you are interested in theories of poetics and historiography and their effects on drama and poetry at the end of the sixteenth century: “I want to research theories of historiography and poetics in relation to drama and poetry during the late Elizabethan and early Stuart eras.” STEP 2: BRAINSTORM KEYWORDS As the next step, take the key concepts from the topic sentence and jot down other related keywords and synonyms for finding relevant materials. This

Basics of Online Searching

3

step will allow you to think of different ways your topic can be described, so if the first set of terms doesn’t work you have others to try, especially if you use a variety of reference tools that employ different kinds of vocabulary for one of your concepts. For the masque example, the terms renaissance and early modern might appear sufficient, but as you will learn in the “Subject Searches” section of chapter 3, Library of Congress subject headings do not always use those terms when describing books about those eras. You could find instead that words and phrases such as sixteenth century, seventeenth century, elizabethan, and stuart are more effective. You might use the terms england or britain in combination with the centuries to find additional sources. The MLA International Bibliography uses the date ranges 1500– 1599 and 1600–1699 instead of sixteenth century or seventeenth century to describe scholarship covering that time period. Ask questions about your project to see if there are additional keywords to further open up the topic. Would it be beneficial to explore the larger genre of English drama from this era? What about theatre (or theater)? How does the idea of spectacle intersect with masque, and is that important? To help visualize this step of the process, create a table of concepts relevant to the poetics and historiography topic. As shown in table 1.1, put the main concepts across the top of the table and then list synonyms or related terms underneath. We’ve placed drama and poetry with theory and philosophy because, within the parameters of this project, these are all related concepts that will then intersect with poetics or historiography in a plethora of ways to describe the turn of the seventeenth century. This issue will be illustrated further in step 4.

STEP 3: USE ELECTRONIC RECORDS: THE MARC EXAMPLE Let’s step back a moment from the research process to discuss how these keywords will be retrieved from the databases you search. Search engines are structured to retrieve records based on a set of internal rules and in response Table 1.1. Keywords for topic about theories of poetics and historiography in late Elizabethan and early Stuart eras. Concept #1

Concept #2

Concept #3

poetics historiography

theory philosophy drama poetry

Elizabethan Stuart Renaissance early modern sixteenth century seventeenth century

4

Chapter One

to particular commands. A researcher executes a search to find a title or author or subject, and the search engine retrieves materials in response to the command given. To provide a closer look at how this works, we’ll examine the way one set of standards and rules governs one of the main scholarly research tools you will encounter: the library catalog. Have you ever looked at a record within an online library catalog and noticed a button labeled “MARC Display” among the various buttons allowing you to navigate through the catalog? If you click on it, you will see what can look to the uninitiated like a bewildering list of numbers and words (see figure 1.1). In fact, each of the numbers in the column on the left side of the screen are MARC codes, and to the right of the codes is the bibliographic information that describe the item you have found. This is the MARC record, the behind-the-scenes structure that allows the item you found to be identified and retrieved. MARC, an acronym for MAchine Readable Cataloging, is a standard developed at the Library of Congress in the 1960s, establishing the set of rules by which bibliographic information can be captured, shared, and displayed in an online environment. In the MARC format, tags are assigned to specific bits of bibliographic information; these stored bits of data can then be retrieved by a search engine designed to look for the specific tags when a particular search is executed. Each item cataloged using these protocols is called a MARC record. Librarians use MARC to create catalog records that describe items within the library collection, use the MARC coding to organize the data in the records into indexes, and then provide a Web-based or online text–based interface to allow the contents of the MARC records to be searched and extracted. Most libraries contract with a commercial vendor,

Figure 1.1. Modified MARC record for The Tragedy of Mariam, with tags 100, 245, and 260 highlighted. Source: University of Denver Penrose Library catalog.

Basics of Online Searching

5

such as Innovative Interfaces, SirsiDynix, or Voyager, which have developed the software that allows the cataloging, organizing, and accessing to occur within a single software package. In step 4 we will discuss how the information is searched and retrieved by the researcher; in this step we will examine the MARC record as one example of how bibliographic information is organized behind the scenes. Once you understand one set of rules, the knowledge is transferable to other online resources you will encounter. To illustrate the intricacies of MARC, let’s look at two types of cataloging records: a book and a periodical. In a MARC record, the bibliographic information is divided into fields and subfields. Each field is assigned a three-digit numeric “tag” that can then be placed into an index (such as title, author, or subject indexes) and retrieved using a search engine. For example, a librarian cataloging the Broadview Press version of Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam would put Cary in the MARC author field, tag 100; Tragedy of Mariam in the title field, tag 245; and Broadview Press in the subfield b section of the publisher field, tag 260. When the librarian sets up the integrated software for the library catalog, he or she puts the 100 tag into the author index, the 245 tag into the title index, and the 260 tag into the publisher index and sets up commands to allow researchers to search those indexes by author, title, and publisher. As a result, the researcher can search by author to find all works by Cary within that library catalog, by title to find the particular work, or by publisher to find everything the library owns by Broadview Press. In fact, the researcher can combine all these concepts together to find this exact Cary edition using the strategies discussed in step 4. Periodicals and newspapers as we know them today did not exist in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; we will discuss strategies for identifying titles and strategies for access in chapter 6. Figure 1.2 shows a record for an academic publication important to the Renaissance and early modern literary

Figure 1.2. Modified MARC record for English Literary Renaissance, with tags 229, 245, and 650s highlighted. Source: University of Denver Penrose Library catalog.

6

Chapter One

scholar: English Literary Renaissance. If a library decides to have a separate periodical title index, the MARC tags for the periodical title, 222 and 229, will be put into the periodical title index rather than the title index. Many libraries take this step because periodical titles are not necessarily unique, and rather than requiring the researcher to sift through a variety of formats mixed into the 245-tagged title field, libraries will give these publication types their own point of access in the search commands. Because periodical titles also have the standard 245 tag, this is also included in the title index. If you conduct a periodical search and do not find the title, it is a good rule of thumb to switch to the title index and try again, in case the MARC record lacks the 222 or 229 tag. Figure 1.2 also illustrates the 650 tag, which is the subject field. The librarian who cataloged this periodical assigned two Library of Congress subject headings: English literature—Early modern, 1500–1700—Periodicals and English literature—Early modern, 1500–1700—History and criticism— Periodicals. Other fields of interest to the scholar include the International Standard Serial Number (ISSN), tagged 022, and the call number, tagged 050. Depending upon the structure of the database, each tag could have its own index, or could be searchable using the keyword search. Searching by keyword can be the most flexible and complex way to search the library catalog because librarians put into that index all MARC tags they think their patrons might search by keyword: title, author, subject, and so on. If the URL for an electronic journal is keyword indexed, researchers can retrieve all the electronic publications available via that domain; a keyword search on the domain for English Literary Renaissance, www.blackwell-synergy.com, retrieves all titles available to the library community by that publisher. A keyword search on http, the transfer protocol used within the Internet, combined with a relevant term, can be used to identify Web-based resources cataloged on a particular subject, such as http and renaissance. Subject and keyword searches are discussed in more detail later in this chapter, and in chapter 3. This brief overview of the MARC record illustrates how a database can be configured to allow researchers to retrieve relevant sources using specific commands. Other scholarly electronic research tools you will encounter are designed in similar, although not identical, ways. In the next step, we will explore how search engines extract information from databases using a variety of techniques. STEP 4: CREATE SEARCH STRATEGIES Field Searching As you learned in the discussion about MARC records, electronic records are made up of fields that have been assigned to indexes, and the indexes

Basics of Online Searching

7

are assigned certain search commands to extract the information. The most recognizable search commands are title, author, or subject, and when one of these is used the specific field within the electronic record will be searched and, if relevant, retrieved. This is called field searching. Depending upon the search engine used to explore the database, almost any part of an electronic record can be searched using the field search: author, title, subject, ISSN/ISBN, place of publication, publisher, date of publication, language, abstract, or full text. Most search engines allow keyword, sometimes called default, searching to retrieve information from almost any part of the record. For some databases, the site’s “Help” pages will explain which fields the keyword search will include. Boolean Searches The most basic technique used in online research is Boolean searching. At present, some form of Boolean logic is used by almost every Web-based search engine that literary scholars will encounter when researching the Renaissance and early modern era. Search engines may require you to use Boolean operators, and others may automatically use the Boolean and as the default search. In certain search engines, the advanced option provides a variety of fields to be searched, with drop-down menus to specify the desired field to be scanned. In figure 1.3 we see a typical EBSCO advanced search screen containing three search boxes, with one of the drop-down menus expanded to illustrate the range of fields that can be searched. The “and” option to the left is also a drop-down menu along with the other options “or” and “not.” And, or, and not are Boolean operators, which allow researchers to

Figure 1.3. Main search screen for searching MLAIB via the EBSCO search engine. Source: MLA International Bibliography, via EBSCO.

8

Chapter One

Figure 1.4. Boolean operators.

combine terms, expand concepts, or disallow terms (see the Venn diagrams in figure 1.4, which illustrate these concepts). Although a range of fields is available, the straightforward keyword search using Boolean operators is the most common. Boolean logic and operators are named for George Boole, a nineteenthcentury British mathematician who developed a philosophy of logic that had no known practical use during his lifetime. In the 1930s, Claude Shannon learned about and understood Boole’s philosophy while an undergraduate at the University of Michigan; at MIT he incorporated Boole’s logic into his master’s thesis, and later, as an engineer at Bell Laboratories, applied Boole’s theories to create switching circuits for telephones. The practical use to which Shannon put Boole’s philosophy eventually became the basic idea that underlies modern computers.2 Not only was Boole’s logic used in making computers, it is used to extract data when conducting literary research online, specifically to narrow and broaden search results and to exclude concepts. 1) Boolean Operator “And”: And narrows the search. Revisit table 1.1 in step 2. To focus on all aspects of your topic, type and between terms listed under each of the numbered columns: poetics and theory and renaissance If you type this combination of keywords and Boolean operators into an online bibliographic database that requires Boolean operators, you will find records containing all these terms. AND in figure 1.4 is a Venn diagram to help you visualize this strategy. The shaded area indicates where the three concepts overlap, and illustrates where all three concepts are present. This search strategy retrieved the following record, shown in figure 1.5, from the MLAIB. Key concepts have been highlighted. 2) Boolean Operator “Or”: Or broadens the search. Refer back to table 1.1. Under each of the columns is a list of synonyms or related terms. To cre-

Basics of Online Searching

9

Figure 1.5. Modified record from MLAIB using Boolean and to combine concepts. Source: MLA International Bibliography, via EBSCO.

ate a strategy that allows all these words to be understood as a single concept by the search engine, use the operator or to string them together: poetics or historiography When entered into a bibliography database that employs Boolean logic, records that have any of these terms will be located. In figure 1.4 OR illustrates this point. 3) Boolean Operator “Not”: Not excludes unwanted concepts (see figure 1.4, NOT). Perhaps during your research you discover that an unwanted concept keeps appearing. For example, you require sources on the English Renaissance era, not the American Renaissance of the nineteenth century. You can exclude that concept as follows: renaissance not american This search will eliminate all records containing the word american. This strategy, however, can be problematic, for it could eliminate potentially useful records, such as records in which the word American appears as part of an institutional affiliation or as part of the title of a journal. While not does rid you of some unwanted citations, it may also block promising resources. Therefore, be cautious using this operator. Truncation/Wildcards A second technique common to most search engines is truncation. Truncation allows the researcher to cut off a word at an appropriate point, substitute the end with a symbol, such as *, ?, !, #, or others, so that the stem of the word and variant endings can be found at once. One standard symbol is *. For the

10

Chapter One

topic about politics or patronage and the masque, both politics and patronage can be truncated: politic* will retrieve records with politic, politics, political, and politician, while patron* will retrieve patron, patrons, patronage. A note of caution: truncate wisely. If too much of a word is cut off, then too many irrelevant sources will be retrieved. For example, polit* will retrieve the words listed above, but also polite, politely, and politeness. If too little of the word is truncated pertinent terms will be ignored; if patronage is truncated after the “e”, then only patronage and patronages will be retrieved, and all the others listed above will be excluded. Masque* will bring back masque, masques, masquerade, and masquerades: if all are relevant, or if you don’t mind sorting through the masquerade records as you browse the results, then truncation is appropriate. If not, then use nesting, explained below, to search for masque. Some search engines call truncation symbols “wildcards,” but in other interfaces, the wildcard has its own unique function that allows the use of a symbol internally to replace a letter or letters: wom?n will find woman, women, or womyn. The symbols for both truncation and wildcards vary from search engine to search engine; use the Help screens to discover if the engine you are using allows one or both of these techniques, and which symbols are used. Think of truncation and wildcard searching as a form of the Boolean or, in which you are bringing like terms together to create one concept. For researching the Renaissance and early modern era, both truncation and wildcards can be invaluable when searching for texts at a time when spelling wasn’t standardized. Fuzzy Searching To search digital collections of materials originally published in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, publishers often provide a search feature generally known as fuzzy searching to the interface. Fuzzy searching allows retrieval of results that approximate the word or string of words. Typeface and spelling were not standardized during the Renaissance and early modern era; with fuzzy searching, the system will look for words that somewhat match the desired terms. For example, Early English Books Online (EEBO) has a check box that enables “Variant Spellings,” so that murder finds murther, murdre, murdir, and mvrder. Nesting Nesting is a more complex form of searching, in which concepts are retrieved using a combination of Boolean operators. The use of parentheses allows

Basics of Online Searching

11

similar concepts to be grouped together within a longer search string. For the topic patronage or politics and the masque, two searches can be combined into one: politic* and masque politic* and masques patron* and masque patron* and masques can be searched together as (politic* or patron*) and (masque or masques) To focus on the masque in Britain, the search can be formulated to ensure comprehensive results: (politic* or patron*) and (masque or masques) and (britain or england or scotland or ireland or wales) Phrase Searching/Proximity Operators This section addresses some complicated issues about searching, and may require some search practice to fully understand. Search engines determine how the words within a database will be retrieved: some automatically search phrases as the default; those that use the Boolean and as the default may require quotation marks around the phrase; others require proximity operators. Because they can vary so widely, it is always wise to read the Help screens when you first use a new search engine to learn how the searches you enter will be interpreted. To illustrate this point, let’s look for books by and about the author Margaret Cavendish. This seventeenth-century writer’s maiden name was Lucas, and her title was “Duchess of Newcastle upon Tyne.” Her Library of Congress subject heading is Newcastle, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of, 1624?–1674. If the concept you are searching is a phrase, read the Help screens to see if the search engine allows phrase or proximity (also called adjacency) searching. As mentioned previously, the system may require the use of quotation marks (e.g., “early modern”) for an exact phrase, or an adjacency command, such as the letter w, entered as early w modern. WorldCat, discussed in chapter 3, uses an interface called FirstSearch as its search engine. We’ll explain the distinctions between a database and a search engine in step 5, but for now it is important to know that FirstSearch allows

12

Chapter One

Table 1.2. Search strategies and records retrieve in WorldCat. Source: WorldCat, OCLC, via FirstSearch. Search Strategy

Retrieves

“margaret cavendish” margaret w2 cavendish

margaret cavendish margaret cavendish margaret lucas cavendish margaret cavendish margaret lucas cavendish cavendish margaret lucas margaret and cavendish (default search = and)

margaret n2 cavendish

margaret cavendish

Number of Results 884 924 957

1046

the content of the database WorldCat to be searched using a variety of techniques, including phrase and proximity. The Boolean and is the default strategy if neither phrase nor proximity commands are present (see table 1.2). To search a phrase in a database using the FirstSearch interface, type “margaret cavendish” using quotation marks. This strategy, however, is limiting because it doesn’t allow the author to be found if her maiden name is included, or if cavendish precedes margaret. Proximity operators allow more flexible relationships to connect words, and at times will be more effective. The following proximity operators are used in WorldCat when FirstSearch is the search engine: w (with)—use when you require the system to recognize word order; use wn (where n is a number) to indicate number of words between the words being searched: margaret w2 cavendish. n (near)—use to indicate flexible word order; use nn (where the second n is a number) to indicate number of words between the words being searched: margaret n2 cavendish. • The fourth search, margaret cavendish, retrieves the most records because the two terms are searched separately. As a result, you will retrieve “false drops,” meaning that both words are present, but the sources are not by or about Cavendish. For example, this search found The Prime Ministers, from Robert Walpole to Margaret Thatcher, by George Malcolm Thomson, which contains chapters on William Cavendish and Margaret Thatcher but nothing about Margaret Cavendish. • The first search using “margaret cavendish” is the most restrictive for it does not make allowances for the inclusion of the author’s maiden name. • The second search, margaret w2 cavendish, allows the author’s name as part of the Library of Congress heading to be found, Newcastle Margaret Cavendish Duchess of, and the author’s maiden name to be included, Mar-

Basics of Online Searching

13

garet Lucas Cavendish, but does not retrieve records in which cavendish precedes margaret. • Although you may still get false drops, the most accurate and the most flexible search is the third search because it allows records to be retrieved whether cavendish appears before or after margaret, and it allows the maiden name to be present or not. For databases in which full-text proximity searching is an option, skillful proximity searching is essential: a straight Boolean search on masque and patron* will retrieve records where masque may be the first word in a fifteen thousand word article, and patronage the last, and the concepts have nothing to do with each other. A proximity search on masque n10 patron*, on the other hand, will find articles where the two terms occur within ten words of each other. Proximity searching is an older type of search strategy, essential in the early days of searching online bibliographic databases, but may be completely replaced by other means of extracting information, such as relevancy searching discussed below. Subject versus Keyword Searches In the initial stages of research, keyword searching is most effective because it allows the use of “natural language.” Once you find the relevant sources, start looking in the subject or descriptor fields to discover the “controlled vocabulary,” the predefined, authorized terms used to describe the items. Library catalogs and most commercial scholarly databases employ staff to examine a publication and assign subjects to it using controlled vocabulary, either established by the Library of Congress or developed in-house by a governing body, such as the thesaurus established by the Modern Language Association (MLA). While keyword searching allows the researcher to explore the database using terms brainstormed in step 2, the subject headings or descriptors ensure that all like materials can be pulled together using specific words or phrases. Sources can have multiple subject headings to reflect the range of content included in the work. Most public and academic libraries assign subject headings as set by the Library of Congress. The headings are published in a multivolume set titled Library of Congress Subject Headings and online at Library of Congress Authorities (authorities.loc.gov). In online catalogs, however, it is easy to use the results of a search to determine the authorized headings for a topic. Searching the library catalog, we find the promising title Textual Patronage in English Drama: 1570–1640 (figure 1.6).

14

Chapter One

Figure 1.6. Modified record illustrating the Library of Congress subject headings used to describe Textual Patronage in English Drama: 1570–1640. Source: University of Denver Penrose Library catalog.

The table of contents provides valuable information about this particular volume, especially the fact that chapter 2 discusses masques. The subject headings, in the shaded area, are those terms the Library of Congress has deemed proper to describe a book of this nature. As you can see, these headings are not natural language—no one would think to enter the string of words Authors and patrons—England—History—16th century, but using the link from this record will allow all books related to this topic to be brought together. Although masques (the plural) is a Library of Congress subject heading (figure 1.7), it isn’t present in this record because only part of the book concerns the masque. The broader heading best describes this book overall, but the record came to light because masque occurs in the table of contents. Sometimes the exact subject heading isn’t the best avenue to take, once the subject headings are discovered. Often it is the intersection of two or three subject headings that brings the relevant record to light. In those cases, note the words used in the subject field and search them as keywords, using Boolean operators: for example, drama and patrons and england and 16th century. Database publishers also assign controlled vocabulary to sources, but may create their own thesauri. In chapter 4 we will discuss the various databases of importance to the Renaissance and early modern literary researcher, and we strongly recommend you acquaint yourself with the controlled vocabulary for your topic in each one, so that you know the best terminology to use. In the MLAIB you can browse the online MLA Thesaurus or “Names as Subjects” to see the controlled vocabulary for subjects and authors as subject. The An-

Basics of Online Searching

15

Figure 1.7. The Library of Congress subject headings for masque in browse mode. Source: University of Denver Penrose Library catalog.

nual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (ABELL), another vital literary research tool discussed in depth in chapter 4, has a “select from a list” feature that allows you to browse the subject field. In addition, whenever a relevant citation is located, look at the subject or descriptor fields. If the heading is perfect, use the link (if available) or do a subject search; if the descriptor is too broad by itself but suggests useful terms, then add those to your list of keywords, and try them in keyword searches. Relevancy Searching More and more search engines allow the researcher to sort and display results using relevancy ranking. This feature, which may be the way all future searching will work, is becoming increasingly sophisticated and could replace the more cumbersome proximity searching discussed earlier. In relevancy searches a formula is used to rank results based upon selected criteria, which varies by search engine. Essentially, results are ranked and displayed with the most “relevant” results listed first, employing some of the following types of criteria: • the presence of all or some of the keywords in the record • the number of occurrences of the words searched (the more times the words are used, the higher the result is ranked in the display order) • the proximity of the search terms to each other (the closer the words are to each other, the higher the result is ranked) • the location of the terms within the record (in an important field such as the title or subject/descriptor, in the abstract, in the first paragraph, or near the beginning of the document) At present, search engines with the relevancy searching feature offer the choice of activating or deactivating this feature. Check the Help screens to see if the option is the default in the database you are using. If relevancy searching

16

Chapter One

is not the default, and you would like to use it, look at the Help screens to see if the option is available and how to activate it. In chapter 3 we discuss the next generation of library catalogs as discovery tools, in which relevancy ranking is becoming the standard means of displaying results. Limiting/Modifying Search limiting, or modifying, is an important feature which allows a set of search results to be narrowed down by specific characteristics such as language, material type (e.g., book, serial, video, dissertation, journal article, book chapter), year (or range of years), publisher, or place of publication. Even Google allows limiting to a specific domain, such as .edu, .com, or .gov. As we will see in chapter 3, in next-generation catalog interfaces such as Endeca and Encore, limiting is available through a series of “facets,” which allow you to easily modify a search by date, language, location, format, and so forth, by clicking on a link from a handy list of options.

STEP 5: USE DATABASES VERSUS SEARCH ENGINES Once you have brainstormed terms and have mastered Boolean logic and truncation, you are ready to develop a search strategy to use online. You must tailor the strategy to the search engine you are using. As stated previously, the content of a database is provided by the publisher, and the interface used to access the database is provided by the vendor. For example, the content of MLAIB, discussed in chapter 4, is created by the MLA. But a variety of search engines can be used to access the content of the database via vendors such as ProQuest, EBSCO, Gale, and FirstSearch; your institution has a subscription to MLAIB with a vendor, and that vendor supplies the search engine. Table 1.3 lists both databases and search engines. Table 1.3. List of databases and search engines used to access these databases. DATABASE

VENDOR SEARCH ENGINE

Content

Access to Content

MLAIB

EBSCO FirstSearch (OCLC) ProQuest/Chadwyck-Healey Gale Cengage Learning FirstSearch (OCLC) British Library ProQuest/Chadwyck-Healey

WorldCat English Short Title Catalogue ABELL

Basics of Online Searching

17

To understand how the database is being searched by the search engine, read the Help screens. Whenever you approach a new database, look for the “Help” or “Frequently Asked Questions” section. Ask yourself the following questions as you read through the documentation: • Does the database require the use of the Boolean and to connect separate concepts? • If and is required, does it need to be all uppercase? • Is truncation allowed? If so, what is the truncation symbol? • What is the internal wildcard symbol? • Are quotation marks required for phrase searching? Or are proximity operators required? • Does the search engine allow limiting by date, type of publication, language, material type, or other means? • How are results displayed? By author? Title? Date? • Does the database display records based upon a relevancy formula? If so, what are the criteria used for ranking? In the following chapters, we give the URLs for the publishers of the online subscription databases instead of URLs for the databases. Unless your library subscribes to the database, you cannot gain access through a direct link. If possible, we linked to the publisher’s description of the database, but more often we linked to the main Web page. Here are some strategies to find the database description within the publisher’s website: if a search box is available, search for the title of the database; use the alphabetic list of titles if offered; look for a link to information about electronic or digital products; or look for a link for academic products. For a complete list of vendors that provide access to MLAIB, consult the MLA website at www.mla.org/bib_electronic.

STEP 6: GOOGLE Google is one of the most popular search engines for surfing the World Wide Web. A website is retrieved based upon certain criteria: popularity and importance in terms of the amount of traffic it receives and the quality of the links to the site, and word proximity within the results. Google employs many of the search features described above, but not all. Although there is a general directory to the websites through Google, no subject headings are assigned. Boolean operators OR and AND, in uppercase, and phrase searching using quotation marks are allowed. Technically, truncation is not available; instead, “stemming” allows relevant words to be retrieved: patron will

18

Chapter One

retrieve records with patron and patrons, but not patronage. Google prevents “stop words,” or words which are so common they slow down the retrieval process (e.g., a, an, the, at), from being searched unless you tell it to search those terms. To ensure a stop word is searched, either include it in a phrase search or precede the word with the “+” symbol: +to +be +or +not +to +be will retrieve records with all the terms present, but not necessarily in that order, while “to be or not to be” will retrieve the phrase. If you are looking for websites with the Shakespearean quotation, the latter search will be the most effective. The University of California, Berkeley, maintains an excellent website, Internet Guides (www.lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/Guides/Internet/), which provides useful information about Web search engines, effective search strategies, and general challenges you might encounter when searching the Internet. Most academic resources available online through individual library catalogs or subscription services are not searchable using any of the general Internet search engines, including Google, although the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) and MLA are partnering to provide the content of MLAIB to subscribers though the public network of libraries WorldCat.org (see chapter 3 for more information about WorldCat and WorldCat.org). For this reason the vast majority of scholarly sources a Renaissance and early modern researcher will need cannot currently be found on what is called the “visible Web”—content accessed using a tool such as Google—and therefore Google is a supplementary part of the search process. However, in the case of manuscripts and archives, Google may prove to be very useful. Google Books and Google Scholar are two recent initiatives in which Google, the company, has partnered with libraries to add more scholarly content to the Web, allowing, for example, access to scanned images of pre-1923 books and citations for books and articles. Google Scholar can be set up by libraries so that, if an electronic version of an article exists, the researcher can link directly to it. These initiatives will be discussed in more depth in chapters 4 and 5.

CONCLUSION The advent of the Web and Google has had a tremendous impact on libraries. Once the main portal to the universe of knowledge, librarians now are in the process of rethinking how they provide patrons access to collections and services. The misperception on the part of the public is that everything is online; it isn’t, and may never be, but discovering information about everything published in print and electronic form is a much more feasible, attainable goal.

Basics of Online Searching

19

In chapter 3 we discuss the history of the backbone of the library, the library catalog, and what its future may be. Whatever happens, the basic search techniques you have learned in this chapter will continue to be relevant. The key to ongoing success as a researcher lies in your ability to adapt to new ways of searching, retrieving, and viewing materials with which you are already familiar. We don’t envision the immediate demise of the most vital help you can receive, if you fail to adapt or need assistance: the reference librarian. Our best advice is to get to know your reference librarians wherever you go, and consult them to discover new sources and new search strategies.

NOTES 1. There are two versions of this sketch on YouTube: one posted by “ZrednaZ” on February 21, 2007, www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFAWR6hzZek; and the official version posted by NRK on February 25, 2007, www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQHX -SjgQvQ (both accessed 26 August 2009). 2. George Johnson, “Claude Shannon, Mathematician, Dies at 84,” New York Times, February 27, 2001, www.lexisnexis.com; Solomon W. Golomb, “Claude E. Shannon (1916–2001),” Science (New Series) 292, no. 5516 (April 20, 2001): 455; Elizabeth S. Smith, “On the Shoulders of Giants: From Boole to Shannon to Taube: The Origins of Computerized Information from the Mid-19th Century to the Present,” Information Technology and Libraries 12, no. 2 (June 1993): 217–26; Lee Katterman, “Claude E. Shannon,” in Michigan Greats (University of Michigan: Research Administration), www.drda.umich.edu/news/michigangreats/shannon.html (accessed 26 August 2009).

Chapter Two

General Literary Reference Resources

As your research progresses, you will have questions that can be quickly answered by consulting a reference tool that librarians call “ready reference” resources: guides, dictionaries, encyclopedias, companions, chronologies, and concordances. Some direct you to relevant literary reference sources, while others can be used to check facts such as important dates for an author, to find a short overview of subjects such as a religious movement, to identify titles written by or information about characters created by an author, or to discover specific words within the oeuvre of a poet or playwright. Companions can serve either as ready reference tools, or as introductions to the literature of an era or nation. Several titles we’ve selected are standard literary reference tools with which you should familiarize yourself, such as Harner’s Literary Research Guide, The Oxford Companion to English Literature, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and Dictionary of Literary Biography. Others are representative of a type of publication, such as the Ben Jonson companion or the Spenser concordance listed in the “Individual Author Sources” section later in this chapter. The following selections are a sampling of the variety of available titles within each category, along with recommended works to consult over the course of your scholarly career. Some of these will be updated over the years, or new titles will appear to replace older versions; regularly browsing the reference collections or consulting with the reference librarian will keep you current. Reference works are in transition, and several of the reference sources are available in both print and electronic formats; therefore, we will refer to “reference collections” to include both formats rather than the more traditional “reference stacks.” This shift may have significance for the future of reference books, which are now constrained by publishing costs that restrict the length of entries, even within the largest reference sets; in the online environ20

General Literary Reference Resources

21

ment, entries can be of any length without having an impact on price or shelf space, and can be updated more easily.

RESEARCH GUIDES Bracken, James K. Reference Works in British and American Literature. 2nd ed. Englewood, CO: Libraries Unlimited, 1998. Harner, James L. Literary Research Guide: An Annotated Listing of Reference Sources in English Literary Studies. 5th ed. New York: Modern Language Association, 2008. Marcuse, Michael J. A Reference Guide for English Studies. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.

Have you ever started a research project in a new area of study and wondered where to begin, or wished to learn more about a reference resource you have found? Of course, consulting your reference librarian is always an excellent choice, but there are important published research guides to explain and evaluate a wide range of reference tools for you. Guides to reference books lead to recommended print sources and online databases to use within a discipline. In an additional resource to this volume, available online at www .literaryresearchseries.org, we suggest titles for various fields of study. In the world of English literary studies the two major guides are James Harner’s Literary Research Guide and Michael Marcuse’s A Reference Guide for English Studies. They will guide you through the maze of resources available across the spectrum of English studies. As both are broad in scope, consult them for their recommendations for literary sources outside the parameters of this volume. Get to know these two authoritative publications and plan to refer to them often; the Renaissance era is one of the most studied fields and has an abundance of reference tools, more than most other eras. Harner and Marcuse will be helpful when you encounter older reference titles that you don’t know and are not covered here. If you aren’t already acquainted with it, we recommend you familiarize yourself immediately with James Harner’s Literary Research Guide, also known simply as “Harner.” This is a selective bibliography of important tools for research in English literatures. The preface traces the changes over the various editions, and the introduction states the scope of the volume, explains the arrangement, and describes the decision-making process. In its fifth edition, the volume provides detailed, evaluative annotations for 1,059 works (print, microforms, and electronic databases) published by October 2006, although some major works in press at that time are included. To accommodate the increase in electronic reference sources made available since the fourth

22

Chapter Two

edition, and to make way for a new section on cultural studies, Harner has eliminated coverage of scholarly journals and background studies, as well as the encyclopedias from the “Literature-Related Topic and Sources” division. Arranged in twenty-one divisions by general literary reference tools (e.g., library catalogs, bibliographies, dictionaries, dissertations and theses, Internet sites, biographical sources, guides to manuscripts and archives, periodicals, and genres), followed by national literatures (English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, American, and other literatures in English), and finally by literature-related topics (e.g., cultural studies; film and literature; gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered studies; women and literature; religion and literature), the divisions are subdivided into parts classified by type of resource, with a table of contents at the beginning of each division offering an overview of the organization. The reference works within each subdivision are numbered for easy cross-reference. Name, title, and subject indexes close the volume. The Renaissance and early modern scholar will find these divisions of interest: “M: English Literature,” “N: Irish Literature,” “O: Scottish Literature,” and “P: Welsh Literature.” The table of contents that heads each of these divisions uses entry numbers, rather than page numbers, to direct the reader through the guide. The English section has been subdivided into a general section followed by literary periods: Old English, Middle English, Renaissance, Restoration and eighteenth century, nineteenth century, and twentieth century. Literary scholars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries will want to review the “General,” “Renaissance Literature,” and “Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature” divisions. These have been further subdivided by type of resource: research methods, histories and surveys; literary handbooks, dictionaries, and encyclopedias; bibliographies of bibliographies; guides to primary works; guides to scholarship and criticism; language; biographical dictionaries; periodicals; and genres. “Genres” has been further subdivided to identify specific types of publications for fiction, drama, poetry, and prose. Evaluative annotations for each title are detailed and extremely helpful, with explanations of the strengths and weaknesses of the tool, and comparisons between like sources. Cross-references to entries discussed elsewhere in the volume ensure that the scholar can use a specific division to find all recommended sources, such as the two major literary bibliographies MLA International Bibliography (MLAIB) and Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (ABELL), which are located in Division G. The lengthy overviews of MLAIB and ABELL explain the history, evolution, and structure of each, with comparisons between print and online versions and between the two bibliographies themselves. Although many of the Renaissance and Reformation selections discussed in Harner are also found in this volume, the scholar can consult Harner for guidance in iden-

General Literary Reference Resources

23

tifying additional sources. When a new reference work supersedes a work, Harner provides the older title and bibliographic information. The guide can be used, not only to identify reference works within a field of study, but also to offer information about titles found while browsing the reference collections. Harner is a thoughtful, invaluable research guide. Published in 1990 and regrettably not updated since, Michael Marcuse’s A Reference Guide for English Studies continues to be relevant, for it aimed to identify and describe reference publications of interest in all subjects and for all critical and scholarly inquiries pursued by academics in university English departments. Marcuse’s intended audience is the scholar venturing into unknown areas of study and looking for the tools to access the subject; the guide is for the graduate student researching an unfamiliar era or the faculty member teaching outside his or her field of expertise. The result is, indeed, an impressive compilation of sources published prior to 1985, with selective coverage up to 1990. The introduction explains the arrangement and decision-making process. There are twenty-four major sections: general works; libraries; retrospective and current national bibliography; serial publications; miscellany; history and ancilla to historical study; biography; archives and manuscripts; language, linguistics, and philology; literary materials and contexts; literature; English literature; Medieval; Renaissance; Restoration and eighteenth century; nineteenth century; twentieth century; American; poetry and versification; theater, drama and film; prose fiction and nonfiction prose; theory, rhetoric, and composition; bibliography; and the profession of English. These are further subdivided by types of reference resources laid out in “An Overview of the Organization of This Guide.” The “Index of Subjects and Authors-as-Subjects” is the major point of access because reference tools may fall into more than one section. Under “Renaissance English literature” are subentries for bibliographic essays, bibliographies, collections of excerpts from modern criticism, drama, English-language dictionaries, fiction, French, frequently recommended works, handbooks, historical contexts, library collections, literary theory and criticism, poetry, prose, review of research, rhetoric, scholarly journals, serial bibliographies, student bibliographic guides, women, and year’s work in review essays. Author and title indexes to the sources annotated in this volume round out the end matter. The sections consist of three types of entries: single works, scholarly journals in particular fields, and guide lists to frequently recommended works in a particular field. “Section O: Literature of the Renaissance and Earlier Seventeenth Century” and “Section P: Literature of the Restoration and Eighteenth Century” are subdivided as follows: general, poetry, drama and theater, Shakespeare, and prose and prose fiction. Each item is headed by a bibliographic citation, followed by the Library of Congress call number.

24

Chapter Two

The annotations are descriptive enough to provide the reader with the scope and purpose of a work, what it includes and excludes, with references to like or supplemental titles. M-60 and S-50 contain guides to major English and American authors; in M-60 we find standard reference tools for individual authors such as periodicals, bibliographies, handbooks, standard editions, concordances, and biographies. The Renaissance and early modern authors listed are Francis Bacon, John Donne, John Dryden, Ben Jonson, John Milton, and William Shakespeare. Marcuse notes that these choices may seem to be the most conservative parts of the entire work, for he lists a few of the most canonical figures; however, it is difficult to find these types of authorcentered publications for noncanonical authors. Some sources in M-60 may be dated, as new editions, biographies, and reference tools may have been published in the intervening years, but these lists are a valuable starting point for identifying types of scholarly reference publications centered on authors, and it behooves any literary scholar to compile such a list for his or her own research project or long-term area of interest. Overall, Marcuse tries to steer a moderate course between traditional and contemporary scholarship, but he clearly values early types of scholarship that have fallen out of vogue and includes them in this volume in hopes that, in the future, they will have a new life and that his recommendations will guide scholars to important resources from the past. Because of its date, there are no electronic databases or websites listed. The volume, however, continues to be valuable; for the Renaissance and early modern scholar the section on manuscripts and archives, which has general guides to the location, study, and use of archives and manuscripts, lists publications that continue to aid those who work with primary source materials. The recommended readings within the literary era serve as an entry point into the pre-1985 scholarship of the period, while the scholarly journals subsection lists the core publications within an era of literary study. The information in this volume must be supplemented with Harner and by consultations with reference librarians. In Reference Works in British and American Literature, hereafter referred to as “Bracken,” James Bracken identifies and describes literary reference works devoted to individual authors published up to 1996, and some from 1997. Bracken includes about 170 British and American authors from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For the writers from the Renaissance and early modern period, Bracken has compiled an annotated bibliography describing the research tools which provide the groundwork for literary scholarship. The volume is arranged alphabetically by author, and the author entries typically are subdivided into “Bibliographies,” “Dictionaries, Encyclopedias, and Handbooks,” “Indexes and Concordances,” and “Journals,” if publications are available. Each publication is annotated

General Literary Reference Resources

25

with helpful descriptions about the scope and value of the sources. If no monographic bibliography exists, Bracken will point to the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Language and Literature (discussed in chapter 4), and will indicate if the author’s manuscripts are described in Index of English Literary Manuscripts (discussed in chapter 8). Throughout our volume, we will explain in further detail about various types of author-centered resources and how to find them. RENAISSANCE AND EARLY MODERN PERIOD ENCYCLOPEDIAS, DICTIONARIES, AND COMPANIONS Auchter, Dorothy. Dictionary of Literary and Dramatic Censorship in Tudor and Stuart England. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001. Bell, Maureen, George Parfitt, and Simon Shepherd. A Biographical Dictionary of English Women Writers: 1580–1720. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990. Cambridge Collections Online. West Nyack, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2006?–. cco.cambridge.org. Carney, Jo Eldridge. Renaissance and Reformation, 1500–1620: A Biographical Dictionary. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001. Also available as an e-book. Cook, Chris, and Philip Broadhead. The Longman Handbook of Early Modern Europe, 1453–1763. New York: Longman, 2001. Cook, James Wyatt. Encyclopedia of Renaissance Literature. New York: Facts on File, 2006. Dewald, Jonathan, ed. Europe, 1450–1789: Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World. 6 vols. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2004. Available online via Gale Virtual Reference Library, www.gale.com/gvrl. Grendler, P. F., ed. Encyclopedia of the Renaissance. 6 vols. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1999. Hadfield, Andrew. The English Renaissance 1500–1620. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001. Hager, Alan, ed. Encyclopedia of British Writers. Vol. 1, 16th and 17th Centuries. New York: Facts on File, 2003. Hattaway, Michael, ed. A Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000. Kinney, Arthur F. The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1500–1600. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pacheco, Anita. A Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002. Ruoff, James E. Crowell’s Handbook of Elizabethan and Stuart Literature. New York: Crowell, 1975. Schlueter, Paul, and June Schlueter, eds. An Encyclopedia of British Women Writers. Revised and expanded edition. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998.

26

Chapter Two

Todd, Janet, ed. A Dictionary of British and American Women Writers, 1660–1800. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allanheld, 1985.

Subject and period-specific encyclopedias, dictionaries, and companions are standard research tools generally found in the reference collections of the library; scholars frequently own their own copies to check facts, definitions, plot summaries, background reading, and so forth during the research process. These sources can serve as introductions to concepts, themes, people, literary works, historical events, and critical approaches within a discipline, literary movement, or era. Reference works can be by a single individual, with the strength of the work depending upon the skills of the author to provide an evenhanded approach to what can be vast amounts of information; or they can be edited works with several, sometimes dozens, of scholars contributing entries, with the strength of the book resting on the shoulders of the editor to make the work cohesive and of even quality. Several reference works may need to be consulted to find the fact required, or to check for accuracy of dates. To discover books of interest to your research, combine terms such as companion, handbook, dictionary, or encyclopedia with (early modern or renaissance) and (england or english or britain or british), and browse the reference collections in the call number ranges for British literature. Michael Hattaway’s noteworthy A Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture presents an overview of our current understanding of English Renaissance literature and culture in sixty essays written by scholars in the field. The work is divided into five parts: an introduction; “Contexts and Perspectives,” which contains eleven essays concerning cultural forces (e.g., early Tudor humanism, history, print and manuscript publications, playhouses and the role of drama); thirteen entries discussing new readings of texts (e.g., translations of the Bible, Lanyer’s “The Description of Cookham” and Jonson’s “To Penshurst,” the critical elegy); a wide range of topics in twenty-seven essays on “Genres and Modes” (e.g., allegory, epic, religious verse, prose fiction, diaries, letters); and eight entries on Renaissance understanding of issues such as rhetoric, witchcraft, sexuality, race, and writing the nation. Most essays average ten to thirteen pages, although some are shorter, and all conclude with notes and lists of references and further readings. A single index provides title, author, and subject access to the material. Andrew Hadfield’s The English Renaissance 1500–1620, part of the Blackwell Guides to Literature series, is more of a basic, introductory guide for students new to the era and to the historical contexts, authors, and texts of the Renaissance. Entries vary in length from one to five pages and contain short bibliographies for further reading. The volume opens with chapters on

General Literary Reference Resources

27

the history of the English Renaissance (“Political and Religious Developments”; “Exploration, Discovery, and Colonialism in the Americas”; and “The British Isles”). These are followed by biographical essays arranged alphabetically on forty-one writers, from Roger Ascham to Sir Thomas Wyatt; descriptions of twenty-two key texts (Sidney’s An Apology for Poetry, Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, More’s Utopia, and A Mirror for Magistrates); and essays on “Humanism, Education, Rhetoric and Genre Theory,” “Printing, Manuscript Circulation and Censorship,” “Women, Gender and Queer Reading,” “Attitudes to Other Nations and Cultures,” and “The Stage.” The reference concludes with a section on current issues in the criticism of Renaissance literature, a glossary of terms, a guide to further reading, and an index. The Cambridge Companion series monographs are excellent and wellrespected introductions to subjects or themes in literature, the classics, philosophy, religion, and culture. Comprising scholarly essays that present background and context, this ongoing series is available in print as single volumes or online via Cambridge Collections Online (CCOL). The print volumes are easy to navigate using the index at the back and the table of contents, and include handy chronologies. CCOL consists of three collections, “Literature and Classics,” “Philosophy, Religion, and Culture,” and “Shakespeare Survey” (also listed in chapter 5 on scholarly journals). The online table of contents can be browsed within the confines of a specific volume, or discovered, along with other related chapters, by searching the collections as a whole or within selected collections. Chapters are viewed as PDFs, retaining the formatting of the print version. A handy “My Collections” feature allows users to create individual, password-protected accounts to rerun recent or saved searches, and to store bookmarks to chapters and keep notes on the content. The advanced search allows field searching by full text, author/editor, title/volume, subjects, year of publication, ISBN, text of extract/abstract, and article type (e.g., critical essay, review, interview). The search engine supports Boolean and proximity operators, and truncation. Help screens provide further information about search techniques. Volumes of interest to the Renaissance and early modern scholar include Aphra Behn, Francis Bacon, Ben Jonson, English Renaissance Drama, English Literature 1500–1600, English Literature 1650–1740, English Poetry from Donne to Marvell, English Restoration Theatre, John Donne, John Dryden, Milton, Renaissance Humanism, several titles for Shakespeare (film, stage, studies, comedy, tragedy, history plays), Spenser, and Writing of the English Revolution, with more to come. CCOL isn’t a ready reference type of companion, but a compilation of essays intended to give a broad picture of an era rather than answer quick reference questions.

28

Chapter Two

As an example of a volume within this series, The Cambridge Companion to English Literature 1500–1600 places the literature of the century in the context of the culture that shaped it: the courts of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary, and Elizabeth; the tumultuous Catholic and Protestant relationships during and following the Reformation; and the development of humanism, the age of printing, and the discovery of the New World. Over the century the literature changed; the court literature of Henry moved toward personal poetry of sentiment, advances were made in the genre of prose, and drama moved from the churches to commercial playhouses. The book begins with a chronology of events and texts, followed by a chronology of individuals born in the years from 1500 to 1600. Fifteen chapters of roughly twenty pages each explore the sixteenth century; Tudor aesthetics; authorship; poetry, patronage, and court; religious writing; dramatic experiments; dramatic achievements; lyric forms; narrative, romance, and epic; Tudor satire; private life; popular culture in print; rewriting the world, rewriting the body; and writing empire and nation. Each chapter concludes with notes and further readings, and the volume ends with a single alphabetic index of authors, titles, and subjects. Both the print and electronic versions have their attractive features: it is easy to browse the print volume as an autonomous item, but the online version is available from anywhere. The scholar can also create links to parts of the online volume that are of specific interest, and keep notes. As our library copy has comments written by students in the margins, this feature is particularly striking, for it allows everyone to make the volume a personal copy without ruining the shared print copy. In fact, in chapter 7 we describe how marginalia from the Renaissance and early modern era help reveal contemporary responses to literary works. James Wyatt Cook’s Encyclopedia of Renaissance Literature expands the traditional boundaries of the Renaissance to give a global picture of sixteenthand seventeenth-century literatures, encompassing not just England and Europe, but extending out to Latin and Neo-Latin, Asian, Persian, Arabic, Turkish, and Indian literatures. Brief but engaging entries of no more than two pages describe the literatures and cultural figures from the years 1500 to 1700, as well as important precursors, such as Aristotle’s Poetics. Although the author states that this book isn’t intended for experts, the international coverage is valuable to more advanced graduate students and scholars as well. Cook’s selections were influenced by popular anthologies of literatures, prompting him to provide information on and context for the people, texts, terms, and events to illustrate the items found in anthologies. The breadth of such a work when contained in a single, manageable volume, however, means there is a lack of depth and comprehensiveness. Margaret Cavendish is here, but not Aemilia Lanyer; Midsummer Night’s Dream, but not Hamlet. A

General Literary Reference Resources

29

list of included writers by language of composition, a chronology of authors and birth and death years, and a single author, title, and subject index round out this book. An older, dated book, James Ruoff’s Crowell’s Handbook of Elizabethan and Stuart Literature is still found on reference shelves. What do you do when you find a publication like this on the shelves, a title you don’t know and older than other similar publications? We recommend consulting Harner, Marcuse, and your reference librarian. Harner and Marcuse both caution that this book must be used with care for it has factual errors, but the definitions and descriptions can be helpful. Crowell’s still has value, for literary forms haven’t changed as much as the critical evaluation of them, but the reader must recognize its limitations and determine its usefulness. Entries, ranging from a paragraph to several pages, comprise authors, works, literary genres (e.g., conduct books, chapbooks, autobiographies, letter writers), and movements and terms from the accession of Elizabeth I to the Restoration. Major and minor male figures are here, but women are scarcely represented. Although Ruoff identifies “Scylla’s Metamorphosis” as the earliest of erotic narrative poems, and subsequently lists other poems in this genre, he has no listing for erotic, narrative, or poetry. Note that Hattaway’s volume discussed previously does have an essay on erotic poems and, as the two volumes are in close proximity to each other in the reference stacks, what is not found in one may be found in the other. A sound practice when searching for a term is to try the various relevant reference tools available to you. Biographical dictionaries are another type of reference publication and, as examples, can focus on particular literary eras or movements; race, gender, or sexual preference; genre; or nationality. These tools offer quick access to basic facts about individuals and are valuable to browse for discovery purposes. Later in this chapter we will discuss more detailed biographical reference sources, but sometimes the specialized dictionaries can better serve the purpose. Carney’s Renaissance and Reformation, 1500–1620: A Biographical Dictionary consists of more than 350 entries written by 72 scholars. Part of the Great Cultural Eras of the Western World series that provides basic information on people who have made significant contributions to Western culture, Renaissance and Reformation encompasses all of Europe (although Britain is well represented with one hundred individuals) and all artistic forms. Emphasis is on culture over politics: visual arts, literature, science, architecture, and music. Signed entries with bibliographies are 250–1000 words in length and end with lists for further reading. The expected male literary figures for Britain are present (Shakespeare, Tyndale, Bacon, and Holinshed), as are all the monarchs as well as Anne Askew, Anne Cook Bacon, Elizabeth Cary, and Aemilia Lanyer. The volume concludes with useful appendixes

30

Chapter Two

(authors by discipline—drama, theatre, and literature—and by country), a name index, and an “about the contributors” section. Overall this is a solid work and representative of standard scholarly biographical dictionaries. Volume 1 of Alan Hager’s multivolume set, Encyclopedia of British Writers, is devoted to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Published as part of the Facts on File Library of World Literature series, this set introduces authors from the British Renaissance and early modern era to general readers and students. Almost 450 biographical sketches, ranging from a half column to several columns, encompass both famous and obscure authors, artists, musicians, scientists, and other nonfiction authors, and authors who wrote exclusively in Latin. There are listings for movements and periods within the two centuries, and descriptions of institutions and cultural, political, and historical events that influenced writers, such as humanism, the Reformation, the Admiral’s Men, the Book of Common Prayer, and Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. The straightforward, engaging biographies, frequently accompanied by a “Critical Analysis” section, identify the genres in which an individual wrote, present the life story, and provide a short critical overview. Entries contain works both by and about the subject. Valuable crossreferences make connections between individuals and events across the volume as a whole. The volume begins with a chronological list of the authors and concludes with a selected bibliography and index. Altogether, this reference tool presents a useful introduction to the people and events of the era for all levels of readers and scholars. Bell, Parfitt, and Shepherd strove to be as inclusive as possible when compiling A Biographical Dictionary of English Women Writers: 1580–1720; any type of writing by a woman, even if only a single manuscript letter, was the rule for selection. The compilers sought to identify women whose writing was 1) published between 1580 and 1720, whether during their lifetimes or posthumously, 2) published later from surviving manuscripts; and 3) never published, existing only in manuscript form. They attempted comprehensive coverage of the first category (400 women) but only partial for the second (150 women), with the third category serving as a reminder of what remains undiscovered. The women had to be born in the British Isles, or were naturalized or English-born New World authors, and they wrote in English (no Gaelic-only authors, such as Mary MacLeod, even if born in Britain). As longer biographical sketches would have meant fewer individuals and because the biographers were not trying to create a canon but rather broaden the boundaries of English writers, entries are no more than two hundred words, with shorter entries reflecting lack of information rather than lack of importance. Elizabeth I, Behn, Cavendish, Cary, Philips, and Lanyer are present, as is Constance Pley, who wrote business letters and Barbara Lamb, who wrote

General Literary Reference Resources

31

a letter in August 1658 to Richard Baxter about the difficulties of her Baptist husband. Many of the writings are by Quakers. Entries comprise name, birth and death dates (or when active), patronym, residences, social status, religion, and husband’s name and his social status or occupation, followed by brief biographical information and titles of works; for more prolific writers, sample titles and an indication of total output are provided. Appendixes list anonymous texts, pseudonymous texts, false attributions, and an extract from Lady Eleanor Davis, which the authors use to illustrate the difficulties involved in editing a seventeenth-century text. The volume concludes with essays on women writing before 1640, Quaker women writers, petitions, letters, and women in the book trade. Although this dictionary has many of the attributes of a standard biographical reference tool, it has features that are not standard, such as the essays, and it lacks an index, which would have given greater access to the content. Well-respected biographical dictionaries that partially cover women writers of this era, with lengthier entries, are Janet Todd’s A Dictionary of British and American Women Writers, 1660–1800, and the revised and expanded edition of Paul and June Schlueter’s An Encyclopedia of British Women Writers, which added lesser-known pre-1800 writers. And, finally, Anita Pacheco’s A Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing offers essays categorized as “Contexts” (women and education, religion and the construction of the feminine, women, property and law, women and work, and women and writing), “Readings” (e.g., Isabella Whitney’s A Sweet Nosegay, Mary Sidney’s Psalmes, Mary Wroth’s The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, Anna Trapnel’s Anna Trapnel’s Report and Plea), “Genres” (autobiography, defenses of women, prophecy, poetry, prose fiction, drama), and “Issues and Debates” (early modern women writing in the age of electronic reproduction and feminist historiography). Not generally found in reference collections, but a work which describes itself as a type of reference tool, Dorothy Auchter’s Dictionary of Literary and Dramatic Censorship in Tudor and Stuart England is an interesting volume with a very narrow focus. More of a reader’s companion than a dictionary, the book covers ninety-two instances of censorship that illustrate the types of writings that could be censored over the two centuries, that had social, political, religious, or legal impacts, and that changed a specific government policy or were broader appeals for religious or class justice. The reference features both successes and failures, and covers the failures that shaped subsequent debate. Informative, introductory essays of three to five pages are arranged alphabetically by the title of the piece censored, with a headnote listing the date of censorship, type of work, and the offending issue, followed by an essay divided into sections: historical context, a synopsis, the formal charges and fate of the

32

Chapter Two

author, and the lasting impact of the work. Richard II by William Shakespeare, Eastern Ho by Ben Jonson, George Chapman, and John Marston, and The Country Gentleman by Sir Robert Howard and George Villiers are included. The volume closes with a “Classification of Censorship Topics” appendix that should have provided better access to the content, but was poorly organized: Richard II is under “Essex” and “Deposition of Monarch,” The Country Gentleman under “Personal Attacks,” and Eastern Ho under “Scotland,” and, instead of the titles being listed for easy scanning, they are contained in paragraph form and are thus difficult to pick out. The book would have been better served if the appendix had been incorporated into the index. For the broader historical, political, and cultural contexts of the Renaissance and early modern period, consult Jonathan Dewald’s thorough treatment of the era, Europe, 1450–1789: Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World, which encompasses Europe from the introduction of print to the beginning of the French Revolution and the advent of the modern nation-state. Another resource is P. F. Grendler’s equally impressive, six-volume Encyclopedia of the Renaissance, produced in association with the Renaissance Society of America, which spans the years from 1350 through the early seventeenth century. For a more concise, one-volume handbook, Cook and Broadhead’s The Longman Handbook of Early Modern Europe, 1453–1763 has a basic, straightforward overview of the era from the fall of Constantine in 1453 to the Treaty of Paris in 1763 and consists of brief essays arranged by subjects such as war, religion, political history, and expansion, as well as encyclopedic entries for historical events and major figures. Dewald’s encyclopedia, available via Gale Virtual Reference Library, is fully browsable and searchable online.

NATIONAL LITERATURES GUIDES AND COMPANIONS Drabble, Margaret, ed. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Gruffydd, R. Geraint, ed. A Guide to Welsh Literature. Vol. 3, c. 1530–1700. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000. Johnston, Dafydd, ed. A Guide to Welsh Literature. Vol. 2, 1282–c. 1550. Revised. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000. Royle, Trevor. The Mainstream Companion to Scottish Literature. Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 1993. Stephens, Meic, comp. and ed. The New Companion to the Literature of Wales. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1998. Welch, Robert, ed. The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

General Literary Reference Resources

33

The companions and encyclopedias discussed in this section incorporate literary eras and movements of the national literatures into single volumes, and provide broader contexts for literary study within each nation. Such companions offer ready access to facts, concise definitions, and biographical information over the course of time. These can be used to supplement the Renaissance and early modern reference tools discussed in the previous section. The Oxford Companion to English Literature, in its seventh edition and edited by Margaret Drabble, is a long-standing standard reference resource. Arranged alphabetically, this edition features more than six hundred entries, from a few sentences to several columns, that cover authors; foreign writers important to English literature; works and characters; historical figures, places, periods, and movements; genres; critical theories; and terminology. Two-page thematic essays scattered throughout give overviews of topics such as “Metre,” “Post-Colonial Literature,” “Science Fiction,” “Romanticism,” and “Structuralism and Post-Structuralism.” The Companion has useful, if sometimes somewhat brief, explanations about genres such as jestbook literature, chapbooks, autobiography, ballads and broadsides, and masques. The biographies on both male and female (Lanyer is listed as “Lanier or (Lanyer), Emilia”) Renaissance and early modern writers contain discussions of major works, and there are entries for most well-known works and characters from the era. Although there is no heading for early modern, there is one for Renaissance. A chronology from c. 1000, marking the survival of four AngloSaxon manuscripts, through 1999 contains principal literary works in one column and events in another column to allow readers to review key works in context. A list of literary prizes of the twentieth century concludes the volume. Overall this is an excellent quick-reference source to names, subjects, and terms encountered during literary research. Trevor Royle’s The Mainstream Companion to Scottish Literature broadly covers Scottish literature from its beginnings through the twentieth century. The volume comprises biographical sketches for poets, novelists, dramatists, and critics who wrote in English, Scots, or Gaelic, as well as nonfiction prose writers, works, movements, institutions, and historical events. Writers either were born in Scotland, had Scottish parentage, or resided in Scotland long enough to make a significant literary contribution. Author entries contain biographical information, brief bibliographies of primary works, and selected critical and biographical studies, and describe principal works. Although broad in scope, authors not found in other sources discussed in this chapter may appear here: you will find Mary MacLeod, with a cross-reference from her English name to Màiri nighean Alasdair Ruaidh, the Gaelic poet who lived from 1615 to 1705 and who was not included in Bell’s A Biographical

34

Chapter Two

Dictionary of English Women Writers: 1580–1720 described previously. Sadly, no chronology for surveying literary output and discovering authors from the relevant time period was compiled for this volume. For Ireland and Wales, the national literatures are covered in The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature, The New Companion to the Literature of Wales, and A Guide to Welsh Literature, volumes 2 (1282–c. 1550) and 3 (c. 1530–1700). The first two titles are similar in arrangement and scope to the other Oxford companions of national literatures, while the Welsh Guide, similar in format and intent to the Cambridge Companion series, presents scholarly essays that serve as introductions to literary subjects and themes of the time periods, and provides background and context.

CHRONOLOGIES Cox, Michael, ed. The Oxford Chronology of English Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

One definition of chronology is a reference work organized according to the dates of events. In literary research, these records of events help contextualize an author’s work within a period or era or within world literature. Earlier in this chapter chronologies were mentioned as sections or appendixes in the various types of works. We’ll discuss the author-centered chronology later in the section on individual author sources. We can generate a rough chronology of printed books using the English Short Title Catalog, the largest bibliography of English literature with more than four hundred fifty thousand records for printed books from 1475 to 1800 (discussed in chapter 3); it can be searched by date to discover titles published in any given year: there are 63 records for 1500, 443 for 1600, and 3107 for 1700. One word of caution for locating books published prior to 1752, when the Gregorian calendar was officially adopted in England: before that date, the Julian new year started on March 25. Therefore, Eikon Basilike, published in “1648” on the day Charles I was executed, was actually published in 1649 by the calendar we use today. Cox, in the reference source we’ve chosen for this section, takes this into account and indicates the revised year in his entry for Eikon Basilike by following the 1648 with [i.e., 1649]. During your research you may encounter information that takes into account the existence of both the Julian, or Old Style (OS) and Gregorian, or New Style (NS) calendars, which can be confusing when working with dates and documents. In order to resolve inherent problems with the Julian calendar, in February 1582 Pope

General Literary Reference Resources

35

Gregory XIII pronounced by papal bull that the day after October 4 would be the 15th. A number of Catholic countries, or parts of countries, complied shortly thereafter. Protestant countries such as Britain were slower to adapt. Colonies made the change when their colonizer did, so that California converted with Spain in 1582 and the American colonies with Britain in 1752. By an act of Parliament, eleven days (3rd to the 13th) were omitted in September 1752 and Britain moved from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar, with the new year beginning on January 1, 1752. Scotland had changed to January 1 as the new year in 1600, but retained the Old Style until it switched with Britain in 1752. You may even come across letters, diaries, and documents where two dates are present. As we said, dating can be confusing so caution is necessary when dates are important to a research project. Michael Cox’s two-volume set, The Oxford Chronology of English Literature, is a selected checklist of books (not manuscripts) printed by year from 1474 to 2000. Works written prior to those dates may still be included, if published within the stated dates, such as Chaucer’s Mars and Venus published in 1500. Based upon the Annals of English Literature, this greatly expanded publication lists books and some important periodicals published in English primarily by British writers, although there are a few naturalized authors, some foreign works influential in Britain, and some translated classical and European books. Cox explains the sources used and the decision-making process in the introduction, and the arrangement in the “Using the Chronology” section. The result is an annual record of nearly 30,000 works (some 11,000 works of fiction, 6,000 of poetry, 2,500 dramatic works, and 6,500 works of nonfiction) by roughly 4,000 authors. Volume 1 contains the chronology, arranged under each year alphabetically by author (or, if unknown, by title at the beginning of the section). Entries generally comprise author, title, abbreviation for the category of work (e.g., anthology, the Bible, dictionary, drama, fiction, periodical, prose satire, verse), imprint, and, if necessary, a note. Separate author, title, and translated author indexes make up volume 2; the author index lists birth and death years of the individual followed by titles and publication years in chronological order, while the title index lists title, author, birth year, and publication year. The year of Elizabeth I’s assencion to the throne, 1558, was a slow year with three nonfiction titles and one of verse. However in 1603 there are thirty titles: three dramas, thirteen nonfiction, twelve poetry, one verse with music, and one fiction, with a verse by Henry Chettle on the death of the queen, a verse and a nonfiction work by James I, and Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a “corrupt text, possibly assembled from actors’ memories” with a note about the 1604 superior text (68–69). Different types of reference tools can be used in concert to complement the information found in each. For example, who was Chettle? By consulting Drabble’s

36

Chapter Two

Companion to English Literature, discussed previously, we discover that Chettle (c. 1560–?1607), the son of a London dyer, was an apprentice to a printer, and for a while was his partner. Upon the failure of the business, he took to writing plays.

BIOGRAPHICAL SOURCES Dictionary of Literary Biography. Gale, 1978–. Available online at www.gale .cengage.com. Matthew, Henry C. G., and Brian Harrison, eds. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (in association with The British Academy). 61 vols. Revised edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Available online at www.oxforddnb.com, and updated three times a year.

The content of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and the Dictionary of Literary Biography actually lies between the brief biographical entries in the companions, dictionaries, and encyclopedias discussed above, and book-length biographies; although the print volumes of both are arranged in alphabetical order, these resources offer lengthier biographical essays than the category of dictionary would seem to suggest. Both are highly reputable, standard reference works, each with its own scope and standards; both are available in print and online; and both are important for literary research. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) is the national biography for the United Kingdom; because it was the first of its kind, the nationality isn’t mentioned in the title as it is for other countries, such as the American National Biography. The 2004 revised edition, published in sixty volumes, has an index to contributors and brings together and updates Leslie Stephen’s remarkable nineteenth-century Dictionary of National Biography and its many supplements. (If you don’t know who Leslie Stephen is, you can use this tool to find out.) The massive publication introduces biographical information, written by ten thousand specialists, on deceased individuals who contributed to Britain’s history, including foreigners. The online version is updated three times a year, and now boasts more than fifty-six thousand entries. Biographies may contain a portrait illustration (if available), sources, archives, likenesses, and wealth at death. The importance of the individual and the amount of information known about him or her determines the length of the essay: Mary MacLeod (with a cross-reference to Màiri nighean Alasdair Ruaidh), the Gaelic poet mentioned earlier in this chapter, has just over six hundred words in her entry and no portrait, whereas the entry for William Shakespeare has more than thirty-seven thousand words

General Literary Reference Resources

37

and the portrait attributed to John Taylor hanging in the National Portrait Gallery. In the online version, the biographical sketches have side menus with links to sections of the essays, which allow for easy navigation within the texts: the Shakespeare side menu provides access to the sections of his life and afterlife, such as “Shakespeare’s Parents,” “Plays, 1594–1596,” “The Essex Uprising,” “Shakespeare’s Will,” “Shakespeare and Nineteenthcentury Music and Literature,” and “Shakespeare and Film.” In the “Archives” section for each of our chosen authors, we discover that the University of Glasgow holds the McLagan manuscript where some of MacLeod’s verse appears, and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust at Stratford upon Avon holds Shakespeare’s deeds and papers. The wealth at death of neither MacLeod nor Shakespeare is known, but Leslie Stephen’s wealth was “£15,715 6s. 6d.: probate, 23 March 1904.” The search engine for the online ODNB offers “Quick Search,” a powerful “People” search (described in more detail below), full-text, reference, contributor, and image searches, the ability to browse by name, and the capacity to bring together individuals thematically (e.g., “Early Modern Women: The Rediscovery of Public and Private Life,” “The Gunpowder Plot”). Results can be sorted alphabetically or chronologically; the latter feature is particularly useful for finding individuals or themes within a specific time period. To locate an individual or scan the full text, use the “Quick Search” box located on every page. Name searches require the last name first, and a comma after the last name; if you get no results, it may be because you forgot the comma (which constantly happens to us), made a typographical error, or are using a spelling the ODNB doesn’t employ, such as the Library of Congress spelling Aemilia Lanyer rather than the ODNB spelling Emilia Lanier. When researching an author with variant name spellings or various names, try them all before assuming the person isn’t included. “Full Text” utilizes Boolean operators to search across the entire content of the database, allowing the scholar to define the desired connections between people, organizations, and so forth. If interested in discovering the literary writers who lived or were active during a specific time, from a specific country, use the “People” field search interface, which offers options to search by name; fields of interest; sex; life dates; places, dates, life events (birth, baptism, education, residence, death, burial); religious affiliation; presence of an image; and text search (the specific parts of the entry, such as statement of occupation, name of an organization, or creative work). If interested in Scottish literary women writers who lived between 1500 and 1700, choose the Literature, journalism, and publishing option from the “Fields of Interest” dropdown menu, check Female for “Sex,” type in the “Life Dates” 1500 to 1700, and the “Place” Scotland: fifteen records meet these criteria. Of course this search excludes

38

Chapter Two

religious women who may have been writers in other fields of interest, so, if interested in religious writings, try that option as well. The ODNB is a rich source of biographical information that might not be found otherwise, with the ability to make connections between individuals and bring together individuals with like characteristics. The online database allows the researcher to create his or her own specialized biographical dictionary. Much smaller in scale but with a literary focus, the Dictionary of Literary Biography (DLB) is an ongoing reference work that presents writers from all eras and genres in several hundred volumes, each devoted to a specific type of literature, time period, and national literature. Biographical critical essays of selected literary authors, journalists, critics, screenwriters, and publishers, written by scholarly contributors, chronicle the careers of the writers who worked within the defined scope of a volume. Titles of interest to the Renaissance and early modern scholar include Seventeenth-Century British Nondramatic Poets, Elizabethan Dramatists, British Literary Book Trade, 1475–1700, and British Prose Writers of the Early Seventeenth Century. The print versions are arranged alphabetically by author, are heavily illustrated, and often contain sample manuscript pages. Essays of one thousand to fifteen thousand words weave together the life of the author, the writings, critical assessments, and the author’s importance and reputation. Each essay begins with a chronological list of primary sources and concludes with a bibliography, which can comprise collected letters, bibliographies, biographies, secondary sources, and locations of papers and manuscripts. As a result of the organization by genre within a period or era, some authors can be found in several volumes. The latest volume contains an index to the entire set. DLB is also available online as part of Literature Resource Center (LRC) and as part of Literature Criticism Online (LCO). In both databases the full text is searchable, but LRC provides only the text and lacks the images found in the print and LCO versions. In LCO, the volumes are electronic books and are images of the print version.

INDIVIDUAL AUTHOR SOURCES Brennan, Michael G., and Noel J. Kinnamon. A Sidney Chronology, 1554–1654. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2003. Brock, D. Heyward. A Ben Jonson Companion. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983. Davis, J. Madison, and A. Daniel Frankforter. The Shakespeare Name Dictionary. New York: Garland Publishers, 1995. Dobson, Michael, and Stanley Wells, eds. The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

General Literary Reference Resources

39

Hunter, William B., Jr., ed. A Milton Encyclopedia. 8 vols. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1978–1980. Osgood, Charles Grosvenor. A Concordance to the Poems of Edmund Spenser. Gloucester, MA: P. Smith, 1963.

If you are fortunate, scholarly author-centered reference works may exist for your literary figure; some individuals have several research tools dedicated to them while others have none. In chapter 3 we will discuss how to browse an author by Library of Congress subject heading to find the reference publications available for a person; for now, as examples for discovering the companions, handbooks, dictionaries, encyclopedias, chronologies, and concordances associated with a particular author, some subject headings are: Sidney, Philip, Sir, 1554–1586—Chronology Milton, John, 1608–1674—Encyclopedias Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Dictionaries Jonson, Ben, 1573?–1637—Dictionaries Marlowe, Christopher, 1564–1593—Chronology Spenser, Edmund, 1552?–1599—Concordances Keyword searches, such as those described in chapter 1, can be used to retrieve relevant sources: shakespeare and concordance*, christopher and marlowe and chronolog*. The following works illustrate the types of materials that may be available, but note that these works are very rarely compiled for lesser-known authors. A Sidney Chronology, 1554–1654, available in print and as an e-book, is part of the Palgrave Macmillan Author Chronologies series, which has also published volumes for Christopher Marlowe, John Milton, and Andrew Marvell. The chronologies are intended to allow researchers to verify facts and dates in authors’ lives, and to scan and quickly digest a series of events, which can be difficult and cumbersome to extract from a book-length biography. The Sidney volume traces the literary, political, and personal history of the members of the Sidney family between 1554 and 1654, along with historical events significant to their private and public lives, and important literary contributions by contemporaries. The introduction describes briefly the Julian and Gregorian calendar problems we mentioned earlier. A short account of the Sidney family prior to Philip Sidney’s birth in 1554 opens the volume, followed by a chronology that incorporates the lives and careers of Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke; Robert Sidney, Earl of Leicester; Lady Mary Wroth; and Algernon Sidney and ends with the death of Lady Wroth. An index concludes the volume, primarily comprising names found in the volume, with the “Philip Sidney” entry subdivided by subjects such as

40

Chapter Two

“at court,” “patronage of writers,” “literary tributes,” “writings,” and “death.” Ben Jonson’s works and his associations with the Sidneys are chronicled. Both primary sources in archives and secondary sources were used to compile the Chronology. A Ben Jonson Companion presents a different type of access to the life of an author. While a chronology allows Jonson’s life to be scanned as larger events unfold, with people, publications, and events contextualized over time, the companion takes those same elements, alphabetizes them, and describes them. Someone reading his biography, letters, or scholarly criticism can find short explanations about the details of Jonson’s life. People, places, works, characters, and genres are included. The entry for Jonson himself presents a short chronology of his life, a list of his writings, and is followed by discussions on scholarship, his correspondence, family, and his library. The companion’s listing for Philip Sidney notes basic biographical information, his reputation, and Jonson’s opinions of him and his family and their writings. The volume has a few regrettable errors as pointed out in a review by Richard Dutton: “immoral” for “immortal” in Aphra Behn’s entry, in her allusion to Shakespeare; and the conflation of two people with the same name, “Sir Thomas Smith,” so that a statesman who died in 1577 is said to refer to Jonson in a book from 1605. But more damaging is the poor arrangement of the solid information, which serves as a barrier to the book’s use. For example, the biographical sketch for Anne Lewis, Jonson’s wife, mentions only three of their four children; although all are accounted for in the Jonson family listing, there is no cross-reference to find the latter from the Lewis entry. Jonson’s critics also suffer from this lack of cross-referencing, for their listings contain dates, education, and titles of their most famous works, but comments about their works are located under “Jonson Scholarship.”1 Cross-references or an index would have made this source more valuable. The detailed information and the connections drawn between Jonson and people, places, and events, and his opinions of those, make this volume well worth using as a reference source, but when you find a resource devoted to your author, it is vital that you examine it closely and search out scholarly book reviews to add to your knowledge of the item. The nine volumes which constitute A Milton Encyclopedia offer thorough access to the life of John Milton, including people (contemporary and historical), his family, places, religious movements, works, themes, genres, characters, scholarly critics, authors and works that influenced him or of whom he expressed an opinion, and his reputation and influence upon later authors (William Blake, William Wordsworth). The entry “Tyranny” has a helpful overview of Milton’s theory of tyranny and some critical analysis of his writings on the topic. Entries range from a few lines to several pages.

General Literary Reference Resources

41

Volume 9 contains four additional entries, a number of bibliographies for entries in the earlier volumes, and names and subject indexes to the entire work. Cross-references direct the user to the appropriate heading or related subjects. The encyclopedia was edited by Milton scholars, and the scholarly contributions are signed. The concordance, a form of reference publication, can be devoted to the works of an author or to a specific book, such as the Bible, Torah, or Koran. A concordance is an alphabetical index to the principal words in a text or group of texts, showing every contextual occurrence of that word. When many versions of a piece of writing, such as the Bible or the works of Shakespeare, exist, the compiler determines the best edition or editions to use for the project. You should note that it is important for the scholar to know which sources were used to create the concordance, for content can vary; in the case of the Bible, words are not translated uniformly into English in all versions, or, in the case of Shakespeare, editors may choose to use one quarto or folio over another. In an oversized book of nearly one thousand pages, Charles G. Osgood analyzed and extracted all but the most common words to compile A Concordance to the Poems of Edmund Spenser. First published in 1915 and reprinted in 1963, Osgood selected what he considered to be the best editions at his disposal, the Globe edition of Morris (1869) and the Cambridge edition of Dodge (1908), as well as variants from the Smith and de Selincourt Oxford editions (1910); these publications, in turn, were based on different editions from the late sixteenth century. In his introduction Osgood presents the difficulties of working with Spenser’s poetry and how he has addressed those issues within the concordance. Osgood omitted certain poems he considered not by Spenser (“The Doleful Lay of Clorinda,” “The Mourning Muse of Thestylis”), collected variant spellings under the modern spelling (afraid contains afraide, affrayd, afrayde), and lists common words only partially covered (could, indeed, there, would). The result is a massive book with thousands of words, each contextual occurrence given one line and followed by the poem of origin. As you page through the volume you can see which words Spenser used most frequently and how this type of reference tool allows very close readings and analysis of the text. With the advent of the Web, however, the fate of the concordance as a printed book is uncertain, for if a poem is online, it is easy to scan using the Web browser “find” command. In Google Books, Google and research libraries around the world have partnered to digitize pre-1923 books that are out of copyright. For example the 1897 reprint of Morris’s 1869 edition is available in Google Books, and in fact can be scanned for terms using the “Search in this Book” option. The “Online Texts” page accessed via The

42

Chapter Two

Edmund Spenser Home Page at www.english.cam.ac.uk/spenser/, maintained by the faculty of English at the University of Cambridge, provides links to Spenser’s works (all editions used duly noted) as well as links to freely available electronic sites (e.g., Renascence Editions, Oxford Text Archive). Such projects may lack, however, the human mediation in which issues such as variations in spelling are recognized, and the editorial organization, the ability to see a single term and all its contexts at once, that adds tremendous value to a scholarly reference work such as Osgood’s. But should this same selection, analysis, thought, and care go into the online texts, a concordance would be even more powerful than one in print because search engines could allow interesting ways of pulling together words within a corpus of works. In Open Source Shakespeare, discussed in chapter 12, we describe an online concordance that takes advantage of the Web. By incorporating fuzzy searching techniques, the problem of variant spellings has been addressed; fuzzy searching allows words to be matched approximately, not exactly, so that it would be possible to retrieve, using the example above, all variations of afraid together. It remains to be seen what the future of the concordance will be generally, either in print or online. Finally, there are the countless reference books devoted to Shakespeare and his world and works. Rather than try to select the best, we take this opportunity to discuss two reference sources to illustrate what you should look for when you encounter an unknown reference work, especially when it isn’t in Bracken, Harner, Marcuse, or this volume. In The Shakespeare Name Dictionary, authors Davis and Frankforter have listed every name, proper adjective, official title, literary and musical title, and place that appears in the plays and poems of Shakespeare, but not from outside the texts. There is no heading for Raphael Holinshed, for example, one of Shakespeare’s major sources for the history plays. The volume is attractively organized and laid out, the entries clearly titled, the font easy on the eye, and the descriptions engaging to read. The introduction explains the decision-making process, the content for various types of topics (i.e., for fictional characters, a description and, if major, a few words about how the character is usually interpreted, and what interpretation Shakespeare and his audience would have had). Each listing contains abbreviations to line citations where a name occurred in the plays and poems, and a key to these abbreviations heads the volume. The Dictionary concludes with a list of primary and secondary works consulted. Overall this volume looks, and is, useful. The major flaw, according to Richard Grinnell’s review in Sixteenth Century Journal, is the lack of critical apparatus attached to the entries themselves. No secondary sources are cited, nor any information given about where the information originated. After examining the list of secondary sources,

General Literary Reference Resources

43

Grinnell is concerned that very few works from the previous ten years (the Dictionary was published in 1995) are included, which could have enhanced our understanding of these names. Grinnell concludes that this is a valuable general resource, but not for scholars.2 As scholarly reference books usually have short bibliographies for entries, Grinnell has a valid point. It would take experience using the book with other reference works to be able to appreciate whether, despite this flaw, the volume does meet scholarly needs. In her review of The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare, Pamela Allen Brown notes and appreciates the appearance, organization, and the scholarly apparatus of the volume. Entries are signed and longer pieces have bibliographic references. She finds that, for the most part, the volume “performs impressively” but is concerned about the “general mustiness” of the volume, its slightly conservative and dismissive tone in some listings, and the inclusion of too many nonessential details (e.g., separate items for the authorship controversies; too many paragraphs about eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentiethcentury actors, directors, scholars, and translators; “bardolatry”). The reviewer would prefer that the editors provided deeper discussions of early modern political, intellectual, and literary contexts. Even with these criticisms, however, Brown commends the editors and contributors for producing a generally inclusive and scholarly volume that deserves readers of all levels.3 Again, Brown’s criticisms are valid for a work that could be more balanced; another reviewer may have a different perspective about the biases Brown perceives. These reviews illustrate the types of evaluations of published reference works, which can help you determine the value of the work to your research. You don’t have to be persuaded by any reviewer, but such reviews enable you to think more broadly about the issues surrounding a reference book, and what questions you need to ask yourself about authority, scope and coverage, objectivity, accuracy, and date: Who are the editors or authors? Who is the publisher? What year was the book published, and does that matter? Are entries signed? Are there bibliographies, either at the end of the entries or at the end of the volume? What is the purpose of the work, and how successful is it in attaining its goals (often, only use will fully answer this question)? Is there a bias, and, if so, does that matter? How is it arranged and what access points exist for navigating through it? Book reviews will help you with this process by allowing you to see how others view the work, and why.

CONCLUSION In this chapter, we hope you discovered not only the standard reference publications available to scholars of the Renaissance and early modern period,

44

Chapter Two

but also a wealth of resources that you may encounter in your career, and that you learned the purposes of various reference works and strategies for evaluating them. When you first use a reference source that looks valuable, take the time to examine it: read the preface and introduction to understand its scope, intent, and how to use it; for websites, look for the “About” section which frequently serves to define the scope and intent of the site. These types of reference works can be used in concert, to cross-check the information you find—recall how we used Drabble’s Companion to enlarge our knowledge about the information discovered in Cox’s Chronology. Remember, you can turn to Harner, Marcuse, and your reference librarian for aid in dealing with this crowded world of Renaissance and early modern reference publications. In the rest of this book we will continue to identify and examine print and online tools, many freely available on the Web, which will help you find both primary and secondary materials within this literary era.

NOTES 1. Richard Dutton, review of A Ben Johnson Companion, by D. Heyward Brock, The Modern Language Review 82, no. 4 (October 1987): 913. 2. Richard Grinnell, review of The Shakespeare Name Dictionary, by J. Madison Davis and A. Daniel Frankforter, Sixteenth Century Journal 28, no. 4 (Winter 1997): 1370–71. 3. Pamela Allen Brown, review of The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare, edited by Michael Dobson and Stanley Wells, Shakespeare Quarterly 54, no. 2 (Summer 2003): 188–91.

Chapter Three

Library Catalogs

Library catalogs are a vital part of the scholarly research process, allowing access to a variety of materials and formats available in library collections. Controlled vocabulary established by governing bodies such as the Library of Congress ensures standardization across library catalogs. The catalog contains records that are abstract representations of items owned by the library; the record provides the bibliographic information about an item (author, title, publisher, date, place of publication), describes the content through subject headings and table of contents, notes the physical or electronic properties, and gives the location of the item. In recent years, direct links to electronic books and periodicals have been added. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, the library catalog, which has been virtually unchallenged as the primary portal to the world of books and bibliographic research tools, suddenly has serious competition in the form of the Web. New generations of students search and retrieve information in ways very different from that of researchers during most of the twentieth century, and as a result library catalogs will have to be reinvented to respond to these new trends and to stay relevant. We are in an era of transition, of a shift in philosophy about the nature and role of the library catalog; although no one knows what the future library catalog will look like, we do know what it is and has been, and can speculate on what it may be. In the past, the focus of the catalog was inward on the library and its holdings; researchers had to learn the language of the library catalog to gain full admittance to the collections. In the future, the library catalog may start to look outward, to the scholarly universe as a whole, using vocabulary assigned by the community and not just librarians; in the discovery tool type of library catalog, which we will discuss later in this chapter, this happens 45

46

Chapter Three

already as patrons can add “social tags” to records, thus supplying their own descriptions for library materials. Library catalogs evolved over the centuries to become the primary library research tool we know today. Prior to the nineteenth century, the “catalog” was mainly an administrative tool, an inventory. Scattered lists of books from ancient times, which may have been simple bibliographies or may have indicated something like a catalog, have been found; however, no catalog remains have been discovered, even from the “famous libraries of Alexandria and Pergamum.”1 In medieval Europe, libraries were primarily located in monasteries and monks compiled inventory lists which served to identify holdings, but no standards existed for recording such information and often an inventory was so lacking in detail that it wasn’t useful when disassociated with the collection it described.2 Over time, the lists began to note author and keywords from the titles of works housed in the libraries. With political, social, economic, and cultural changes in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe, libraries were displaced from monasteries to private and university libraries. Manuscripts began to give way to identically printed texts, which became much more widely and readily available, and the identical bibliographic information attached to those publications provided opportunities for developing cataloging standards. As collections grew, access to the collections changed because patrons needed to have more accurate information about the contents and locations of the books. At this time, however, each library continued to develop methods for identifying and tracking the collections, some more thoughtfully than others, but there was no communication between librarians about the cataloging process and no clear objective about what catalogs were meant to accomplish. Although there was some subject information in the inventory lists, no real progress toward the modern catalog was made until the seventeenth century. In 1620 the first modern dictionary catalog, the Bodleian Catalogue, an alphabetic list of authors and phrases or keywords from titles, was produced. Sir Thomas Bodley, a retired diplomat who volunteered to oversee the restoration of the Oxford University Library, established a code for catalog arrangement in which he attempted to identify the holdings as accurately as possible using standardized criteria. As the seventeenth century progressed, ideas about the purpose of the catalog began to take root and to be discussed among the keepers of libraries.3 Discussions stalled for most of the eighteenth century, and the catalog was virtually unchanged even as both private and university collections grew with the burgeoning wealth of knowledge being published at the time. It wasn’t until after the French Revolution at the end of the century, when the revolutionary government of France issued the 1791 cataloging

Library Catalogs

47

code, providing guidelines “on how to describe publications, instructions on how to mark shelves to facilitate the location of a particular book, and a brief statement on the qualifications desirable for catalogers”4 that progress was once again made. The code directed that the bibliographic information and location within the libraries of France be recorded on individual cards (the libraries used playing cards). Through this massive administrative undertaking to make a complete national inventory of library holdings within the country,5 the first national card catalog and union catalog was born. After a series of starts and stops, at the end of the nineteenth century the library catalog we know today finally began to emerge. Librarians, grappling to articulate a philosophical understanding of the nature of cataloging, drove the development. The catalog came to mean access to the library collection through a variety of entry points, including author, title, and subject. A series of codes to standardize bibliographic description were established. Hanson and Daily identify five key nineteenth-century events in the United States that had a lasting effect on cataloging because they created effective means of communication to discuss the nature of the catalog, to set up cataloging and classification standards, and to further cooperative efforts: 1) Charles Cutter’s Rules; 2) the founding of the American Library Association (ALA); 3) the Dewey Decimal Classification with subject index; 4) the publication of the American Library Journal; and 5) the founding of the Library Bureau to standardize the size of the catalog card.6 All five elements ensured the success of the catalog as the way to identify and control the publishing output of the nation. Card catalogs came into use as standard practice, and access to collections was the key role of the library catalog. Then, in the twentieth century, agreements such as the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules established international rules and standards. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, we are entering a post-Boolean age in which cataloging and the search capabilities of databases and library catalogs will be more responsive to the ways users actually search and understand data, rather than depending so heavily upon subject headings and Boolean operators. At the end of the twentieth century card catalogs gave way to online catalogs, which gave way to Web-based catalogs. The library community has come a long way from inventory lists to Web-based shared cataloging and catalogs, allowing researchers around the world to find specific items or to find the output by an author, or the output on a subject. Search capabilities expanded beyond the title, author, subject, and call number to include keywords, standard numbers (ISSN, ISBN), publisher, date of publication, language, format, and so forth. The Web-based catalog even permitted title word searches, harking back to one of the key access points so prevalent in the inventory lists of centuries past. The Web, however, is also the force that

48

Chapter Three

will drive the library catalog to reinvent itself. In a series of three essays, published in The Journal of Academic Librarianship, Karen Coyle 1) reviews what we thought was the future when computers first started having an impact on libraries in the latter half of the twentieth century,7 2) looks at what the library needs to be in the Web 2.0 world,8 and 3) predicts what the library catalog can become.9 Coyle explains the 2.0 world as shorthand for an unknown but desired move to something new . . . Tim O’Reilly, founder of the foremost publishing house for computer and networking titles, gave these as some of the key elements of a Web 2.0 application: it takes place on the Web; it is a service, not a product; it is not limited to a single software product or a single machine; it is open and shared; users in group and social interaction are part of its organization. Users provide content and add value.10

In the first essay Coyle found that the predictions about the library and computers were correct, and that we do have online catalogs, remote access to the catalog, and even digital access to publications. The seers, however, failed to predict the Web, or even to acknowledge the importance of the computer industry as a key player, and therefore assumed the library would continue its role as the portal to the world of information. As a result of our failure to take into account such vital factors, many perceive the library in danger of being bypassed as a resource. Coyle proposes that the library needs to integrate its vast compilation of data into the online community, a social community that not only allows individuals to find information, but to comment on it and give advice and recommendations for further resources. The control librarians have held over the library catalog isn’t quite compatible with this new world where the user is an active participant and contributor to information access. Partnerships with Google (Google Books and Google Scholar) mean library collections can be discovered and accessed by patrons without ever going into the library or the library catalog, with authentication at the point of access the only clue that the item has restricted access provided by the user’s library. This is the invisible catalog, a “shift from collections to connections.”11 Indeed, this shift will have an impact on how future research will be conducted. No one knows what the outcome of the current catalog evolution will be, although the organizers of a variety of initiatives now under way are exploring how to redefine and redesign the catalog and are also making proactive attempts to determine that future and direction. We are still at the beginning of this shift, and you will need research skills and an understanding of strategies to be an effective researcher in the world of library catalogs. As mentioned previously, one of the key elements that serves as the foundation for international cataloging cooperation was

Library Catalogs

49

the 1967 Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, today known as AACR2R (the second revision of the original agreement). These rules, used in most English-speaking countries, provide guidelines for consistent description of an item’s bibliographic and physical information. Controlled vocabulary and authoritative headings, agreed upon by a governing body such as the Library of Congress, ensure that author, title, and subject headings are standardized so that all items that fit within the parameters of the vocabulary can be pulled together. As part of monographic publishing practices in the United States, the Library of Congress cataloging record is printed on the verso of the title page, complete with authoritative author, title, and subject headings. All this information is placed into a library catalog record using the MARC (MAchine Readable Cataloging) fields discussed in chapter 1. In most library catalogs in the English-speaking world, the combination of AACR2R and MARC guarantee that researchers can find all works by Margaret Cavendish when the authoritative author heading, in this case Newcastle, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of, 1624?–1674, is used. Authoritative headings take into account variant spellings, complex titles of works, translations, transliterated words, married names, royal titles, multiple surnames, and unknown authorship; standard vocabulary pulls together the records that meet the search criteria. We will go into more detail about authoritative headings and controlled vocabulary at the relevant points within this chapter. By understanding the interplay between the rules, the MARC format, and the search engine, you will have a better understanding about why certain searches retrieve the results they do. This understanding will serve as a foundation for exploring a wider variety of catalogs, including union catalogs and national library catalogs discussed later in this chapter, as well as online databases, discussed in chapter 4, that use similar but not identical organizing elements.

AUTHOR SEARCHES AND EVALUATION OF RESULTS To find works by authors from the Renaissance and early modern era, begin your research with an author field search in your library catalog. Works, in the context of this book, are writings created by one or more authors, or writings that were attributed to an individual at the time, which may or may not have been published. As literary research becomes more interdisciplinary, the boundaries of what works are included in the scholarship has expanded, and a work can be creative or nonfiction: a poem, play, essay, history, religious tract, devotional writing, confessional, tribute, letter, diary, speech, broadside, and so forth.

50

Chapter Three

Ruth French Strout credits the ancient Greeks with contributing the author entry to cataloging, but it took centuries before this information was standardized, with authors listed by surname, in library catalogs.12 To find materials by author, simply enter the last name followed by the first name. Simple? Perhaps. Scholars researching within the Renaissance and early modern era, however, will also have to take into account other factors that may have an impact on a successful author search: If the author was a woman, is she listed by her maiden or married name? If the author is royalty, how is the name entered? If the author has a common name, how does one distinguish which author is the correct one? In addition to these issues, an author search in a Web-based catalog today may retrieve more than one entry for an author. For example, an author search on cavendish margaret will retrieve two entries in our catalog with relevant works by the author. In figure 3.1, the first entry for Cavendish Margaret links to anthologies and collections, while the second entry contains a “see reference” that leads the scholar to the correct authoritative entry for the author: Newcastle, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of, 1624?–1674. The items found under the first entry will not appear in the second set of records because they do not contain the authoritative author heading. Why is there a difference, and what does it mean for the researcher? The entry Newcastle, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of, 1624?–1674 is the authoritative author heading which is used in library catalogs to pull together all the items for which she is the creator. Prior to online catalogs, the card catalog would have had records filed under this heading, with a cross-reference from Cavendish Margaret; libraries would have been unlikely to create cards recording the contents of collections and anthologies because, if done consistently, such practices would have resulted in enormous card catalogs requiring too much space. As a result, the Cavendish essay, “Mirth and Melancholy,” contained within the volume Women Write: A Mosaic of Women’s Voices in Fiction, Poetry, Memoir, and Essay, would not have been found in a card catalog, although we did find it among the results contained within the first link in figure 3.1. Therefore, a scholar researching Cavendish using a Web-based catalog would need to use both of the author links to identify the holdings within this library, and would need to be vigilant about scanning the results of any author field search. Although this may seem confusing, the rules that establish an authoritative heading for an author ensure that patrons can find the correct author across a wide variety of libraries, while at the same time the Web-based catalog al-

Figure 3.1.

Source: University of Denver Penrose Library catalog.

Library Catalogs

Figure 3.2.

51

Source: University of Denver Penrose Library catalog.

lows author searches by commonly known names, pseudonyms, alternative names, and so forth. The wise researcher acquaints his or herself with the biographical facts about the individual under investigation, noting clues to identify the correct author entry, such as birth and death dates, name changes, forms of address (e.g., honorific titles, royal titles), and publication dates. If researching someone unknown to you, search the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography or Renaissance and early modern era encyclopedias or companions, discussed in chapter 2, to discover basic facts about the person. When searching in a catalog, enter the name (surname first) with which you are most familiar, and evaluate the results to see if you can identify the relevant entries. For example, in figure 3.2, the results of a search on the author bacon francis, which of the following is the authorized heading for Bacon of the early modern era? The correct answer is 2: Bacon, Francis, 1561–1626, which includes books within the collection as well as links to digital works in Early English Books Online. Entry 1 consists of items for an author Francis Bacon (more than likely our Francis Bacon, but not guaranteed) within collections and anthologies. So, although the authoritative heading is Bacon, Francis, 1561–1626, you will need to assess the other author headings to identify if any of those are relevant, too. Despite a tremendous amount of scholarly work done to identify a wide variety of authors from the Renaissance and early modern era, not every individual has an authoritative author heading. For lesser-known authors, if nothing is found by an author search, try a keyword search to see if there are any entries within a work’s table of contents in which the author name is not inverted. Once you have executed an author search and have retrieved a list of results, the next step is to evaluate the records themselves to make the best choices for your research. For authors from this era, the results may be either overwhelming or nearly nonexistent. The library may hold dozens of different versions of Hamlet, including various editions, reprints, facsimiles, films, and formats; which is the right one for your project? For research that you hope to have published by an academic press or journal, the latest scholarly

52

Chapter Three

edition would be the best choice.13 If there are multiple choices, check Marcuse and the Dictionary of Literary Biography, both discussed in chapter 2, as well as bibliographies in scholarly books and articles, to determine which edition is most commonly used by scholars in that field. If there are no choices because the documents haven’t been republished in modern texts, search for a digital version of the original printed book. If neither reprinted or digital copies of the author’s works exist, try to locate the original printed books in other libraries using union catalogs such as WorldCat, discussed later in this chapter. As these books will more than likely be in rare book collections and not lent via interlibrary loan, you may need to travel to view the volumes. For Shakespeare, there are multiple and varied choices, which range from the Norton Shakespeare (Stephen Greenblatt, general editor) to the Arden Shakespeare (Methuen, 1951–); Marcuse lists eleven editions and the Shakespeare entry in Dictionary of Literary Biography lists sixteen possibilities,14 with overlap between the two lists. If you wish to compare various versions of Richard II in the quartos and folios in order to identify missing lines and scenes, such as the missing deposition scene in the first quarto, then the latest scholarly edition, even a heavily annotated critical edition, may not be the right choice. However, there are scholarly facsimiles of the quartos available, and in chapter 12 we discuss websites that allow online, side-by-side comparisons of different versions of Shakespeare’s plays. Also, Early English Books Online, discussed in chapter 11, provides digital versions of the original publications that allow you to conduct your own examination and analysis of the text.

TITLE SEARCHES As you browse the Early English Books Online database, the English Short Title Catalog, or in the printed volumes of Pollard and Redgrave’s A ShortTitle Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475–1640, it becomes clear why previous generations focused on keywords from the title to list in inventories: titles could be very long and descriptive. The title of one of the earliest compiled bibliographies of English printed books came from Andrew Maunsell in 1595; his publication was titled The first part of the catalogue of English printed bookes: vvhich concerneth such matters of diuinitie, as haue bin either written in our owne tongue, or translated out of anie other language: and haue bin published, to the glory of God, and edification of the Church of Christ in England. Gathered into alphabet, and such method as it is, by

Library Catalogs

53

Andrew Maunsell, bookseller. It should be noted that Maunsell did include full titles in his volume, no matter how long. In contrast, and in keeping with modern practices, the 1965 facsimile of Maunsell’s volume is titled The Catalogue of English Printed Books, 1595. Titles found in library catalogs generally reflect the information printed on the title page of the piece. Under some circumstances, titles do have “uniform titles,” which are designed to bring together the various editions, translations, facsimiles, and so forth, for the scholar to consider. Under other circumstances, a title search could retrieve either the whole of a work, or a portion of the work republished in an anthology. As was recommended for author searches, the researcher needs to evaluate results of the search to select the one that would best suit the project. A title search on hero and leander in the library catalog will retrieve titles of a variety of works from different eras based upon the Greek myth about Hero and Leander, including the poem begun by Christopher Marlowe and finished by George Chapman (see figure 3.3). Entries 10, 11, and 12 are the records for the editions of Marlowe’s poem that were digitized as part of the Early English Books Online project. Clicking on the entry 1 link reveals one of the titles listed to be The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe, published by Cambridge University Press, and which contains “Hero and Leander” in volume 2 of that set. The abbreviation in the description field, facsim., indicates that facsimiles are present. This may potentially be a scholarly edition for the poem. A visit to the book stacks to examine the set and, if new to this area of study, a search for scholarly book reviews is in order before a decision can be made whether this source is authoritative or not (see figure 3.4).

Figure 3.3.

Source: University of Denver Penrose Library catalog.

54

Chapter Three

Figure 3.4.

Source: University of Denver Penrose Library catalog.

The second entry, Hero and Leander, 1598, is indeed a facsimile of Marlowe’s poem, as indicated in the “Note(s)” field, reproducing the 1598 text (see figure 3.5). Be sure to read the various fields in the record, such as the “Description” and “Note(s)” areas, to ensure you understand what type of edition you have found. Further, when confronted by an array of publications, all with the same title, you can focus on the versions that are particular to Marlowe by conducting an author/title search rather than simply a title search. To find Marlowe’s poem as part of an anthology, do a keyword search on marlowe and hero and leander. To find a scholarly edition, search your local library catalog as well as union catalogs for the latest university or academic press version of the poem. The poem was published by Oxford University Press as part of The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe, edited by Roma Gill (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987–). Look for book reviews of the Gill edition to determine its authority and reputation, and check bibliographies of scholarly writings about this poem to see which edition is used by academics in this field of study. In addition to books, title searches will also retrieve series and journal titles. Execute a search to determine if your library subscribes to the journal English Literary Renaissance, or if it has online access to Anti-Aulicus via Early English Books Online or microfilm. As we discussed in chapter 1, some library catalogs allow searching by the periodical and/or series title fields; if so, then use those options. However, if the title you want is not found using the more specialized title field search, conduct another search using the regular title search to make sure the item isn’t held by the library. Keep in mind that title searches can also be used to find all material types, such as DVDs, videos, CDs, databases, images, music, Web resources, government documents, and archival materials.

Figure 3.5.

Source: University of Denver Penrose Library catalog.

Library Catalogs

55

SUBJECT SEARCHES Subject searches allow materials on the same topic to be pulled together, such as books about the Bible in the sixteenth century, English drama during the Restoration, literary criticism of Sidney’s Arcadia, and the correspondence of early modern women. Originally, as part of card catalogs, subject headings were static and users had no ability to search across terms to pull together two or three different concepts. In online catalogs, both keyword and subject heading searches can be used to retrieve records on a topic; keyword searching allows broad access in scanning various parts of the record, such as the title, author, publisher, notes, table of contents, and subject headings for relevant terms, while a subject heading search focuses on that specific field in the record. Historically subject groupings were broad, whereas today subject headings can be very precise. As cataloging practices became more sophisticated, the level of detail grew and the controlled vocabulary was standardized to facilitate searching across library catalogs. Catalogers use subject headings to give as clear a picture as possible about the contents of a book. The introduction of tables of contents into records supplements the information provided by subject headings, to the benefit of the researcher. Keyword searches can be used to find the authoritative subject heading for a particular topic, and can be used to identify materials of particular types, such as correspondence, criticism, biography, concordance, bibliography, or diary. To uncover specific types of sources, combine the term with the subject(s) you are researching: (early modern or renaissance) and drama and criticism; donne and concordance*; biography and fell and margaret; and bibliography and herbert george. Once you locate a relevant record, check the subject field to discover the authoritative heading for that author or topic. For example, a Margaret Fell keyword search yields the title Margaret Fell and the Rise of Quakerism; an examination of the subject field in the record reveals that the authoritative subject heading for her is Fox, Margaret Askew Fell, 1614–1702 (note that keyword searches to find books about Fell, in which her name appears only in the subject field, will not be found by searching the phrase margaret fell or fell margaret, which is why we recommend the keyword search above to find biographies about her). To find the various types of subheadings attached to an author, search on the author’s name as a subject search; just as there may be an authoritative author heading for the person, there may be an authoritative subject heading, including birth and death dates, married names, or royal titles. For George Herbert, the subject heading is Herbert, George, 1593–1633 (see figure 3.6), which can then be followed by more specific subheadings to allow you to find particular types of works, such as bibliographies, biographies, concordances, and criticism. Note

56

Chapter Three

Figure 3.6.

Source: Prospector union catalog.

that the “biography” subheading listed is from an earlier Library of Congress practice; today, biographies are found under the heading with no subheadings, in this case, entry 1, so be sure to check both. This display provides an overview of the types and numbers of sources available to the scholar. Find out what the authoritative headings are for your author and then browse the list of subheadings to identify various types of publications, then extend this search to other union catalogs, to ensure you have the broadest possible view of subheadings relevant to your author. Some of the Library of Congress subject headings relevant for research in the Renaissance and early modern era are: Renaissance—England England—Civilization—16th century English literature—Early modern, 1500–1700—History and criticism English drama—History and criticism—Theory, etc. Theatrical companies—England—History—17th century Theater—England—History—16th century Queen’s Men (Theater company) Marlowe, Christopher, 1564–1593 Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616 Women and literature—England—History—17th century Women—England—History—Renaissance, 1450–1600 Literature and society—England—History—16th century Literature and science—England—History—17th century Note that some dates span both centuries, and some focus on one century. Generally, headings for early modern use 1500–1700, while those that don’t, such as the Literature and society and Literature and science examples, have headings for each century. Drama and theater have distinct headings. As you browse the results, make note of relevant headings and either search those specific headings or incorporate the terms into keyword searches. When you find books of interest, check the verso of the title page to see if the cataloging information, complete with subject headings, has been printed. Subject headings can be the key that will open up the world of your topic, and help you build a comprehensive bibliography.

Library Catalogs

57

One note of caution: be aware of the terminology you use to retrieve materials, and be aware that modern terminology doesn’t always retrieve what you think it should. For example, the word “autobiography” could be applied to a variety of Renaissance and early modern writings, but the concept of autobiography didn’t exist at that time. Instead, authors wrote confessionals, revelations, contemplations, meditations, and so forth. Library of Congress may not interpret these writings as autobiographical and may instead use subject headings such as Spirtual Life—Christianity—Early works to 1800 or simply Meditations. As you enter the world of the Renaissance and early modern era, be cognizant of the vocabulary used at that time, and employ those terms as well as subject headings as your research proceeds.

CALL NUMBERS AND THE ART OF BROWSING Once you know which book you want, the next step is to find it. If there is no link to the online version, and it is available, a visit to the library book stacks is in order. The call number gets you to the shelf where the book sits, waiting to be read. In the United States, most public libraries use the Dewey Decimal classification system, while most academic libraries use Library of Congress (LC) classification. Some research libraries with closed stacks, such as the New York Public Library Research Library and the British Library, arrange the books by size to save space; these libraries use an in-house numbering system for locating the materials, which are retrieved by staff. In the Dewey system literature is located in the 800s, and in Library of Congress, in the Ps. Within the P classification, British literature has been assigned the subclass PR while American literature is in the PS subclass. When a book is cataloged, a call number is assigned that situates the work in the most logical area of the collection. For an overview of the Library of Congress classification system, visit www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/lcco/. When the Library of Congress call number system was developed, the canonical figures of British literature were assigned generous call number ranges. Shakespeare was assigned PR2750–3112, Ben Jonson PR2600–2648, and John Milton PR3550–3598. Margaret Cavendish, however, is PR3605 .N2, where PR3605 indicates she is an individual, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century (1640–1770) British author and .N2, where the N stands for Newcastle (remember the authority heading for Cavendish?), identifies her as our Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle. As more authors began to be rediscovered and reprinted, the call numbers had to be stretched to fit, and Cutter letters (the letter following the first period in the call number) were used to identify these reclaimed individuals, such as the N for Newcastle

58

Chapter Three

used to identify Cavendish. When we get to the twentieth century, even more authors are packed into a call number class: Virginia Woolf’s call number is PR6045.O72, where the PR6045 indicates she is a twentieth century British author with a last name beginning with W, and the Cutter letter “O” is the second letter of her last name, Woolf. Note that works by and about authors exist in areas of the Library of Congress classification system other than their major call numbers, for they may be included in anthologies, collected works, collected critical essays, and so forth. Use the library catalog to find where works such as Paula R. Backscheider and John J. Richetti’s Popular Fiction by Women, 1660–1730: An Anthology (Oxford University Press, 1996) and James Fitzmaurice and Josephine A. Roberts’s Major Women Writers of Seventeenth-Century England (University of Michigan Press, 1997) are located in the book stacks, and browse that area for other promising titles. When you get to the book stacks, know that the book you want wasn’t put in that location on that shelf by accident; it is part of a larger plan. Libraries use call number systems as another means of pulling together like books and materials. The system isn’t perfect, but it provides a valuable component to the research process. Many people, when discussing their means of finding books, will say “I cheated because I went to the shelf and looked around.” That isn’t cheating, that is using the system as it was intended and is called “browsing.” Libraries with closed shelves lose this feature because they are not arranged by subject. In addition to browsing the shelves, take advantage of the Web-based catalog and browse call numbers online; by doing so you will find all the books with that classification number, including those in storage, in Special Collections, in the juvenile stacks, in the periodical stacks, and, if your library assigns call numbers to electronic sources, online as well. One of the strengths of cataloging done by librarians is the fact that materials on the same topic can be brought together by using subject headings, in order to gather together items conceptually, and by assigning call numbers, to locate items together physically. UNION CATALOGS Center for Research Libraries. www.crl.edu/. Copac. www.copac.ac.uk. Library of Congress and the National Union Catalog Subcommittee of the Resources Committee of the Resources and Technical Services Division, American Library Association. National Union Catalog, Pre-1956 Imprints: A Cumulative Author List Representing Library of Congress Printed Cards and Titles Reported by Other American Libraries. 754 vols. London: Mansell, 1968–1981.

Library Catalogs

59

WorldCat, OCLC. www.oclc.org/worldcat/default.htm. WorldCat.org. www.worldcat.org.

When you have done a thorough search of your library catalog, moving on to union catalogs is the next logical step. Union catalogs, the result of cooperative ventures on the local, state, regional, national, and even international levels, can exist either in print or online, and permit multiple library catalogs to be searched together. By using them, researchers are conducting more exhaustive searches for relevant works; they are looking outward at the scholarly universe rather than inwardly at a single collection. In the “Subject Searches” section above, we provided a sample search (George Herbert) from Prospector, the regional union catalog for Colorado libraries. WorldCat, Copac, and the National Union Catalog are examples of three types of union catalogs: international (online), regional (online), and national (print). Some union catalogs are updated as soon as a new record is created in the local catalog, while others are never updated after the initial record is created. Many consortial union catalogs allow direct borrowing by the patron and therefore include the availability of the item. Although librarians use standard practices for cataloging materials, at times local needs trump the recommended cataloging, and as a result more than one record for the same item will exist within a union catalog. As always, continually evaluate the results of your searches and adjust your process when you see new avenues to explore. WorldCat is the largest online union catalog and largest bibliographic database in the world. With tens of millions of entries, the subscription database contains records for books, websites, films, slides, journals and magazines, manuscripts, maps, musical scores, newspapers, sound recordings, and videos, in over four hundred languages; cataloging records have been contributed by OCLC member libraries from around the world, from more than fiftythree thousand libraries in ninety-six countries. In addition to the commercial WorldCat database, available by subscription, the records are also available in abbreviated form via WorldCat.org, discussed below. WorldCat, originally called OCLC Online Union Catalog, is a product of OCLC and began in 1971 in Ohio with the Ohio College Library Center, a group of fifty-four academic libraries that organized to share online cataloging.15 Up until the advent of the computer, libraries purchased catalog cards for the books they added to their collections. Cataloging a book can be very expensive, and, to save money, libraries would buy the cataloging cards done by an authoritative source, such as the Library of Congress. Once the value of using computers to catalog works was recognized, the Ohio group quickly realized they could share their own cataloging online rather than purchasing

60

Chapter Three

cards. This initiative grew into a major library resource, not only facilitating internationally shared cataloging, but allowing materials to be identified, located, and even lent via interlibrary loan. As a union catalog, WorldCat serves as an indicator of potential ownership, not definitive ownership, by a library, and, as large as it is, it isn’t comprehensive. It contains the holdings for libraries that report ownership of particular titles. Therefore, not every item in the local library catalog is necessarily in WorldCat. If an item is lost or removed from a library collection, this information may not be reported in WorldCat, and therefore the database may not accurately reflect a library’s current holdings. To determine availability at a particular institution, use the link to the library catalog located in the “Libraries worldwide that own item” section of the record. If a direct link isn’t provided, go to the website for that library and search. WorldCat allows an impressive amount of information on an item to be searched, including keyword, author, title, series title, subject, place of publication, publisher, publication date, OCLC number, ISSN/ISBN, notes, contents, genre, geographic coverage, material type (e.g., serial, microform, website, visual materials, music, sound recordings, serials, monographs), language, and library code. Results can be displayed by number of libraries holding the title, relevance, or date. Records can be exported into bibliographic managing tools, such as RefWorks and EndNote, or as text files. The power of the search engine allows you to search the field “Geographic Location” great britain, and limit to serial and by year 1500–1700 to generate a list of titles held by participating libraries. Again, this list is not definitive, and it must be used in conjunction with the research tools discussed in chapter 6, but it illustrates how flexible this system is for retrieving desired materials, and perhaps generating a list that does not exist in any form elsewhere. One of the most popular publications of the mid-1600s, the Eikon Basilike was purportedly written by Charles I and sold on the day he was executed, January 30, 1649 (or as we learned in chapter 2, 1648 by the Julian calendar, for the new year began on March 25). The work was an “immediate commercial success in Britain, and, soon after, on the Continent: thirty-five editions of the book were published in England and twenty-five elsewhere in Europe in 1649 alone.”16 To search for libraries that hold the book from 1649, search the title field for eikon basilike, limit to the year 1649, and, under “Subtype Limits,” select “Not Microform” from the “Any Format” dropdown menu. The resulting records comprise not only the Eikon Basilike in English and translations, but also Eikonoklastes, Milton’s response deconstructing and annihilating the arguments put forth in defense of Charles. To limit your search to the version printed for Richard Royston, type grismond and royston into the “Publisher” field. Royston was a seventeenth-century bookseller and

Library Catalogs

61

Figure 3.7. Source: WorldCat OCLC, via FirstSearch.

publisher who, using a series of printers, managed to get the volume in print and ready for distribution on the day Charles was executed.17 WorldCat has three records for this volume, printed by John Grismond for Royston. The version shown in figure 3.7 is the record for one of the several versions held at the Huntington Library. The display of this record and its level of detail reflect WorldCat’s origins as a resource for catalogers to share records, as it isn’t formatted or organized for the casual user. This rare volume will not be available via interlibrary loan from any of the institutions that own it, so the researcher would need to travel to see the original. Because we limited our search to books and excluded microforms, we eliminated other possible avenues to see images of the book. To expand the results back out, click on the “Search for versions with same title and author” option under the “More Like This” section to find variant editions and formats, such as those in the Early English Books microfilm collection, which has been digitized and is available as Early English Books Online (see chapter 11). The “Find Items About” option links to the Eikon by subject, rather than by title, including criticism, history, and other secondary sources. Charles I is listed as the author, but the record also lists John Gauden, widely accepted as the person behind the work; both names are links to find additional publications authored. There is an option to request the item via interlibrary loan and a link to “Cite This Item” which reformats

62

Chapter Three

the information into various citation styles (APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, and Turabian). The OCLC number, which is unique to this WorldCat record, allows researchers to find this particular record again; as stated above, the same publication can have several records in WorldCat due to slight cataloging differences between libraries. The OCLC number can be invaluable when requesting materials via interlibrary loan, especially when the item required has a common name and no other unique standard numbers, such as an ISSN or ISBN number. As our discussion illustrates, WorldCat is a rich resource that allows complex searching and retrieves valuable primary and secondary sources. As huge and impressive as the Web is, it cannot match the content in this single database. Sadly, because of the ease with which individuals can search the Web using engines such as Google, WorldCat has found itself becoming marginalized. To counter this trend, OCLC has initiatives to bring a more scholarly cast to Web browsing: one already in place is WorldCat.org, and another, not yet released, is a partnership with MLA to provide selected MLA International Bibiliography content to subscribers via WorldCat.org. WorldCat.org is a website for the database that allows public access, but with limited search options and abbreviated bibliographic information. Both basic and advanced searches are offered, with the advanced version searching by keyword, title, author, and ISSN/ISBN/OCLC number, and limiting by language, format, and publication date. Rather than the long, detailed record seen in figure 3.7, a record primarily intended for catalogers, WorldCat.org provides a brief version of the record. You can use a zip code to find local access to the item (note: for a library’s holding to display, the library must have a subscription to WorldCat via FirstSearch). Records can be exported to Endnote or Refworks. Overall, WorldCat.org is an attractive, easily navigated website that intersects the best of scholarly research with the ease of Web browsing. For true scholarly research, however, it can’t replace the subscription WorldCat database via FirstSearch, nor the level of detail contained in those records. Even so, it remains to be seen if WorldCat will become a dinosaur and disappear, or if it can survive in the Web 2.0 world. Although not a union catalog, we have included the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) here as an important scholarly resource for libraries that are members of the consortium, consisting of North American universities, colleges, and independent research libraries. The consortium acquires and preserves newspapers, journals, archives, and a variety of traditional and digital resources to support research. Member libraries may borrow any of the materials via interlibrary loan at no cost or, when available, via electronic delivery. The records for the parts of the collections that have been cataloged are searchable in WorldCat. Ask your reference librarian if your

Library Catalogs

63

institution is a member, and how you can access the relevant materials you find there. Copac comprises the catalog records of United Kingdom and Irish academic and national libraries (e.g., British Library, National Library of Scotland, and National Library of Wales), university libraries (e.g., Trinity College, Cambridge, Oxford, Durham, Edinburgh, Birmingham, Bristol, and Manchester), and special libraries (e.g., special collections at St. Andrews and Reading, and the National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum). There are “Quick,” “Main” (or advanced), and “Map” search interfaces. “Main” permits searching by author, title, publisher, ISSN/ISBN, subject, and keyword, and limiting by date, place of publication, language, and library location. Records can be downloaded or emailed. A search on the title eikon basilike and publisher royston, limited to the years 1648–1649 and to the british library, reveal four records, each with unique features of the volume contained in the “Notes” field, three of which were printed by J(ohn) Grismond for Royston, the first issue of the first edition of the Eikon. We expanded our search to 1648 to ensure that we retrieved all relevant records because, in the records, the corrected date was listed as “1648/49” and thus two significant items weren’t found when limited to 1649. A note of caution about the original 1649 Eikon Basilike editions used in the previous examples: all of these are in special collections or rare book rooms at the libraries that hold them, and therefore the scholar would need permission to use them. Consult chapter 8 about manuscript and archival research to learn about using books in special collections. The National Union Catalog, Pre-1956 Imprints: A Cumulative Author List Representing Library of Congress Printed Cards and Titles Reported by Other American Libraries (also known as NUC or Mansell) was the original union catalog for the United States, a massive undertaking that resulted in over seven hundred volumes. Sadly, if WorldCat can be marginalized as a resource by the Web 2.0 generation, this grand dame of bibliographic union catalogs may well fade away into oblivion. We see on library listservs questions about the value of keeping it, when everything is already online. The truth, however, is that not everything is online, especially all bibliographic records, not even in WorldCat or Copac. A sample search of records in both WorldCat and Mansell revealed that roughly 25 percent of the items in Mansell were not in WorldCat;18 this statistic was reconfirmed by a follow-up study in 2008.19 Some libraries have put the set into storage, or have removed it from the collection altogether. Some, like ours at the University of Denver, have put it into the regular stacks, because, although not as vital as it once was, we still use it to trace various editions of older texts. The set is arranged by author, and when no author by title, in the tradition of those inventory lists

64

Chapter Three

discussed at the beginning of this chapter. The entries are photocopies of catalog cards submitted by libraries, with abbreviations to the libraries that hold the item. This resource is well worth exploring by scholars of the Renaissance and early modern era.

NATIONAL LIBRARY CATALOGS Integrated Catalogue. British Library. catalogue.bl.uk. Manuscripts Catalogue. British Library. www.bl.uk/catalogues/manuscripts/ INDEX.asp. Library of Congress Online Catalog. catalog.loc.gov.

National libraries serve as the repository for the materials that document the intellectual culture of a country, and to preserve and organize publications. The institutions generally do not lend the materials and many are libraries of “last resort,” which means researchers need to apply for permission to use the collections, and to prove that the materials required aren’t available elsewhere. The politics and culture within a country determine the characteristics of the national library, and not every country officially designates one. Broadly, the purposes of these types of institutions are as follows:20 1. Collect (acquire, organize, preserve, and provide access to) national literature on all subjects exhaustively 2. Collect literature on all subjects comprehensively, regardless of national origin 3. Coordinate the bibliographic activities of a country 4. Provide bibliographic access to the nation’s literature in the form of a national bibliography 5. Coordinate national bibliographic services, including resource sharing and the sharing of bibliographic data 6. Provide technical and training expertise for libraries and other information agencies nationwide 7. Take the lead in international bibliographic cooperation efforts 8. Educate the general public about a nation’s historical, literary, and scientific traditions 9. Coordinate national policies of intellectual property, especially copyright 10. Establish a system of legal deposit of published material 11. Provide research assistance to government entities 12. Provide access by means of in-house consultation or lending to researchers as well as the general public

Library Catalogs

65

The British Library, originally part of the British Museum when the Department of Printed Books was founded in 1753, was designated as the National Library by The British Library Act of 1972. It receives a copy of every publication produced in the United Kingdom and Ireland, and holds over 14 million books, 920,000 journal and newspaper titles, 58 million patents, 3 million sound records, and more. To access the library catalog, click on the “Catalogues” button on the main Web page, and select from the resulting list. In addition to the main Integrated Catalog, which has records for books, serials, printed music, and maps, scholars can search the specialized catalogs, the English Short Title Catalogue (pre-1801 publications), manuscripts, maps, the sound archive, current serials, bookbindings, business information, illuminated manuscripts, Victorian ephemera, the India Office, Silk Road manuscripts, microforms, Wolley charters, and more. In addition, there is a reminder that not all the collections have records online, and therefore printed catalogs are still required to conduct research in, for example, the Early Printed Collections. We will briefly discuss the manuscripts catalog below, and we will discuss the British Library digital initiatives in chapter 12. The British Library Integrated Catalogue, which now includes newspaper records for holdings at Colindale, can be searched free of charge by anyone, and digital copies of some documents ordered and paid for online. The British Library buildings, however, are not open to the public, and permission to use the collections must be obtained to enter and request materials in person (although in recent years, the British Library has opened its doors to British university students, to make itself more relevant to younger generations). To learn more about entering libraries with restrictive access, see chapter 8. In the advanced mode, the catalog can be searched by author, title, publisher, place of publication, date, subject, ISSN/ISBN, uniform title, format, notes, contents notes, and shelfmark, and searches can be limited to languages, year or range of years, and format. An “FAQ” section reveals answers to the common questions. Scholars of the Renaissance and early modern era will find a wealth of primary and secondary source materials here. Located in the St. Pancras library building, the Department of Manuscripts, with three hundred ten thousand manuscripts, is divided into three areas: “Medieval and Earlier Mansucripts (circa 300 BC to 1603),” “Modern Historical Collections (1603 to the Present),” and “Literary and Theatrical Collections.” The online British Library Manuscripts Catalogue serves as the single access point for the main catalogs of the Department of Manuscripts, which holds all types of handwritten materials in Western languages, documents dating back to pre-Christian times, and the manuscript acquisitions of the British Museum and British Library from 1753 onward. The catalog was created by scanning the published catalogs, and therefore the quality of the

66

Chapter Three

information reflects the varying cataloging practices over two centuries. Errors are gradually being corrected. Check the links for “catalogues included” and “catalogues not yet online” to determine if you need to consult printed catalogs. Using the Manuscripts Catalogue, scholars can conduct a “Description search” using keywords or manuscript references, or perform an “Index Search” on name, additional name, descriptive adjunct (royal title, occupation, place of residence, relationship), index entry (word or name in the main part of the entry), language, state (autograph, forgery, copy, etc.), years, and specific manuscript. The catalog did not yet contain images at the time this volume was written, but examples can be seen in the “Digital Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts,” www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/ welcome.htm, and “Images Online,” www.imagesonline.bl.uk/. The Library of Congress, although not the official national library for the United States, has many of the characteristics of such an institution and to all intents and purposes functions as one. It is one of the largest libraries in the world, preserving more than 134 million items on all subjects, in all formats, and in hundreds of languages, including over 20 million books and 59 million manuscripts. In addition to the collections available at the library located in Washington, D.C., the institution has developed various digital collections, one of which will be discussed briefly in chapter 11 (American Memory). The Library of Congress Online Catalog allows “Basic Search” (title, author, subject, keyword, call number browse, ISBN/ISSN, series/uniform title) and “Guided Search,” which allows the use of Boolean operators and limiting (language, material type, date, and place of publication). Scholars of the Renaissance and early modern period would do well to search this vast collection, and to explore the manuscript and digital holdings as well as the book and newspaper collections.

DISCOVERY TOOLS, GOOGLE, AND THE FUTURE OF LIBRARY CATALOGS In March 2006, Karen Calhoun prepared a report, The Changing Nature of the Catalog and Its Integration with Other Discovery Tools, for the Library of Congress. In her report, based upon literature reviews and interviews, she states that “Today, a large and growing number of students and scholars routinely bypass library catalogs in favor of other discovery tools, and the catalog represents a shrinking proportion of the universe of scholarly information.”21 She urges librarians to rethink the traditional library catalog, the bibliographic control held in such high esteem, and rethink access to collections by looking to the successful strategies used by businesses and marketing

Library Catalogs

67

firms. In addition, she recommends that libraries partner with companies such as Google to integrate collections into the broader Web universe research process and to make library catalogs relevant once again. The researchers Calhoun interviewed regarded local library catalogs as too inwardly focused when the scholarly universe is so enormous, and were critical of the confines of the Library of Congress subject headings. Calhoun raises some interesting points, but perhaps goes too far. In a scathing response to this report, Thomas Mann chastises Calhoun for promoting a “dumbing down” of scholarship by advocating partnering with discovery tools that allow searchers to find something of relevance, but not everything of relevance. One of the many points he addresses is the role of foreign-language materials in scholarly research: It is especially distressing that the Calhoun report is utterly oblivious to scholarly work that needs to incorporate foreign language books . . . such resources would drop out of sight to keyword searches because the LCSH [Library of Congress subject heading] vocabulary control that collocates both English and foreign works under uniform subject headings would not be there to begin with.22

As mentioned previously in the “Title Searches” section, the uniform title does bring together all the variant versions of a title; Google, as powerful as it is, lacks the ability to do the same. In the United States, librarians are discussing the possibility of moving away from the detailed bibliographic control they have held over the catalog since the nineteenth century, and to move toward solutions that would make finding materials easier, along the lines of Google and Amazon.com. The latter, however, as Mann rightly points out, are not intended to allow comprehensive research, but to allow individuals to find something, maybe a few things, of interest. Librarians have gathered a tremendous amount of data since the nineteenth century, enabling materials going back to the beginnings of civilizations to be discovered and located. Would it be possible to combine the two ideas, to keep our Library of Congress subject heading and MARC data, and yet use interfaces that both allow researchers to find something and to find everything? Progress in the direction toward a next-generation catalog has already been made. The University of Washington Libraries began testing WorldCat .org Local to search their own library catalog, their regional union catalog, and WorldCat all at once. In January 2006, North Carolina State University decided to experiment with the use of Endeca, search software used on the websites of companies such as Barnes and Noble, IBM, and Home Depot, to give “users relevance-ranked keyword search results and to leverage the rich metadata trapped in the MARC record to enhance collection browsing.”23

68

Chapter Three

Figure 3.8. Endeca.

Source: North Carolina State University library catalog using

In figure 3.8, we display the search results for Eikon Basilike one last time. Scholars can conduct a search and then refine that search using the “facets” links on the left side of the Web page to focus on a particular subject, genre, language, era, or author associated with that work. Those who treasure browsing by call number can use the facets links on the left to limit to a particular Library of Congress call number section. Traditional commercial vendors of library catalog software have also developed new ways to search the library catalog. In the fall of 2008, our institution, the University of Denver Penrose Library, launched Innovative Interfaces Inc.’s (III) Encore, a discovery tool for searching library catalogs with features such as facets, word clouds, and tagging. Records are retrieved based upon relevancy, but the results can be sorted by title and date. Encore doesn’t use the Boolean or or not, althought it now offers truncation because the philosophy behind such products is for the patron to find something, not everything. Instead of field searching, facets allow limiting by title, author, date, language, format, and location, and word clouds provide a visual means of refining a search through the words prominently associated with the results. Patrons can tag records with their own keywords or even opinions. Libraries are also experimenting with federated searching, or searching multiple online

Library Catalogs

69

databases simultaneously, so that a search in the library catalog also retrieves articles from subscription literary databases such as MLAIB. The boundaries between the library catalog and other online bibliographic resources are becoming blurred. At present Encore has not replaced the traditional version of the III online library catalog in the Penrose Library, for we still have what we call the “classic” search capability, but every year we are exploring new ways to bring the content of our library catalog and our subscription databases to our academic community. We end this chapter with a short overview of Google Books, books.google .com, a cooperative venture between Google and academic research libraries to make available online out of copyrighted books. An ongoing project, Google is scanning pre-1923 books held by participating libraries (see books .google.com/googlebooks/partners.html) and making these digital versions freely available in Google Books. The scanned images of the pre-1923 books are acceptable. Sometimes the people scanning the page also scanned their hands or fingers, and so far most books are scanned in black and white. If these books are going to serve as the sole digital version for the next hundred years, the quality of the scanning and decision to exclude color in most cases is unfortunate. The database also retrieves records for pre-1923 books not yet scanned. Participating publishers contribute information about post-1923 books, with limited or snippet views into the content. All results contain bibliographic information about the item, its origin (publisher or, if an image, library of origin), and links to booksellers for purchase and to “Find in a library.” By partnering with libraries, Google helps raise the quality level of content on the Web; by partnering with Google, libraries open up their collections to the universe and look outward instead of inward. We may be taking the library catalog in a completely new direction as a result. At present, these initiatives show the promising future envisioned by Calhoun and the shortcomings lamented by Mann: although they help libraries reach out to the world, the result is that you can find something on a topic, not everything. The future of cataloging and catalog searching remains to be seen.

CONCLUSION As we stated at the start of this chapter, we are in the midst of a philosophical struggle over the fate of the library catalog because of the tremendous impact of the World Wide Web on finding information. Library catalogs in some form will continue to manage and organize the enormous body of human publishing output, but what that library catalog will look like, even in a few short years, is a mystery. Strout, looking back over the history of this research tool

70

Chapter Three

at the middle of the twentieth century, cautions that we, too, may be missing something obvious that will transform how we conduct our work: For instance, the practice of using Christian names as entries survived for many years, even in the listings in which there were column after column of entries under “Johann.” The use of forename for the entry word was, of course, a carry-over from times when there was no system of surnames, but the appalling thing is that for century after century catalogs and bibliographies remained so immured by this tradition that they failed to become aware of the change in custom. (One cannot help wondering which of our entrenched procedures, now so completely taken for granted, will some day look quite as ridiculous as this, and for which there must be as simple an answer as the use of the surname. It may well be that the conglomeration of entries under “U.S.” in our catalogs will someday look not only as stupid but as easily obviated as their entries under “John.”)24

Our final bit of advice on the subject of research now and in the future remains: be flexible and be critical. Pay attention to the ways a search engine searches and retrieves materials, and always evaluate results with care.

NOTES 1. Ruth French Strout, “The Development of the Catalog and Cataloging Codes,” Library Quarterly 26, no. 1/4 (January/October 1956): 256. 2. Eugene R. Hanson and Jay E. Daily, “Catalogs and Cataloging,” in Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science, ed. Miriam A. Drake, 2nd ed., vol. 1 (New York: Marcel Dekker, 2003), 435. 3. Strout, 265. 4. Judith Hopkins, “The 1791 French Cataloging Code and the Origins of the Card Catalog,” Libraries and Culture 27, no. 4 (Fall 1992): 378. 5. Hopkins, 378. 6. Hanson and Daily, 446. 7. Karen Coyle, “The Future of Library Systems, Seen from the Past,” Journal of Academic Librarianship 33, no. 1 (January 2007): 138–40. 8. Karen Coyle, “The Library Catalog in a 2.0 World,” Journal of Academic Librarianship 33, no. 2 (March 2007): 289–91. 9. Karen Coyle, “The Library Catalog: Some Possible Futures,” Journal of Academic Librarianship 33, no. 3 (May 2007): 414–16. 10. Coyle, “The Library Catalog in a 2.0 World,” 289. 11. Coyle, “The Library Catalog: Some Possible Futures,” 414. 12. Strout, 257. 13. Richard D. Altick and John J. Fenstermaker, The Art of Literary Research, 4th ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 32.

Library Catalogs

71

14. Dennis Kay, “William Shakespeare,” Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 172: Sixteenth-Century British Nondramatic Writers, Fourth Series, ed. David A. Richardson (Detroit: Gale Group, 1996), 217–37. 15. Jay Jordon, “OCLC and the Emerging Worldwide Library Co-operative,” Library Management 24, no. 3 (2003): 107. 16. Jim Daems and Holly Faith Nelson, eds., Eikon Basilike with Selections from Eikonoklastes John Milton (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Editions, 2005), 14. 17. H. R. Tedder, “Royston, Richard (1601–1686),” revised by William Proctor Williams, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, www.oxforddnb.com/view/ article/24240 (accessed 27 August 2009). 18. Jeffrey Beall and Karen Kafadar, “The Proportion of NUC Pre-1956 Titles Represented in OCLC WorldCat,” College & Research Libraries 66, no. 5 (September 2005): 433. 19. Christine DeZelar-Tiedman, “The Proportion of NUC Pre-56 Represented in the RLIN and OCLC Databases Compared: A Follow-up to the Beall/Kafadar Study,” College & Research Libraries 69, no. 5 (September 2008): 401–6. 20. Thomas D. Walker, “Libraries, National,” Encyclopedia of Communication and Information, ed. Jorge Reina Schement, vol. 2 (New York: Macmillan Reference USA, 2002), 541–45. 21. Karen Calhoun, The Changing Nature of the Catalog and Its Integration with Other Discovery Tools, Final Report, March 17, 2006, 5. Prepared for the Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/catdir/calhoun-report-final.pdf. 22. Thomas Mann, “The Changing Nature of the Catalog and Its Integration with Other Discovery Tools. Final Report. March 17, 2006. Prepared for the Library of Congress by Karen Calhoun. A Critical Review,” Journal of Library Metadata 8, no. 2 (2008): 182–83. 23. Kristin Antelman, Emily Lynema, and Andrew K. Pace, “Toward a TwentyFirst Century Library Catalog,” Information Technologies and Libraries 25, no. 3 (September 2006): 128. 24. Strout, 264–65.

Chapter Four

Print and Electronic Bibliographies, Indexes, and Annual Reviews

Briefly, a bibliography is a list of publications—books, articles, dissertations, websites, and so forth. Subject bibliographies are the best way to get an overview of the scholarly work published on a topic. In print form, the bibliography may be arranged by author, title, subject, or date; if Web-based, the bibliography can be searched by any or all of these fields. The literary bibliographies we will discuss in this chapter provide access to the scholarship of general English literary studies, or are specific to the Renaissance and early modern era. We will describe the scope of the sources, but, as we have said elsewhere in this volume, it is wise to always read the introduction, or consult the database description page if online. There are two basic types of bibliographies: analytic (or critical or descriptive) bibliographies that can record in detail the book as a physical object and its production (John Dryden: A Bibliography of Early Editions and of Drydeniana) and enumerative (or systematic) bibliographies which can list concise information by, for example, author, title, subject, or date (the library catalog, New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature [NCBEL], and John Donne: An Annotated Bibliography of Modern Criticism). Analytic versions can be valuable for they may contain detailed information about the physical qualities of all the editions of specific types of works. Some compilers of bibliographies aim for comprehensive lists of primary sources, to identify and record every known title within a defined arena. The English Short Title Catalogue is one such example of these inventory-type bibliographies, for it provides descriptions and library holdings information for books published in Britain and its colonies in any language, as well as materials printed in English elsewhere in the world, from 1475 to 1800. Other bibliographies are lists of secondary sources that focus on the literature within a specific field of study, such as literary scholarly criticism. These 72

Print and Electronic Bibliographies, Indexes, and Annual Reviews

73

sources can be extensive and include all types of documents (e.g., books, book chapters, journal articles, dissertations, and websites), such as MLA International Bibliography (MLAIB) and Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (ABELL), or they can be very specialized bibliographies within the field of study, such as World Shakespeare Bibliography Online. In chapter 2 we introduced Harner’s Literary Research Guide and Marcuse’s A Reference Guide for English Studies; both are bibliographic guides to literary reference sources. Indexes are another type of standard reference tool we discuss in this chapter. Indexes are finding tools that allow the contents of books, journals, and websites to be discovered by author, title, subject, or other established protocols. MLAIB and ABELL are at once bibliographies and indexes, assigning controlled subject terms to specific works and parts of works, and using indexes to locate these within the larger publication. The lines between online bibliographies and indexes are becoming more and more blurred; the online environment not only allows much more access to a bibliographic record, but even access to the full text of an item. This chapter also covers annual reviews, which can function as critical bibliographies. These publications may be simple lists of scholarship on a topic published in the previous year. For British literatures, the Year’s Work in English Studies serves as the basic overview of scholarly output; other reviews can be found in scholarly periodicals as regular annual features, such as “Recent Studies in the English Renaissance” in English Literary Renaissance and “Recent Studies in the English Renaissance” in SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900. With the advent of the Web and digital initiatives such as JSTOR, Project Muse, and Periodicals Archive Online, access to the full text of literary journals can be integrated into online bibliographic databases, either as part of the databases or through a series of links. These digital collections of academic journals can be searched independently, or they can be interlinked to databases such as MLAIB using OpenURL, a standard for Web-based software designed to allow links to be established between databases and electronic publications via link resolving software such as 360 Link. Google Scholar, a service available as part of Google, is freely available online; searches retrieve citations to books and articles. Librarians use OpenURL technology together with link resolving software to create links from Google Scholar to their library holdings, so that members of their academic community can access the articles. At present Google Scholar is more useful for the sciences and social sciences than for the humanities, but as it grows it will have greater relevance for literary studies.

74

Chapter Four

RefWorks and EndNote are examples of bibliographic organizational tools. Many online databases will allow records to be exported to individual accounts, so that scholars can centrally control the citations they discover. In addition to storing the citations, the software can sort the citations and format them into a wide variety of styles, including MLA. These software packages can replace the former index cards kept by scholars. At the end of this chapter, when we discuss compiling a bibliography on Margaret Cavendish, we recommend exporting the hundreds of citations found in online databases to a bibliographic organizational tool, and de-duping the results to create your own bibliography on the author.

GENERAL LITERARY BIBLIOGRAPHIES Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature. Leeds: Maney Publishing for the Modern Humanities Research Association, 1921–. Annual. www.chad wyck.com. Bateson, F. W., ed. Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature. 5 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940. With a supplement edited by George Watson, 1957. JSTOR: The Scholarly Journal Archive. JSTOR. www.jstor.org. MLA International Bibliography of Books and Articles on the Modern Languages and Literatures. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1922–. Annual. Check www.mla.org/bib_electronic for a list of online vendors. Periodicals Archive Online. ProQuest/Chadwyck-Healey. pao.chadwyck.com. Periodicals Index Online. ProQuest/Chadwyck-Healey. pio.chadwyck.com. Project Muse. Johns Hopkins University Press. muse.jhu.edu. Watson, George, ed. The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature. 2nd ed. Vol. 1, 600–1660. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974. ———, ed. The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature. 2nd ed. Vol. 2, 1660–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971. Year’s Work in English Studies. Oxford: Published for the English Association by Oxford University Press, 1921–. Annual. www3.oup.co.uk/ywes.

MLA International Bibliography of Books and Articles on the Modern Languages and Literatures (MLAIB) and Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (ABELL) are two important research tools for literature. MLAIB is published by the Modern Language Association of America (MLA) which was founded in 1883, while ABELL is published by the British Modern Humanities Research Association (MHRA), established in 1918. The stated purpose of both organizations is to promote the advancement of literary study and research. Although the associations now have international membership,

Print and Electronic Bibliographies, Indexes, and Annual Reviews

75

their first bibliographies published in the early 1920s listed the scholarship published within their respective countries. Both bibliographies have expanded in scope since then, and are available in electronic format. Together, these two bibliographies provide access to a vast amount of the scholarship on English literatures and language written since 1921. Scholars need to use both to ensure comprehensive searches. Despite that, MLAIB and ABELL will need to be supplemented with specialized bibliographies and annual reviews to fill in the gaps, especially in the early years of coverage. MLA International Bibliography of Books and Articles on the Modern Languages and Literatures (MLAIB) began in 1921 as part of the official journal for the MLA, the PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, and has over the years grown extensively. Harner points out that one must understand when the changes occurred and what the changes were to effectively and knowledgeably use this resource.1 Because there was a major shift in 1981, and because there was general organizational similarity between volumes prior to that date, he recommends thinking about this research tool in two periods: 1921–1980, and from 1981 forward. Originally titled “American Bibliography,” it discussed in essay form the annual scholarly writings by Americans on American, English, Germanic, and Romance languages and literatures. The essay evolved into a classified bibliography, and continued to appear in PMLA from 1921 to 1968; most academic libraries have reprints of these bibliographies, which were published as separate volumes. The first bibliographic essay, “American Bibliography for 1921” in the March 22 issue of PMLA, was twenty-nine pages long, and can be viewed online in JSTOR. In 1956, scholarship by non-Americans began to be included. In 1969, the bibliography became four classified volumes, or sections: 1) General, English, American, Medieval and Neo-Latin, and Celtic literatures; 2) European, Asian, African, and Latin American literatures; 3) linguistics; and 4) pedagogy in foreign languages compiled by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL). Each volume contained its own table of contents and author/editor/compiler index. In 1981 a fifth section was added to cover folklore, a sophisticated computerized and classification indexing system was introduced, and author and subject indexes were compiled to incorporate all sections. The elements of this classification system will be explained below, when we look at a record from the online database. Today the MLAIB indexes books (print and electronic), book chapters, dissertations, journal articles (print and electronic), and, as of 2007, scholarly websites. It doesn’t include book reviews, although it does have some review essays. There are no geographic or language boundaries to the materials, as long as they fit within the parameters of the publication. In situations where

76

Chapter Four

the purpose of a journal is broader than literatures, as is the case in interdisciplinary publications, journal coverage may be selective. The scope is international, encompassing all languages and literatures in English, in other languages, in all areas of linguistics, in general literature and related topics (literary theory and criticism, film, radio, television, theater, manuscripts printing, publishing, genres, literary forms, literary themes and figures, rhetoric and composition, and teaching of literature), and, finally, all aspects of folklore. Unless the scholarly discussion falls within these limits, however, publications that deal solely with ancient literatures and religious texts are excluded. MLAIB coverage is vast, making this one of the premier research tools for literary scholars. MLAIB online (the print version ended in 2008) is updated ten times a year and is available from 1926 (with selected titles going back further) to the present through various vendors; MLA has an overview of the features offered by the different vendors at www.mla.org/bib_dist_comparison. Through a partnership with OCLC, MLA plans to offer selected content to subscribers through WoldCat.org for libraries. The description in this chapter is based upon the EBSCO interface and retrieval system. The database offers a basic search, an index (field) search, an advanced search option that allows both keyword and index searches, a thesaurus, the MLA Directory of Periodicals (discussed in chapter 5), and a “Names as Subjects” index. The search engine uses Boolean logic and operators, as well as truncation and nesting, to extract relevant records. The MLA staff created and continually updates the thesaurus to standardize the terms, or descriptors, assigned to the documents in the bibliography; since these may differ from subject headings and descriptors used in library catalogs and other databases, take the time to discover those most relevant for your research. In the online version, a link to the “Thesaurus” is provided and can be browsed. Sample descriptors include “English Literature,” “Renaissance,” “Elizabethan Drama,” “Elizabethan Theater,” and “Metaphysical Poetry,” but there is no descriptor “Early Modern.” The “Names as Subjects” index allows browsing by name to determine the authoritative descriptor for an author; the Library of Congress subject heading for Margaret Cavendish is Newcastle, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of, 1624?–1674 while the MLAIB subject heading for her is Cavendish, Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle (1624–1674). Rather than the terminology used by Library of Congress (16th century, 17th century, 1500–1700), dates span a century or centuries: 1300–1500, 1400-1500, 1500–1599, 1500–1699, 1500–1799, 1500–1899, 1600–1699, 1600–1799, and so forth. Note that the relevant years that appear in all of these are 1500 and 1600; later we will show how to use these key dates to search effectively. These descriptors are then assigned to specific classified fields within the electronic record, allowing the record to be retrieved using

Print and Electronic Bibliographies, Indexes, and Annual Reviews

77

either a keyword search or an index (or field) search; if this seems confusing, review our discussion about field searching in chapter 1. The online record seen in figure 4.1 illustrates the classified structure of the database and all the indexed fields that can be searched in MLAIB. “Title,” “Author(s),” “Source,” “Peer Reviewed,” and “ISSN” have their own fields. The “General Subject Areas” is subdivided into classified categories: “Subject Literature,” “Period,” “Primary Subject Author,” “Primary Subject Work,” and “Genre.” These are the authority headings that allow all national literatures, dates, authors as subject, literary works as subject, and genres to be retrieved using the authorized vocabulary. Descriptors are located in the “Subject Terms” category. The “Document Information” category is subdivided into “Publication Type” and “Language of Publication.” Each of these categories and subcategories can be searched using a keyword search, or searched using the specific index. EBSCO offers a “Limiting” feature that allows researchers to check boxes to retrieve publications that are peer reviewed or to exclude dissertations, to search within specific publication dates, and to limit to a specific document type (book, book article, dissertation, journal article, or website) using drop-down menus. The record in figure 4.1 was found by conducting the keyword search early modern and women. We can learn a great deal about the item described and about the workings of an MLAIB record by examining this record. Early modern appears in the title of the source; otherwise, no references are made to any specific literary era. Women appears in the title and subject fields. MLAIB assigns the surname “Fox” to “Fell,” as does the Library of Congress subject heading, which indicates that both her names need to be searched to ensure all relevant records are found. The period of coverage is 1600–1699, and the subject literature is English. The article comes from a peer-reviewed source, the genre is prose, and the primary subject work analyzed is Women’s Speaking Justified. The information in the classified fields provides a map with many trails to follow to related materials.

Figure 4.1. Modified MLAIB record for “Women’s Reading Practices in Seventeenth-Century England: Margaret Fell’s Women’s Speaking Justified.” Source: MLA International Bibliography, via EBSCO.

78

Chapter Four

In MLAIB, the “Period” subcategory is crucial to consider when conducting research on a particular period. As we explained above, the period date ranges can cover a century or several centuries, extending back before 1500 and beyond 1699. In EBSCO, the default “Select a Field (optional)” search is the keyword search. To ensure you find all relevant bibliographic citations with 1500 and 1600 in the “Period” field, use the drop-down menus in the advanced search “Find” boxes and select “TM Period.” To focus on all scholarly research on the masque from our era, we’ve combined a keyword search on masque* with the period years (1500 or 1600) and national literature (english literature) (see figure 4.2). Even this search strategy isn’t comprehensive, for those records with period years such as 1300–1800 will be missed; this is one of the difficulties of searching this field in MLAIB, but such a strategy will retrieve the majority of relevant sources. When searching the keyword renaissance, limit it to either a period or subject literature search to exclude renaissances which occurred elsewhere, such as the Italian, American, and Harlem renaissances. Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (ABELL), too, dates back to 1921 and has been published in book form from the beginning.

Figure 4.2. Advanced Search in MLAIB. Source: MLA International Bibliography, via EBSCO.

Print and Electronic Bibliographies, Indexes, and Annual Reviews

79

Although its scope has grown over the years to cover non-English language sources and research from around the world, its focus remains on scholarly research, from Anglo-Saxon times to the present day, in English literatures and language from Britain, Ireland, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Africa, and Asia. Document types comprise books, book chapters, journal articles, critical editions of literary works, book reviews, collections of essays, and doctoral dissertations published anywhere in the world. ABELL is available in print, updated annually, and online, updated monthly; online subscriptions are available for ABELL as a stand-alone product, or as part of Chadwyck-Healey’s Literature Online (LION), which contains the full text of literature journals, biographies, drama, and reference books (e.g., The Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures, New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics). If your institution’s subscription to ABELL is part of LION, the full text of two hundred journals will be linked with and searchable from within ABELL. The advanced search interface for ABELL allows both keyword and field searching, and employs Boolean operators and nesting. The search engine also offers both truncation/wildcard characters and proximity operators; the latter can be invaluable when searching the full text of journals. Use the Help screens for further information. The list of authoritative terms for each field can be retrieved through the “select from a list” link to the right of the search box. Searchable index fields are title keyword, subject, author/reviewer(s), publication details, journal, ISBN, ISSN, and publication year; limit features comprise “All,” “Articles,” “Books,” “Reviews,” and “All Records” or “Records with Full Text Only.” Although MLAIB and ABELL are very similar in scope, they aren’t identical, and different publication policies and assignment of standard headings affect search results. Both databases have the subject heading “queer theory,” but this phrase isn’t assigned to documents in the same way. In MLAIB, the keyword search queer theory and (early modern or renaissance) retrieves the bibliographic citation “Toward a Queer Address: The Taste of Letters and Early Modern Male Friendship” by Jeffrey Masten, published in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 10, no. 3 (2004): 367–84. The searchable subject terms for this article are friendship, men, letters, and queer theory. The same search in ABELL doesn’t retrieve this citation, even though the article is in that database. A title search in ABELL retrieves the record, and we note the subject headings assigned are male friendship, homoeroticism, and letters. Both databases have similar terminology to describe a work, but the terms are applied differently. When you use both databases and find a record in one but not the other, try searching the specific title in the one that didn’t retrieve the record, to see if it is really unavailable, or if other subject headings would have

80

Chapter Four

retrieved it; if other terms have been assigned to the work, redo your search in that database using the new descriptors. In comparing MLAIB and ABELL, Harner notes that both are invaluable to the literary scholar, and that each, although similar, have different features and strengths.2 Although there are differences in scope, levels of indexing, and organization that make exact comparisons impossible, Harner points out that scores of works in one are excluded or overlooked in the other. For pre-1956 work, when MLAIB focused on American scholarship, the overlap is quite low. We have also found that even when both databases index a journal title, they may have started coverage at different times, missed issues, indexed selectively, or stopped indexing completely. MLAIB is much more international in scope, while ABELL includes book reviews (although not comprehensively); ABELL also has better coverage of books published solely in Britain and smaller British journals. In his review of Jost Hindersmann’s examination of MLAIB and ABELL, Christopher Smith finds that Hindersmann agrees with Harner about the importance of both, and then goes on to wonder if the wisest course and the greatest service to the academic community would be for the two databases to merge.3 An intriguing idea. Even for those institutions that subscribe to both databases via LION, where the two can be searched together, the issues raised here still affect the outcome. The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (NCBEL) is an older yet still valuable reference tool for English literary studies, a bibliographic list of primary and secondary sources for the literatures of authors who are native to or primarily resided in the British Isles, from Anglo-Saxon times to 1950. Celtic literature is excluded. NCBEL is the second edition of Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (CBEL), edited by F. W. Bateson, but, because the social and political background section and the Commonwealth literatures of India, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa have been eliminated in NCBEL, this earlier edition is still important. The fivevolume set is being updated by the third edition, also titled Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, and is edited by Joanne Shattuck; at present only volume 4 has been published. Until the third edition is finished, volumes 1 (Anglo-Saxon through the Renaissance, 600–l660) and 2 (Restoration and eighteenth century, 1660–1800) of NCBEL should be consulted. More than two hundred contributors provided the bibliographies for NCBEL, and the thoroughness, accuracy, and consistency varies in each section. The terminal dates for most secondary sources range from 1962 to 1969, although this, too, isn’t standard across the publication. Harner cautions that only extended use of the set reveals how adequate an individual part may be. The literary eras are arranged by genre, and authors are listed under the genre

Print and Electronic Bibliographies, Indexes, and Annual Reviews

81

with which they are most closely associated; for authors associated with several genres, use volume 5, the index to the entire set, to discover all occurrences. Author entries generally begin with bibliographies, where they exist, and collections, followed by §1, the primary section with its subsections of editions and translations, and then §2, a chronological list of secondary materials with individual scholars and critics grouped together. Manuscript locations are often briefly noted in the headnotes for the author entry. When clarity is required, the secondary source list may be further divided by individual titles of works. To save space, bibliographic citations are very brief. Volume 1 of NCBEL spans the Anglo-Saxon period, Middle Ages, and Renaissance to Restoration eras, with nearly one-third devoted to the Renaissance. The range of genres covered and the authors identified within each genre are very broad, although some authors for which there are no secondary sources published in the 1960s have been excluded even though they merit scholarly interest today. The section arrangement reveals the richness of source materials available: 1. Introduction. General works (bibliographies, collections, literary history and criticism, general background), literary relations with the Continent, and book production and distribution 2. Poetry. Introduction, Tudor poetry, the Elizabethan sonnet, minor Tudor poetry, Jacobean and Caroline poetry, John Milton, minor Jacobean and Caroline poetry, emblem books, epigrams and formal satire, and song books 3. Drama. Introduction, theatres and actors, the Puritan attack on the stage, moralities, early comedies, early tragedies, later Elizabethan drama, minor Elizabethan drama, William Shakespeare, Jacobean and Caroline drama, minor Jacobean and Caroline drama, and university plays 4. Religion. Humanists and reformers, the English Bible, the prayer book, versions of psalms, and sermons and devotional writings, Richard Hooker, the Marprelate controversy, and the Caroline Divines 5. Popular and miscellaneous prose, pamphleteers and miscellaneous writers, minor popular literature, character-books and essays, prose fiction, newssheets and newsbooks, travel, translations into English 6. History, philosophy, science and other forms of learning, letters, diaries, autobiographies, biographies, scholarship, literary criticism 7. Scottish literature—poetry and drama, and prose In volume 2, the Restoration period is integrated into the whole volume, so the table of contents should be browsed to find the relevant genres and dates. The chronological arrangement of both primary and secondary sources allows the

82

Chapter Four

scholar to trace an author’s oeuvre and reputation over time. Marcuse notes that the first volume received generally good reviews, while the inconsistencies in the second volume caused it to receive mixed reviews. Despite the unevenness and errors in the work, literary scholars should start with NCBEL, especially if no more recent bibliography for the author has been published, because of its general coverage of both primary and secondary works for minor and major authors. It is also useful for genres and translations, as will be seen in chapters 9 and 10. Nevertheless, NCBEL must be supplemented with MLAIB, ABELL, Year’s Work in English Studies, and annual reviews. The most comprehensive annual review for literatures in English is the Year’s Work in English Studies (YWES). First published in 1921, the resource provides evaluative essays that survey the scholarly, mainly AngloAmerican and primarily books and articles, output for a given year. Over time it has grown from covering British literature to include the English-language literatures from the United States, Canada, Africa, the Caribbean, Australia, New Zealand, and India. Currently, the annual volumes are arranged chronologically by British literature and followed by the national literatures. A list of “Books Reviewed” (but not articles) ends each section, and the volume concludes with an index to critics followed by an “Authors and Subjects Treated” index. Of interest to the scholar of the Renaissance and early modern era are the chapters “The Sixteenth Century: Excluding Drama after 1550”; “Shakespeare”; “Renaissance Drama: Excluding Shakespeare”; “The Earlier Seventeenth Century”; “Milton and Poetry, 1603–1660”; and “The Later Seventeenth Century.” Each chapter is subdivided into sections, such as General, Sidney, and Spenser in “The Sixteenth Century”; these subdivisions can vary from year to year, with General and Prose subsections for “The Earlier Seventeenth Century” in volume 82 (2001), and General and Women’s Writing subsections in volume 85 (2006). The authors for each section are identified. The quality, thoroughness, and objectivity of the scholarly selections and reviews can vary because of the critic: read through the entire essay, not just the piece about a particular book, to get a sense of the reviewer’s opinions and point of view. Generally, print volumes appear three years after the year of coverage, while the online version posts chapters as they become available. To keep current with the chapter releases, scholars can sign up for “eTOC Alerts.” We will discuss this type of notification service in more detail in chapter 5. YWES is invaluable for surveying the scholarly literature annually to keep abreast of new publications and trends, and over the years to track changes in critical approaches and shifts in the reputations and perceptions of authors. JSTOR, ProjectMuse, and Periodicals Archive Online are all digital collections of periodicals. All three are interdisciplinary and allow the full content of their journals to be searched. Each can be searched independently of any

Print and Electronic Bibliographies, Indexes, and Annual Reviews

83

other database, and allow OpenURL-compatible link resolvers to link from other databases to articles in these collections. We don’t recommend searching within these databases without also searching other bibliographies and indexes because, although excellent academic tools, these are limited to the number of journals included. Each database allows advanced searches using various combinations of Boolean operators, field searching, truncation, nesting, and proximity operators. In the following discussion, we will focus on the different features of and issues with the three sources to provide insights into using these types of tools. No description will be complete; instead, we encourage you to read the information in the “About” and “What’s New” sections of these sites, to ensure that you understand the content you will find, and to keep up with changes and additions to content and searchability. JSTOR contains files of digital images for more than seven hundred scholarly journals, starting with the first issues. Some journals date back to the 1600s, such as Philosophical Transactions from 1665 forward (see chapter 6). With a one- to five-year moving wall as the end point, JSTOR does not hold current issues of periodicals, although it partners with other publishers such as Project Muse to allow current contents to be searched within the database and links to articles at other sites. JSTOR, an acronym for “journal storage,” was conceived as a means of electronically archiving and providing access to entire runs of journals to allow libraries to store the bound volumes off site, thus easing the space problems that many libraries face. The page images are scanned at high resolution and appear as they were originally printed and (copyright permitting) illustrated. Titles selected for inclusion are based on certain criteria: number of institutions that subscribe to the journal, citation analysis, recommendations from experts in the field; and length of time the journal has been published. Libraries can purchase parts of JSTOR that fit their curricular requirements: a multidisciplinary collection, such as the six hundred titles (with some literature and language titles) currently contained in the “Arts and Sciences” archive, or a discipline-specific collection, such as the fifty-eight titles in the “Language & Literature” collection developed with the help of the MLA. The system allows Boolean and field searching (full-text, author, article title, abstract, and caption), and limiting by document type, dates, language, and disciplines or journals. The abstract field can be searched, thus increasing the chances of finding relevant materials by keyword; because titles can be colorful and engaging rather than descriptive, and as the full text can be too massive to search effectively, keyword searches of the abstracts, which tend to describe accurately the content of an article, are vital to literary research. For example, searching eikon in the title field finds several relevant sources, but searching the word in the abstract field retrieves three additional works, including “God, Satan, and King Charles: Milton’s

84

Chapter Four

Royal Portraits.” An “Article Locator” form permits searching for a specific citation within the database. JSTOR also provides links from the record of an article to Google Scholar to discover “Articles Citing This Article,” “Related Articles,” and “Articles by [the article’s author].” JSTOR continues to grow in terms of content, technological advances, and partnerships, making the service invaluable to academic library communities. Project Muse complements JSTOR, providing access to current issues of scholarly journals. At present, the two databases have about sixty titles in common, with the ability to search twenty-five of JSTOR’s titles from within Project Muse. Project Muse holds over three hundred scholarly journals in the humanities, arts, and social sciences. Of interest to the scholar of the Renaissance and early modern era are SEL: Studies in English Literature (with older volumes in JSTOR), Renaissance Quarterly, Shakespeare Bulletin, and Shakespeare Quarterly. The Milton Quarterly from 1997 to 2000 is also archived here, but the publisher of that journal, Duke University Press, pulled out of Project Muse and set up its own electronic journal database; this illustrates that, despite all attempts to make these digital products stable, there will be unexpected changes. Articles in this database can be viewed in either HTML or high-resolution PDF. Of the three journal databases discussed here, only Project Muse assigns Library of Congress subject headings to describe the content of articles. Periodicals Archive Online (PAO) currently contains digital archives for 450 English- and foreign-language journals in the humanities and social sciences. The archive for some titles goes back two hundred years. The publisher, ProQuest has added British Periodicals Collections I and II (discussed in chapter 6), which contains more than 460 periodicals from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. PAO can be purchased alone or together with Periodicals Index Online (PIO), which indexes more than five thousand journals in the humanities and social sciences dating back to 1665. Both PAO and PIO allow keyword searching, but neither have authority control, which means like articles can’t be brought together using controlled vocabulary; neither database has abstracts to search, nor the ability to limit searches to specific centuries or periods of time. For full-text articles in PAO, proximity searches will provide more opportunities to retrieve relevant materials. RENAISSANCE AND EARLY MODERN PERIOD BIBLIOGRAPHIES Bibliographie Internationale de l’Humanisme et de la Renaissance. Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1966–.

Print and Electronic Bibliographies, Indexes, and Annual Reviews

85

ECCB: The Eighteenth-Century Current Bibliography. New York: AMS Press, 1975–. Previous title: Philological Quarterly, with the years 1926–1980 reprinted in English Literature, 1660–1800: A Bibliography of Modern Studies. 6 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950–1972. English Short Title Catalogue, 1473–1800. British Library. estc.bl.uk. Iter Bibliography (Iter). Part of Iter: Gateway to the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Toronto: Iter, Inc., 1997–. www.itergateway.org. “Literature of the Renaissance in [1917–1968]: A Bibliography.” Studies in Philology, 14–66 (1917–1969). Pollard, A. W., and G. R. Redgrave, comps. A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475–1640. Revised by Katharine F. Pantzer, W. A. Jackson, and F. S. Ferguson. 2nd ed. 3 vols. London: Bibliographic Society, 1976–1991. “Recent Studies in the English Renaissance.” English Literary Renaissance 1 (1971–). “Recent Studies in the English Renaissance.” SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 1 (1961–). Annually in the Winter issue. “Recent Studies in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century.” SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 1 (1961–). Annually in the Summer issue. “Recent Studies in Tudor and Stuart Drama.” SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 1 (1961–). Previous titles: “Recent Studies in the Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama”; “Recent Studies in Shakespeare and Jacobean Drama.” Annually in the Spring issue. Smith, Hilda L., and Susan Cardinale, comps. Women and the Literature of the Seventeenth Century: An Annotated Bibliography Based on Wing’s Short-Title Catalogue. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1990. Wing, Donald, comp. Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and British America, and of English Books Printed in Other Countries, 1641–1700. 2nd ed. 4 vols. New York: MLA, 1972–1998.

As a scholar of the Renaissance and early modern era, you need to know that these two monumental bibliographic sources will play a vital role in your research, even if you never use them in print: Alfred W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave’s A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475–1640 (commonly referred to as Pollard and Redgrave) and Donald Wing’s Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and British America, and of English Books Printed in Other Countries, 1641–1700 (commonly referred to as Wing). The numbers assigned to the works in these catalogs, commonly known as the Short-Title Catalogue (STC) and Wing numbers, are still used to identify specific titles, editions, and impressions. Although not every printed book is actually included, the compilers of both bibliographies intended to identify all books printed in Britain and its

86

Chapter Four

colonies from 1475 to 1640 and from 1641 to 1700. The catalog sets were revised in the late twentieth century to add new sources that had been discovered since the first edition, and we have listed the revised volumes in the sources that head this section. Pollard and Redgrave and Wing contributed essential information for Renaissance and early modern study. The information they gathered has been used to create a variety of bibliographies, such as the English Short Title Catalogue and Smith and Cardinale’s Women and the Literature of the Seventeenth Century, and to identify printed materials in the microfilm and digital Early English Books collections discussed in chapter 11. We are assuming that most scholars will use the online English Short Title Catalogue rather than Pollard and Redgrave’s and Wing’s printed volumes, but recommend you read the entries in Harner’s Literary Research Guide for Pollard and Redgrave and for Wing to get a greater understanding about the history and the use of these sources. The English Short Title Catalogue, 1473–1800 (ESTC) is the most comprehensive bibliography for books, pamphlets, newspapers, serials, and a variety of ephemera printed in England or its colonies between 1473 and 1800. It is also a union catalog, representing holdings for these rare materials in over two thousand libraries worldwide. Engraved music, maps, and prints are excluded, although atlases and texts that are wholly engraved do appear. Other examples of excluded materials are playing cards, playbills, and trade cards. The database comprises every item from Pollard and Redgrave and Wing, and records for newspapers and other serials published before 1801. The database is a work in progress, and the bibliographic records can vary in terms of the information provided. References to Early English Books 1475– 1640 and Early English Books 1641–1700 may be noted (more about these resources in chapter 11). URLs for freely available digitized materials within the scope of this database are being added. ESTC is invaluable for identifying materials published by all authors and on all subjects, and the search interface available on the British Library website allows detailed and flexible searching to retrieve relevant materials, including basic and advanced search screens, Boolean operators, truncation (here, the symbol is ?), phrase searching, and keyword and field searching. Searches can be limited by publication years (as demonstrated in chapter 2), language, item format, and country of origin. There are options to browse the indexes and to browse by library to view titles held. The database continues to grow as additional publications are identified and bibliographic information added. Hilda L. Smith and Susan Cardinale provided a marvelous service to the academic community when they compiled Women and the Literature of the Seventeenth Century: An Annotated Bibliography Based on Wing’s ShortTitle Catalogue, which expands upon the information found in the ESTC.

Print and Electronic Bibliographies, Indexes, and Annual Reviews

87

Using Wing as the basic resource, and supplementing that with other bibliographies and library catalogs, the authors assembled this work to identify works by seventeenth-century women who were published anonymously or pseudonymously, works mis-assigned to men, satirical pieces by men who signed themselves as females, and serious publications by men that were mistakenly assigned to women. (The material overlaps with Bell’s A Biographical Dictionary of English Women Writers: 1580–1720 discussed in chapter 2 because both books culled information from Wing, and you may benefit from consulting both titles together.) The volume is divided into two parts: first, publications by women, and then works for and about women (e.g., role of women in marriage, domestic arts, childrearing). Part 1 contains more than six hundred publications by women. With problematic material for which the gender of the author was difficult to ascertain even after a close reading of the text, Smith and Cardinale consulted other secondary sources and cited those authorities in the annotations to explain the ultimate authorship decision; works are placed in Part 2 if not by a woman. For example, Wing lists The Debauchee: Or, The Credulous Cuckold as the work of Richard Brome, but others have attributed it to Aphra Behn and thus it is listed in Part 1 under her name; although the record in the ESTC is based on Wing’s bibliographic information, Behn’s name has been added to indicate that she has been identified as the possible author. The Counterfeit Bridegroom, which some attribute to Behn, was placed in Part 2 of the bibliography because the compilers found insufficient evidence that Behn was the author. Annotations are short (forty to fifty words) but thoughtfully written; it is clear the compilers read and evaluated each item. Arranged alphabetically by author, entries consist of author, title, place of publication, year, number of pages, and Early English Books reel number (Wing and Early English Books will be discussed in chapter 11). The preface explains the decision process to determine what to include and exclude (i.e., include ballads, plays, and novels written by men about living or historical figures, but exclude writings about women in general or fictional women), the structure of both parts, and the use of cross-references. An addendum provides bibliographic information but no annotations for an additional two hundred works that were not viewed or that came to the attention of the authors too late. The final section lists female booksellers, publishers, and printers, but with no page numbers it is just a list; readers are to consult Paul G. Morrison’s volume Index of Printers, Publishers and Booksellers in Donald Wing’s Short-Title Catalogue (University of Virginia Press, 1955) for further information. The book concludes with a chronological index and a general index, with references to page numbers but not entries, which requires the scholar to scan the page for the relevant information; at times the page numbers are wrong, so be sure to look on the previous or next page. The

88

Chapter Four

general index has no authors, but does have the authors as subject: Katherine Philips is in the index as the subject, with a reference to page 50, although the entry is actually at the bottom of page 49. International in scope and in origins of scholarship, the Web-based interdisciplinary Iter Bibliography encompasses books, journal articles, reviews, review articles, dissertations (since 1990), and essays in books pertaining to the Middle Ages and Renaissance, from 400 to 1700. It indexes 1,500 journals published since 1784. Both basic and advanced searches are available, with the latter offering both keyword and field searching (author, title, subject, publication title, series title, and Dewey call number) and limiting by language, material type, and publication year. Library of Congress subject headings have been assigned to selected records since 1990; as controlled vocabulary isn’t available for all records, extensive keyword searching will be essential. The Iter Gateway also provides access by subscription to the electronic versions of the following publications: Milton Bibliography, Records of Early English Drama (REED) Newsletter, Early Theatre, Renaissance Quarterly, and Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme. Along with YWES, reading review essays in scholarly periodicals devoted to the era is an excellent method for keeping abreast of the scholarly literature. English Literary Renaissance (ELR) and SEL: Studies in English Literature both publish review articles of interest to the Renaissance and early modern scholar. “Recent Studies in the English Renaissance” in English Literary Renaissance, which appears twice a year, combines a topical review of research with a relatively complete bibliography. The periodical PMLA, as well as YWES and MHRA, are culled from a specified year forward for entries. Essays are roughly thirty pages in length, and present all types of scholarly publications. For example, “Recent Studies in Metrical Psalms”4 covers the scholarly literature from 1970 to 2001 and is arranged as follows: a bibliography of background studies; a review essay of general critical studies; studies of individual authors, both male and female; standard or best editions of the psalms, and, as in the case of Milton, relevant websites with information about psalms; a state of criticism essay; a “see also” list of additional studies in each of the above categories; and a bibliography of anthologies in which metrical psalms are printed. “Recent Studies in Ben Jonson (1991–mid 2001)”5 comprises review essays arranged by general studies, critical studies, concordances and bibliographies, special topics (authorship, sexuality and gender, religion), studies of the plays, and studies of individual plays. We discuss more of these review bibliographies, relevant to genres and translation, in chapters 9 and 10, as well as one on the Cavendishes later in this chapter. “Recent Studies” began with the first volume of ELR, and is indexed regularly in ABELL and sporadically in MLAIB. Unfortunately ABELL, unlike

Print and Electronic Bibliographies, Indexes, and Annual Reviews

89

MLAIB, doesn’t use the phrase “review article,” and therefore to compile the list, in the advanced search you must enter recent studies in the “Title Word” field and english literary renaissance in the “Journal” field. If your institution subscribes to the journal electronically, the contents can be searched online and the relevant articles retrieved. “Recent Studies in the English Renaissance,” “Recent Studies in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century,” and “Recent Studies in Tudor and Stuart Drama,” published annually in SEL: Studies in English Literature, assess Renaissance scholarship (Winter), Tudor and Stuart drama (Spring), and Restoration and the eighteenth century scholarship (Summer). These reviews were conceived as part of the scope of the journal from the first volume in 1961; an established scholar selects and reviews the scholarship of the previous year in essays of about fifty pages. Marcuse lists the authors of the essays from 1961 to 1989. Search ABELL using the same strategy previously described for “Recent Studies” to find the articles; if your library also subscribes to LION, the full text of the article will be available in ABELL from 1994 to the present. Otherwise, go directly to the relevant issues in JSTOR, Project Muse, and PAO to browse the issues. Although it ceased as part of Studies in Philology in 1969, “Literature of the Renaissance in [1917–1968]: A Bibliography” was an annual bibliography of scholarly works published during the previous year. Originally the focus was on English Renaissance literature, but in 1939 the bibliography expanded to incorporate Germanic, French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese literatures. Arranged by author, the “English Renaissance” chapter has nine sections: bibliographical and general works; technique of scholarship; printing; history, manners and customs; drama and stage; Shakespeare; nondramatic works; Spenser; and Milton. Although not a comprehensive list, the bibliography includes titles not found in other bibliographic sources and is worth perusing if you are surveying historical scholarship. Originally part of Philological Quarterly since 1926, ECCB: The Eighteenth-Century Current Bibliography became an annually published monograph in 1975, and is mentioned here because the Restoration era is covered as part of the “long” eighteenth century. The bibliography, with selected annotations, is arranged in seven sections: printing and bibliographical studies; historical, social, and economic studies; philosophy, science, and religion; fine arts; literatures and languages; British literatures; and American and new world literatures. The bibliographies published in the Philological Quarterly were reprinted in English Literature, 1660–1800: A Bibliography of Modern Studies (Princeton University Press, 1950–1972). Bibliographie Internationale de l’Humanisme et de la Renaissance (BIHR) is another source of potentially useful scholarship for it surveys

90

Chapter Four

more European publications, although it is generally available only at larger research libraries. Marcuse would urge you to use this title, for, as he states in his introduction, “to exclude all or most non-English-language reference materials on the grounds that English-speaking students lack foreign languages is to misrepresent the fact that scholars do indeed miss valuable resources under such circumstances,”6 and, although British literature is much less thoroughly covered, Harner calls it an essential complement to MLAIB and ABELL.7

RENAISSANCE AND EARLY MODERN PERIOD AUTHOR BIBLIOGRAPHIES Burgess, Irene. “Recent Studies in Margaret Cavendish, William Cavendish, Elizabeth Cavendish, and Jane Cavendish-Cheyne.” English Literary Renaissance 32, no. 3 (November 2002), 452–73. Hager, Alan, ed. Major Tudor Authors: A Bio-bibliographical Critical Sourcebook. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997. Available as an e-book. Harner, James L., ed. World Shakespeare Bibliography Online. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000–. www.worldshakesbib.org. Macdonald, Hugh. John Dryden: A Bibliography of Early Editions and of Drydeniana. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939. Roberts, John Richard. John Donne: An Annotated Bibliography of Modern Criticism, 1912–1967. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1973. ———. John Donne: An Annotated Bibliography of Modern Criticism, 1968–1978. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1982. ———. John Donne: An Annotated Bibliography of Modern Criticism, 1979–1995. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2004. Tannenbaum, Samuel A., and Dorothy R. Tannenbaum. Elizabethan Bibliographies. 10 vols. Port Washington, NY: Kennikar, 1967.

Most canonical figures have at least one bibliography of scholarly works, but most lesser-known figures do not. In this section we’ve included examples of different types of author-based bibliographies. In addition to the sources listed here, annual reviews of scholarship may also appear in journals devoted to that author; in chapter 5 we list some author-centered journals for you to consult. To find bibliographies, conduct a keyword search in the library catalog or union catalog on the name and combine it with the term bibliography truncated: ben jonson and bibliograph*; to ensure you don’t miss anything, search again with the last name first: jonson ben and bibliograph*. As mentioned in chapter 1, browse the library catalog by the authoritative Library of Congress subject heading for the author, and look for the subheading “bibliography.” Consult Bracken’s Reference Works in British and American

Print and Electronic Bibliographies, Indexes, and Annual Reviews

91

Literature, discussed in chapter 2, which lists relevant bibliographies, if they exist, whether in monographic form or as part of a larger bibliography (such as NCBEL). For literary figures without a bibliography, we’ll conclude the chapter with strategies for creating one of your own. World Shakespeare Bibliography Online (WSB Online) is an invaluable database for research on Shakespeare, published by Johns Hopkins University Press for the Folger Shakespeare Library. Originally in print as part of the Shakespeare Quarterly, the database attempts the most comprehensive coverage of Shakespeare-related scholarship and theatrical productions printed or produced worldwide since 1962. Using the power of the Web and the bibliographic groundwork established by the Shakespeare Quarterly, this database has been expanded to include all important books, articles, reviews (books, films, productions, and audio recordings), dissertations, audiovisual materials, electronic media, and other scholarly and popular materials related to Shakespeare published around the world and in more than one hundred languages. Containing in excess of an astounding 112,000 annotated entries, the database is updated regularly and new materials from the past continually added with the intention of extending the database back to 1900. The breadth of this resource illustrates the flexibility of the Web, which isn’t bound by print publishing costs and physical space, permitting the endless expansion of the content of a reference tool. The three volumes of John Donne: An Annotated Bibliography of Modern Criticism cover the scholarly literature from 1912 to 1995. The author, John R. Roberts, chose to start with 1912 because that was the year H. J. C. Grierson’s edition of Donne’s poetry was published and, as Roberts states, “that was the first major effort of the twentieth century to deal with Donne in a thoroughly scholarly and serious way.”8 These volumes, arranged chronologically starting with Grierson’s work, function as annual reviews of scholarship over the years, comprising 3,896 entries in all (1,280 from 1912 to 1967; 1,044 from 1968 to 1978; 1,572 from 1979 to 1995). Roberts’s annotations are descriptive, not evaluative, although he acknowledges that his biases and preferences may show at times; he often quotes the critics to give a sense of the approach and critical complexity. Roberts selected all articles and books with Donne as the focus, editions with substantive critical discussion, and books not primarily concerned with the Donne but with significant coverage. A representative annotation comprises the bibliographic information and the stated goal of the work. When important, the arrangement of the work will be described (e.g., “Collection of Coleridge’s comments on the seventeenth century arranged under seven headings” and the headings listed; or the authors and titles presented in a collection of essays). There are longer annotations for significant pieces, such as C. S. Lewis’s essay “Donne and Love Poetry in the Seventeenth

92

Chapter Four

Century,” which Roberts introduces as “an essentially iconoclastic evaluation of Donne,”9 and, oddly enough, in a collection of studies presented to honor Grierson. Author and subject indexes conclude all three volumes. The author index lists critics; all entries with the original and reprinted versions of Lewis’s essay are listed. The subject index leads to topics mentioned in annotations, such as “Galileo,” “Catholicism,” “Plato,” and “Scholasticism.” The subject index reflects the new critical approaches and areas of study as the century advanced; in the last edition there are entries for “sexuality,” “feminism,” “deconstructionism,” and “New Historicism.” Bibliographies such as this one are labors of love, both for the author and for the profession; they contribute an important overview of the scholarship that provides a foundation for future research and for knowledge about the conversations that have occurred in past scholarship. It is vital to use these bibliographies in conjunction with MLAIB and ABELL, not only for their annotations, but because they can have citations not found in those two bibliographies. In 1926, ABELL has nineteen citations for Donne (mostly reviews of books written about Donne), MLAIB one, and Roberts’s bibliography eleven, including the one from MLAIB. There is some overlap with ABELL, but the ABELL citations don’t necessarily refer to Donne. For example, in a September 23, 1926, article by T. S. Eliot in the Times Literary Supplement, “Lancelot Andrewes,” Eliot compares Donne unfavorably to Andrewes, but ABELL makes no reference to Donne (nor to Eliot as the author, for this was published anonymously at the time). This example illustrates the value of an annotated bibliography such as Roberts’s, which seeks out everything about an author that may not be retrievable in larger literary databases. Hugh Macdonald’s John Dryden: A Bibliography of Early Editions and of Drydeniana encompasses the early editions of Dryden’s works and early secondary sources about him. Macdonald attempts to include all editions of his works during his lifetime as well as every contemporary book and pamphlet in which he is “praised, attacked, or alluded to.”10 Macdonald aims to keep the scope of the bibliography within Dryden’s lifetime in terms of the author’s works, but extended the “Drydeniana” into the mid-eighteenth century. The contents are arranged by poems, miscellanies, collected editions of poems, plays, prose, letters, and contemporary views, and within these categories in chronological order. At the beginning of this chapter we referred to this work as an analytic bibliography, because the physical elements of the sources are described: each title is fully transcribed, the collation and size noted, and the contents listed. Notes refer to details found in some of the featured publications, such as initials of individuals, errors found, and differences between copies. Macdonald uses footnotes to provide information about Dryden specific to the publication. Although the analytic

Print and Electronic Bibliographies, Indexes, and Annual Reviews

93

or descriptive bibliography seems to have fallen out of favor as a type of reference tool, those interested in learning about certain qualities in the early editions will still find these of value. For Dryden scholars, this bibliography has the added value of detailed bibliographic citations, notes, and footnotes to contemporary perspectives on the author. In chapter 9, we will describe a major descriptive bibliography for drama, Greg’s Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration. The Tannenbaums’ ten-volume set Elizabethan Bibliographies presents reprints of forty-one concise bibliographies, originally printed between 1937 and 1950. This serves as a convenient starting point for those individuals without author-centered bibliographies, such as John Lyly, Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, and Anthony Mundy (Munday), and as a supplement to NCBEL. The short bibliographies are generally arranged by works, adaptations and translations, biography and commentary, bibliography, and index; citations are highly abbreviated, with a key to abbreviations at the head of each bibiliography. Secondary sources are largely from the nineteenth and early twentieth century. To research authors without a bibliography, look for sources that cover an era, such as Major Tudor Authors: A Bio-bibliographical Critical Sourcebook. A bio-bibliography is self-explanatory: it is a combination of a biography and a bibliography. In this case, both are supplemented by an essay on an author’s critical reception over the centuries and the relative significance of the author during the Tudor period. All types of works are encompassed: literary, scientific, music treatises, philosophical, and even mystical. English, Irish, and Scottish authors are joined by influential foreigners who lived in or wrote a significant work in Britain, or whose works were adopted or translated in Tudor England. The canonical male authors are included (Shakespeare, Spenser, Sidney), but women are also represented (Elizabeth Cary and Lady Ann Bacon). Arranged alphabetically by author, entries of three to ten pages typically contain a biographical sketch, discussion of critical reception, and bibliography with primary sources followed by a list of major critical studies and biographies. As with any collaboration, the entries vary in style and content, but overall this is a valuable resource to consult when starting research on a new author.

COMPILING YOUR OWN AUTHOR-CENTERED BIBLIOGRAPHY No print author-centered bibliographies exist for Margaret Cavendish, so we set out to discover what is available.

94

Chapter Four

For books, chapters, articles, and dissertations, we turned to MLAIB and ABELL (review the strategies discussed above for searching on Cavendish as subject). The former contained 252 entries searching her name as subject, and 267 as a keyword search; the latter contained 258 entries under the subject heading Newcastle, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of, none under the subject heading Cavendish, and 279 entries found under the keywords margaret cavendish, with roughly 20 unique items in the latter. Citations in both bibliographies date back to the 1950s, with one in ABELL from 1921. For primary and secondary source material, we accessed ESTC and WorldCat. A “Word from Author” search in ESTC on newcastle margaret resulted in 36 records, 3 items by subject. The WorldCat search strategy described in chapter 1, margaret n2 cavendish, retrieved 957 records for books, Internet sources, electronic texts, visual sources, and musical scores, while a Library of Congress subject heading search, in which the previous search was noted out, found an additional 14 entries. A title keyword search on margaret cavendish, again not-ing out the initial search, retrieved an additional six records. Using WorldCat, should you wish to create distinct lists of works by Cavendish and then about Cavendish, search her as author first, and then as subject, as we did for ESTC. In NCBEL, using the index in volume 1, Cavendish is listed in four of the genre sections with about six secondary sources (duplicated in the various entries as necessary) from the first part of the twentieth century, including a Virginia Woolf essay from 1925. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography lists the biographical references used to compile her entry. In ABELL, we found a topical bibliography devoted to Cavendish and her family by Irene Burgess in the “Recent Studies in the English Renaissance” issue of English Literary Renaissance.11 Burgess directs us to the bibliography following James Fitzmaurice’s essay on Cavendish published in the anthology Major Women Writers of Seventeenth Century England, as well as his online Margaret Cavendish Bibliography (jan.ucc.nau.edu/~jbf/CavBiblio.html), which lists publications, editions, manuscripts, secondary sources, and most of the citations found in NCBEL. To compile all the hundreds of citations found in WorldCat, MLAIB, and ABELL, you can export the records into bibliographic management software such as RefWorks or Endnote, remove duplicates, and create a bibliography using MLA style. Once this is done, the print and Web bibliographies can be compared against this list and missing citations added manually. Check the Help screens to see if your own personal notes can be added to the citation to record your opinions of the source. This is a makeshift way to compile your own bibliography quickly, but it does provide an overview of the primary and secondary sources connected with an author, in a flexible electronic format.

Print and Electronic Bibliographies, Indexes, and Annual Reviews

95

CONCLUSION Bibliographies, indexes, and annual reviews come in all shapes and sizes, but these types of research tools essentially do the same thing: they lead us to the primary sources of and secondary scholarship about a topic. Bibliographies can exist at the end of a journal article, book, or even encyclopedia entry; indexes offer access to the content of a book, or contents of hundreds of books and journal articles; and annual reviews direct the scholar to publications from a year or over several years, or allow the researcher to survey the scholarship on a particular subject over time. A truly useful bibliographic citation will include an annotation written by a scholar who can speak knowledgeably about the piece, or who can describe the contents expertly and briefly. Online databases provide ever more access to the scholarly output since early in the twentieth century, and even before. All of this information can be overwhelming, but by learning about the tools and how to use them, what to look for and what may be valuable, you will come to master the range of bibliographic resources available to you, and, we hope, to value them all. NOTES 1. James L. Harner, Literary Research Guide: An Annotated Listing of Reference Sources in English Literary Studies, 5th ed. (New York: Modern Language Association, 2008), 45. 2. Harner, 50–51. 3. Christopher Smith, “Review of MLAIB and ABELL: Periodische Fachbibliographien, CD-ROM- und Online-Datenbanken zur Anglistik, by Jost Hindersmann,” The Modern Language Review 97, no. 4 (October 2002): 1062. 4. John Ottenhoff, “Recent Studies in Metrical Psalms,” English Literary Renaissance 33, no. 2 (May 2003): 252–75. 5. Douglas A. Brooks, “Recent Studies in Ben Jonson (1991–mid-2001),” English Literary Renaissance 33, no. 1 (February 2003): 110–52. 6. Michael J. Marcuse, A Reference Guide for English Studies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), x. 7. Harner, 259. 8. John Richard Roberts, John Donne: An Annotated Bibliography of Modern Criticism, 1912–1967 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1973), 1. 9. Roberts, 103. 10. Hugh Macdonald, John Dryden: A Bibliography of Early Editions and of Drydeniana (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939), vii. 11. Irene Burgess, “Recent Studies in Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623–1674); William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle (1593–1676); Elizabeth Cavendish Egerton (1627–1663), and Jane Cavendish Cheyne (1622–1669),” English Literary Renaissance 32, no. 3 (September 2002): 452–66.

Chapter Five

Scholarly Journals

In this chapter we focus on scholarly journals relevant to the Renaissance and early modern period; the era is well represented in the scholarly periodical literature in journals devoted to the period and to period authors, as well as in the broader literary journals. An astonishing number of titles are devoted to Shakespeare alone, including a couple of periodicals that advocate other individuals as the author of the works attributed to the Bard. In the following chapter we provide an overview of the journals dedicated to the Renaissance and early modern period, and conclude with a “General” section in which we briefly list standard literary journals that publish relevant research. We will focus primarily on peer-reviewed journals that publish in-depth original research. Get to know the titles in your field and select those you wish to consult on a regular basis and to which you want to submit your research. The benefit of such scholarly journals is self-evident: as a form of communication, articles can be reviewed and published in a more timely fashion than books can, and therefore will reveal the emerging critical approaches and ongoing academic discussions sooner. Each journal has its own scope and intended audience. All have stated guidelines indicating article length and submission standards. Many are published by associations and university presses. Editorial boards of subject experts oversee the content and guide the direction of the publications. Some journals include book reviews, lists of new books received, theater reviews, conference announcements, annual reviews of the literature, or notes on new findings. Most periodicals of interest are indexed in MLA International Bibliography and Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (discussed in chapter 4), although a few of the titles in the “Period Studies” section, which are more historical or cultural studies than literary, are not. If not indexed in 96

Scholarly Journals

97

either, check the journal’s website to discover where the journal is indexed, use Ulrichsweb.com (discussed later in this chapter), or ask a reference librarian for help. To determine if a periodical is included in a print index, look at the beginning or end of the volume, or look for a separate volume such as the MLA Directory of Periodicals; if the index is online, check for a button or link to “Publications” or “Title List,” or, in the case of MLAIB, the link to the MLA Directory of Periodicals. If no list of titles exists, most search engines have a search option for journal title, source, or International Standard Serial Number (ISSN); enter the title or ISSN and check the results. To see how far back coverage extends, find the entry with the earliest date; in the case of a database that sorts by date, jump to the last entry on the results list to see the earliest date or look for an option to sort the list in chronological order. You should know that these research tools may index selectively and therefore not every article or issue may be present. Neither MLAIB nor ABELL indicate dates in their journal title list, so this step will be necessary; however, MLAIB and ABELL as part of a Literature Online (LION) subscription do link to a list of full-text journal titles and dates. In terms of publishing practices, scholarly journals are in a state of transition. Titles may be available in print, in microform, and electronically; in only one of these formats, or in a combination of two or three. Some associations allow access to the full content of their publications from their websites, while others require subscriptions or allow articles to be purchased individually. Full texts for several of the titles discussed here are available through digital journal collections such as LION, JSTOR, Project Muse, and Periodicals Archive Online (PAO), discussed in chapter 4. Some online publications are “open access,” meaning they are scholarly academic journals available on the Web at no charge: open access is a movement in academic publishing, fueled largely by the rising costs of already extremely expensive science journals, and advocates bypassing commercial publishers and instead distributing peer-reviewed scholarly research freely, immediately, and widely via the Web. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ; www.doaj.org) is a directory to free, full-text, quality-controlled scholarly and scientific journals. Many libraries incorporate records for open-access journals into their online catalogs, and many scholarly bibliographic databases index these journals, making them easier to find and integrate into the research process. Almost all of the journals mentioned in this chapter have a Web presence in which the tables of contents for past issues are present. Some have notification systems, such as RSS (an automated Web-based system that feeds updates to subscribers), or allow email of tables of contents to alert scholars that new issues have been published; if offered, you can register for these services. Your library, too, may have a notification system for the print

98

Chapter Five

subscriptions to notify you when a new issue of a particular journal arrives: inquire if you are interested.

PERIODICAL RESEARCH RESOURCES Magazines for Libraries. Bowker, 1969–. www.ulrichsweb.com. MLA Directory of Periodicals. New York: Modern Language Association of America. Available online through subscription to MLAIB and freely available to MLA members at www.mla.org. Ulrich’s Periodicals Directory. Bowker, 1932–. www.ulrichsweb.com.

You can consult standard research tools to find basic information about serial publications in general and literary journals in particular. One source is the journal itself, which will state in every issue, in one issue a year, or on its website, the purpose of the journal, the types of research it publishes, its editorial board, contact information, frequency, ISSN, and publication guidelines. The Modern Language Association publishes the MLA Directory of Periodicals, both in print and online. Online, it is part of the MLAIB subscription and you can link from within MLAIB to the directory. The MLA Directory of Periodicals not only lists the journals indexed in MLAIB, it includes detailed information about each: journal acronym, scope, subjects, language, publisher, first year of publication, ISSN, frequency, circulation, alternate formats (microforms or electronic), URL and content, whether it is peer reviewed, whether it is actively indexed, and subscription contact information. Of particular interest to those who wish to submit an article for consideration are the submission details, which briefly list information about restrictions, article length, number of articles submitted per year and number published, book reviews (if accepted), notes (if accepted), time frame from submission to decision, and time frame from decision to publication. Magazines for Libraries (MFL) and Ulrich’s Periodicals Directory (Ulrich’s) are broader in scope than literary studies publications, but both give important information about journals within the literary field. MFL evaluates selected important titles within a field of study, while Ulrich’s attempts to comprehensively list serial publications from around the world. First published in 1969 and currently in its fifteenth edition, MFL is arranged by discipline and provides concise, descriptive evaluations of core and major periodicals. The “Literature” section identifies “Basic Periodicals” followed by “Basic Abstract and Indexes.” Entries feature journal title, ISSN, start year, frequency, price, editor(s), address, email address, online vendors, location of indexes, whether the journal is refereed and publishes book reviews, and intended audience (e.g., Ac=academic; Ga=General), followed by short but excellent

Scholarly Journals

99

annotations describing the purpose of the publication, sample topics, and types of libraries that should subscribe (e.g., “for academic and larger public libraries,” “for medium-sized and larger academic libraries”). No author-centered titles are included in the latest version of MFL, although these were reviewed in some earlier editions and are available through Ulrichsweb.com (described below). Many of the major, core literary titles that we will briefly mention in the “General” section of this chapter are represented in this volume, and reading through the “Literature” and “Theater” parts of MFL would be time well spent. The multivolume directory Ulrich’s is arranged broadly by category; with entries listing publisher, address, country of origin, start year, frequency, document type (e.g., journal, academic/scholarly), whether refereed, language, price, special features, editor(s), title history, URL, sources where indexed, and a brief description of scope. Both MFL and Ulrich’s are standard library reference tools, commonly kept close to the reference desk. Online, MFL has been integrated into Ulrichsweb.com, the Web-based version of the printed directory. MFL can’t be searched separately within Ulrichsweb.com, and, as the website has the same basic information about the titles as MFL, only annotations from the latter are included. If an MFL annotation exists for a title in Ulrichsweb.com, a “Reviews” tab will appear at the top of the full record for that title and the annotation placed under that tab. To discover the journals available through your library, you can conduct a periodical title or ISSN search for the specific journal title you want, execute a keyword search that combines your area of interest with the word periodicals, such as early modern and periodicals, or search the appropriate subject heading, such as renaissance—periodicals. If your library doesn’t have access to the journal you need, try a Google search on the periodical title (enclosed in quotation marks) to see if the periodical has an online presence with access to the full text of articles; if not, request the desired articles via interlibrary loan. Ask the reference librarian, too, because you may be missing something in your search. Many academic libraries offer online help called “virtual reference,” allowing you to email or chat with a librarian to solve your question or research problem remotely.

RENAISSANCE AND EARLY MODERN LITERATURE Cahiers Élisabéthains: A Biannual Journal of Renaissance Studies (CahiersE). Centre d’Études et de Recherches Élisabéthaines de l’Université Paul Valéry, 1972–. 2/yr. ISSN: 0184-7678. recherche.univ-montp3.fr/cahiers/. Early Modern Literary Studies: A Journal of Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century English Literature (EMLS). Department of English, Sheffield Hallam University, 1995–. 3/yr. ISSN: 1201-2459. www.shu.ac.uk/emls/emlsjour.html.

100

Chapter Five

English Literary Renaissance (ELR). Blackwell Publishing, 1971–. 3/yr. ISSN: 00138312. www.blackwellpublishing.com/journals/ELR. English Manuscript Studies, 1100–1700 (EMS). British Library, 1989–. Annual. ISSN: 0957-8080. www.press.uchicago.edu/Complete/Series/BRITL-EMS.html. Literature Compass (LiteratureC). Blackwell, 2004–. Annual. ISSN: 1741-4113. www.blackwell-compass.com. Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England: An Annual Gathering of Research, Criticism, and Reviews (MRDE). Associated University Presses, 1984–. Annual. ISSN: 0731-3403. Renaissance Drama (RenD). Northwestern University Press, 1956–. Annual. ISSN: 0486-3739. www.english.northwestern.edu/resources/journal.html. Restoration and Eighteenth Century Theatre Research (RECTR). University of Denver, 1962–. 2/yr. ISSN: 0034-5822. www.du.edu/english/rectr/home.htm. Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660–1700 (Restoration). University of Tennessee, 1977–. 2/yr. ISSN: 0162-9905. web.utk.edu/~restor. SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 (SEL). Johns Hopkins University Press, 1961–. 4/yr. ISSN: 0039-3657. www.sel.rice.edu. The Seventeenth Century (SCen). Centre for Seventeenth-Century Studies, Manchester University Press, 1986–. 2/yr. ISSN: 0268-117X. www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/journals/journal.asp?id=5. Seventeenth-Century News (SCN). English Department, Texas A&M University, 1941–. 2/yr. ISSN: 0037-3028. www-english.tamu.edu/pubs/scn.

The titles in this section represent the variety of academic literature journals that fall within the parameters of the times described as Renaissance and early modern. Some focus on a century (Seventeenth Century News), others on a portion of this historic era (Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660–1700), and a few explore the Renaissance and early modern period along with the previous or subsequent eras (SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900). Other titles are concerned with genres (Renaissance Drama). Some have long publishing histories, while others are very recent additions to the field of study. Although we will mention online availability, remember that MLAIB and ABELL are the major avenues for discovering the full spectrum of literary research on a topic. We’ll progress chronologically as we describe the journals. Seventeenth-Century News is the oldest of the publications, and as of volume 65 is now a review journal containing news of interest to the Milton Society; prior to that, the journal carried short articles and notes. An official periodical of the Milton Society of America and the Milton Section of MLA, it comprises about eight to ten book reviews an issue, each between one thousand and fifteen hundred words long, on all aspects of English, American, and European seventeenth-century culture. This periodical enables scholars to keep current on the latest books about history, social history, scientific

Scholarly Journals

101

advancements, and colonialism, including topics such as religion, print, and literary culture in early modern England; John Locke and toleration; whores, virtuous women, and wives; and monographs about Donne, Milton, Bacon, and dramatists (except Shakespeare, unless he is part of a larger discussion). As part of the Texas Digital Library mandate to preserve the research output of Texas institutions, the journal is archived and freely available on the Texas Digital Library website back to 2002, and can be searched using the DSpace search engine, repositories.tdl.org/tdl/handle/2249.1/5065. Since 1968, each annual volume of Renaissance Drama has focused on a specific subject; prior to that, each was a collection of miscellaneous essays. In 2006 the topic was “Embodiment and Environment in Early Modern Drama and Performance”; in 2005, “Media, Technology, and Performance”; and in 1968, the volume centered on masques and entertainment, and featured an article providing a retrospective view of masque criticism. Six to ten articles, twenty-five to thirty-five pages long, are published annually. The critical approaches and topics have evolved with the changes in scholarly interests over time, but the focus remains on the genre of drama; although there are some international subjects, the English theater, the Elizabethan theater, and the dramatists of that time are most represented. Each issue of SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 centers on a specific period (English Renaissance in the Winter issue; Tudor and Stuart drama in Spring; Restoration and eighteenth century in Summer; and nineteenth century in Autumn) and contains eight to ten readable, engaging articles, fifteen to thirty pages in length, plus, as discussed in chapter 4, an invaluable overview of recent studies in the period covered by that issue. The Winter, Spring, and Summer issues will be of most interest to scholars of the Renaissance and early modern period, with articles discussing bearded women in early modern English texts; Nicholas Udall’s comedies and Catholicism; devotion in Ben Jonson’s Masque of Blacknesse; the five choruses in William Shakespeare’s Henry V as a ceremonial structure reproducing that of royal entry; homoerotic desire in the circle of friends formed by Katherine Philips; and the nature of friendship and intimacy as examined in the relationship between Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and John, Lord Hervey. The journal is also known for publishing articles both by established academics and younger faculty. Restoration and Eighteenth Century Theatre Research is another journal devoted to the theater genre that focuses on the long eighteenth century, and solicits scholarly research on British and some American theater, including theater history, drama, opera, plays, playwrights, and performers, and book reviews and theater notes. Three to seven essays in each issue range from five thousand to eight thousand words. Of interest to researchers of the

102

Chapter Five

Renaissance and early modern period are topics such as Mary Pix “she-tragedies,” libertine gamblers in the late Stuart comedy, Catholic conspirators in English comedy of the Glorious Revolution, and a production history of Dryden and Purcell’s King Arthur. An online comprehensive list of contents for the second series, which began in 1986, is available on the website. English Literary Renaissance encompasses the literatures from the Tudor and Stuart eras, 1485 to 1665, with articles on canonical figures—Shakespeare, Spenser (idolatry in The Fairie Queene), Donne, Milton (dance in the masque), and Sidney—and lesser-known authors and works, such as Ann Bacon’s letters of advice, Aemilia Lanyer’s poetry, and John Bale’s drama. There are also articles on themes, such as bastardy, liberal epistemology, and the character Jack of Newbury. Issues generally contain four to six articles, about ten to twenty-five pages long, with illustrations from woodcuts and engravings scattered throughout. Helpful to the scholar are the bibliographic review essays and annotations on topics such as English translation from 1520 to 1590, Tudor and Jacobean literature about Ireland, seventeenth-century letters, and ecocritical studies; these essays are especially valuable for research in genre, and will be discussed further in chapter 9. Cahiers Élisabéthains: A Biannual Journal of Renaissance Studies, also publishes articles on all aspects of the English Renaissance from Chaucer to the Restoration, with the literature and drama of the Elizabethan period of particular interest. Each issue includes four to five articles (with one or two in French each year), plus books and theater reviews. Some issues have “Notes” or brief articles intended for discoveries and remarks, such as “Uses of the Royal Plural in King Lear” and an exchange with Bill Alexander about the staging of Titus Andronicus. The major canonical figures are prevalent, with topics on performing messengers; language and news from the York Cycle to Jonson; succession in the Henriad; Shakespeare and Catholicism; and class and gender in John Webster’s The Devil’s Law-Case. There are also articles on lesser-known authors, such as Gabriel Harvey (his gendered response to an earthquake in 1580) and Isabella Whitney. Abstracts on the website are in both English and French. With Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660–1700, we come to the end of the Renaissance and early modern period. The journal’s website states that this publication, begun in the 1970s, was a response to a gap in the literature as scholarship in this area grew. Each issue comprises three or four scholarly articles of five thousand to seven thousand words, an annotated bibliography of several dozen new studies (both books and articles), and an announcements and queries section. Articles reflect the interdisciplinary nature of this journal, ranging from the freakish female bodies in the works of Aphra Behn; oath giving and false swearing in John

Scholarly Journals

103

Crown’s City Politiques; an examination of travel, memory, and authorship in George Wheler’s A Journey into Greece; Dryden’s The Kind Keeper; the rise of free prayer in the Restoration; and Nell Gwyn and the role of the Protestant whore. The stated goal of Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England: An Annual Gathering of Research, Criticism, and Reviews is to foster conversation and increase knowledge concerning medieval and non-Shakespearean drama, performed on medieval church porches, on later professional stages, and on contemporary stages. The journal focuses on drama prior to 1640; each volume contains ten to twelve articles, most between twenty and thirty pages, and sixteen to eighteen book reviews (including Shakespeare) of three to four pages each, with some longer review articles such as one on Lancastrian Shakespeare. Discussions are intended to increase knowledge of theatrical institutions and to continue the study of the history, theory, and methodology of performance. Topics encompass drama in the provinces, the history of the Bell House Inn and Playhouse, John Lyly’s decline in popularity, contemporary issues and traditional forms in the repertory of the Chamberlain’s Men, and the crone in Renaissance drama. The interdisciplinary journal The Seventeenth Century endeavors to publish essays, accessible to scholars who are not specialists in the field, on literature, political and economic history, social history, theology, philosophy, colonial history, natural sciences, music, and the visual arts. This title could have been located in the “Renaissance and Early Modern Studies” section of this chapter, but as Seventeenth Century News no longer publishes essays, and because this journal addresses issues of interest to literary scholars, we placed it here as a title that should be browsed regularly. Essays include topics such as deciphering letters from Charles I to Jane Whorwood; writing on early modern science, culture, religion, and revolution; lone motherhood; Aphra Behn and the rhetoric of republicanism; and Dionys Fitzherbert and spiritual life writing. Seven to ten articles, between three thousand and twelve thousand words, comprise each issue. English Manuscript Studies, 1100–1700 is another title that could have been placed in the “Studies” section of this chapter, but again has much of interest to literary scholars (see also chapter 8). The manuscript culture, as opposed to printed books, encompasses illuminated manuscripts, commonplace books, miscellanies, provenance and attribution, and the manuscript as physical object. In the first volume the journal editors point out that the Oxford English Dictionary has largely been based on printed books, even though manuscripts were still a vital part of the intellectual community up to 1700 when the printed book definitely triumphed. Each volume comprises about eleven articles from eight to sixty pages in length, and lists manuscripts

104

Chapter Five

for auction in the previous year that have yet to find homes. The theme for volume 12, “Scribes and Transmission in English Manuscripts 1400–1700,” includes Scottish manuscript miscellanies, a censored text of Donne’s To His Mistress Going to Bed, Francis Beaumont’s verse letters to Ben Jonson, and the date and script of Hobbes’s Latin optical manuscript. Early Modern Literary Studies: A Journal of Sixteenth- and SeventeenthCentury English Literature is one of the earliest scholarly literary publications available exclusively and freely online, and is listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals website discussed above. Early Modern Literary Studies publishes between five and seven critical essays and studies per issue on English literary topics, culture, and language during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as well as bibliographies, notices, book reviews, and theater reviews. In addition to the traditional apparatus of a scholarly journal, the periodical maintains Web links to relevant e-texts, e-journals, blogs, images, author websites, and academic discussion groups. Recent article titles include “Is ‘Hand D’ of Sir Thomas More Shakespeare’s?” “The School of the World: Trading on Wit in Middleton’s Trick to Catch the Old One,” “Observations upon the Irish Devils: Echoes of Eire in Paradise Lost,” “Hero’s Afterlife: Hero and Leander and ‘Lewd Unmannerly Verse’ in the late Seventeenth Century,” and “Verse, Voice, and Body: The Retirement Mode and Women’s Poetry 1680–1723.” Special issues present research on “Shakespeare on Screen,” “Monitoring Electronic Shakespeare,” “Essays from the Fifth Biennial International Margaret Cavendish Conference,” “Literature and Geography,” “Women Writers,” and “Middleton.” Irregularly published bibliographies are on such topics of interest as “Shakespeare on Television: A Bibliography of Criticism,” “Early Modern Cartographic Resources on the World Wide Web,” and “Women Writers Online: An Evaluation and Annotated Bibliography of Web Resources.” Unlike later Web-based journals, and perhaps due to its early roots in the online environment, essays are submitted in text form and don’t take advantages of the interactive power of the Internet; this is not a criticism, but an observation. A recent addition to scholarly criticism, Literature Compass is available only online by subscription, and at a hefty price. The journal publishes survey articles that feature current research trends across the entire discipline in one online annual volume. It is similar to SEL in that each section, equivalent to an issue, examines a different literary era; but whereas SEL focuses on four, Literature Compass features nine: “Medieval,” “Renaissance,” “Shakespeare,” “17th Century,” “18th Century,” “Romanticism,” “Victorian,” “20th Century and Contemporary,” and “American.” Because the whole process is done electronically, articles are typically published six to eight weeks after acceptance, and, because printing prices are not an issue, there are no standard limits to the

Scholarly Journals

105

number of articles per volume—the 2003 Shakespeare volume contained seven articles, while the 2004 had three. Taking advantage of the Web’s strengths, the content can be searched using an internal search engine; a “Related Articles” feature suggests additional articles of interest from within the database; and link resolvers, using OpenURL technology, provide links from articles’ “Works Cited” citations to the library catalog or electronic subscriptions. The site allows users to register for emailed “Contents Alert” and offers links to recommended literary websites. Topics do reflect current scholarly research trends: volume 4 for the Renaissance section includes “Empire, Exile, and England’s ‘British Problem’: Recent Approaches to Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender as a Colonial and Postcolonial Text,” “Walter Ralegh and the Arts of Memory,” “The Forgotten Greek Books of Elizabethan England,” and “Women’s Patronage-Seeking as Familial Enterprise: Aemilia Lanyer, Esther Inglis, and Mary Wroth.” In volume 4 of the Shakespeare section, we find “Shakespeare and the City,” “Love’s Usury, Poet’s Debt: Borrowing and Mimesis in Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” and “Reading Shakespearean Violence”; volume 4 of the 17th Century section contains “Female Characters on the Jacobean Stage Defying Type: When Is a Shrew Not a Shrew?” “Literatures of Wonder in Early Modern England and America,” “Working with Anonymity: A Theory of Theory vs. Archive,” and “Donne and Disbelief: The Early Prose.”

RENAISSANCE AND EARLY MODERN STUDIES Early Modern Culture: An Electronic Seminar. Early Modern Culture, 2000–, Annual. ISSN 1939-0246. emc.eserver.org. Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal. Center for Renaissance & Baroque Studies, University of Maryland, 2006–. Annual. ISSN: 1933-0065. www .emwjournal.umd.edu. Exemplaria: A Journal of Theory in Medieval and Renaissance Studies (Exemplaria). Maney, 1989–. 3/yr. ISSN: 1041-2573; E-ISSN: 1753-3074. maney.co.uk/index. php/journals/exm/. Explorations in Renaissance Culture (EIRC). South Central Renaissance Conference, 1974–. 2/yr. ISSN: 0098-2474. engphil.astate.edu/EIRC. The Huntington Library Quarterly: A Journal for the History and Interpretation of English and American Civilization (HLQ). University of California Press. 1937–. 4/yr. ISSN: 0018-7895. huntington.org/huntingtonlibrary_03.aspx?id=2988. Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies (JEMCS). Indiana University Press, 2000–. 2/yr. ISSN: 1531-0485. inscribe.iupress.org/loi/jem. Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (JMEMSt). Duke University Press, 1971–. 3/yr. ISSN: 1082-9636. Former title: Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies (1971–1996). jmems.dukejournals.org/archive.

106

Chapter Five

Parergon: Journal of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies (ParergonJ). Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Modern Studies, 1971–. 2/yr. ISSN: 0313-6221. www.parergon.arts .uwa.edu.au. Quidditas. Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association, 1980–. Annual. ISSN: 0195-8453. humanities.byu.edu/rmmra. Formerly Journal of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association. humanities.byu.edu/rmmra/. Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme (Ren&R). Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, University of Toronto, 1963–. 4/yr. ISSN: 0034429X. www.crrs.ca/renref/homepage.htm. Renaissance Quarterly (RenQ). Renaissance Society of America, 1948–. 4/yr. ISSN: 0034-4338. Former titles: Renaissance News (1948–1966); absorbed Studies in the Renaissance (1975). www.rsa.org/rq.php. Renaissance Studies: Journal of the Society for Renaissance Studies (RENST). Oxford University Press, 1987–. 4/yr. ISSN: 0269-1213. www.blackwell-synergy .com/loi/rest. 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era. AMS Press, 1994–. Annual. ISSN: 1065-3112. 1650-1850.net. Sixteenth Century Journal: The Journal of Early Modern Studies (SCJ). Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1969–. 4/yr. ISSN: 0361-0160. escj.truman.edu.

The journals discussed in this section are more interdisciplinary in nature and publish articles on all aspects of the Renaissance and early modern period. We’ve identified a cross-section of periodicals of interest, from the major, core periodicals to regional association publications to open-access journals. Titles in this section are not necessarily indexed in either MLAIB or ABELL; review the recommended strategies for discovering indexes set forth at the beginning of this chapter. The official publication for the Renaissance Society of America, and one of the premier journals for Renaissance scholars, Renaissance Quarterly publishes ten to twelve (twenty-five to thirty-five pages) interdisciplinary articles per year, covering history, literature, art, philosophy, music, and more. The editors select articles they believe address important recent developments in Renaissance studies. Issues also contain about one hundred book reviews, and may include review essays and reports on the society. Most articles are in English, with some French and Italian included. Of interest to literary scholars are articles such as “A Postmodern Renaissance?” by Randolph Starn, and discussions of beheading in Irish and English literature and art, the appearance of English literary texts in John Bale’s construction of national identity, and the examination of two royal recipe books that presented to the English nation Henrietta Maria and Elizabeth Cromwell as different “housewives.”

Scholarly Journals

107

Another multidisciplinary journal, Renaissance Studies: Journal of the Society for Renaissance Studies covers all aspects of European Renaissance history and culture, with articles in history, art, architecture, religion, literature, and languages of Europe. Each issue also contains a substantial book review section and often illustrated reviews of exhibitions and society news; occasionally a fifth, special issue will be offered. English literary topics include the use of idolatry in representations of desire in six sonnet sequences (Petrarch, Sidney, Spenser, Drayton, Daniel, and Shakespeare), reassessment of the texts of Thomas More’s Richard III, Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica and its engagement with biblical curiosa, MacBeth and Hercules, and a literary case study about Phineas Fletcher’s scientifically informed somatic epic, The Purple Island. Explorations in Renaissance Culture, published in association with the South-Central Renaissance Conference, comprises peer-reviewed articles on all areas of Renaissance and early modern studies in art, history, iconography, literature, music, philosophy, and history. Available in print and with five to eight articles (twenty to thirty pages), a recent issue explored the theories of John Shawcross as published in Intentionality and the New Traditionalism: Some Liminal Means to Literary Revisionism, including an essay by Shawcross himself; topics in other volumes address the literary iconologies of Mary Firth, the poetics of feminization in Sidney’s Arcadia, and the abandoned practice of Elizabeth I comparisons to female biblical figures in a religious shift of the late 1570s. Selected volumes are archived at www.cwrl .utexas.edu/~nydam/scrc/explorations.shtml. Providing a forum for discussions that span the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Exemplaria: A Journal of Theory in Medieval and Renaissance Studies brings together different terminologies and approaches for scholarly research in history, literature, music, anthropology, and more. Online or in print, issues consist of six to nine articles (twenty-five to forty-five pages), some devoted to special topics. Although the majority of articles cover the medieval period, literary scholars will be interested in essays such as “Paradise Lost for the Dying Dream: Mortal Redefinition of Linguistic signs in Paradise Lost,” “De-Coronation and Demonic Meta-Ritual in Richard II,” and “The Tudor Search for Arthur and the Poetics of Historical Loss.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies is another well-respected journal in which the Middle Ages meet the early modern period; it solicits research that is historically grounded and informed by contemporary theoretical debate concerning European and Western Asian cultures in the disciplines of art, literature, theater, music, theology, philosophy, and history. Available in print and online, each issue has six to seven articles roughly twenty to forty

108

Chapter Five

pages long. Some issues are open-topic while others are thematic, such as “Utopias, Medieval and Early Modern” or “Mapping the Mediterranean.” The Huntington Library Quarterly: A Journal for the History and Interpretation of English and American Civilization is a publication of the Huntington, which houses an important American research library devoted to rare books and manuscripts. It publishes on the literature, history, and art of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries in Britain and the United States, with special emphasis on the interactions of literature, politics, and religion; the social and political contexts of literary and art history; textual and bibliographic studies; the history of printing and publishing; and the performance history of drama and music. In addition, there are book reviews, review articles on important works in early modern studies, and an “Intramuralia” section on Huntington acquisitions. Occasionally issues will contain “Notes and Documents,” short pieces on specific subjects or pieces devoted to the content of archival materials (including transcriptions of manuscripts), such as “‘The Lotterie’: A Transcription of a Manuscript Play Probably by Margaret Cavendish” and “An Overlooked Tract by Francis Bacon.” Regular special issues cover topics such as politics and poetry in early Stuart England, the uses of history in early modern England, and the intersection of print, propaganda, and royalism. Parergon: Journal of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies contains articles and book reviews that focus on new approaches and that cross traditional disciplinary boundaries in European literature, history, and culture. Five to eight articles (twenty to thirty pages) in each issue cover topics such as Ben Jonson’s knowledge of minerals and metal working; maids, wives, widows, and marriage in The Witch of Edmonton; and Samson Agonistes and spiritual autobiography. Quidditas, published by the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association, is freely available on the Web. As explained in volume 26/27, “Quidditas is a Latin legal term that originally meant ‘the essential nature of a thing’ . . . the original Latin meaning, together with the later implied notions of intense scrutiny, systematic reasoning, and witty wordplay, is well suited to the contents of the journal.” The online volumes include articles (twenty to thirty pages), notes, review essays, and, most recently, “Texts and Teaching: Books Recommended for Courses.” Some sample article titles are “The Fall of Troy and the Rise of Elizabethan Drama: Empowering the Audience,” “Interpreting Early Modern Woman Abuse: The Case of Anne Dormer,” and “Anne Southwell, Metaphysical Poet.” Published annually since 2000, Early Modern Culture: An Electronic Seminar is an unusual open-access journal that has experimented with communication opportunities within the Web environment for active and ongoing inquiry; it functions, the editors hope, along the lines of a good seminar. The

Scholarly Journals

109

journal proffers a different version of peer reviewing that happens along the way: four works in progress are presented along with responses from readers working on similar topics. “The Electric Seminar” allows for participating readers to post responses and create an actual dialog about the direction and particulars of the research in progress. Sample paper topics include “The Sonnet in Ruins: Time and Nation in 1599,” “Reading from the Wormholes: Micro-Periods from the Future,” and “When Women Ruled the World: The Glorious Sixteenth Century.” Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal is a recent and specialized scholarly journal devoted to the interdisciplinary and global study of women and gender from 1400 to 1700. The editors seek articles of no more than 8,750 words that cross disciplinary boundaries. Essays may cover literature, history, art history, history of science, music, politics, religion, theater, cultural studies, and any world region. Articles of interest from the first volume include “‘High Housewifery’: The Duties and Letters of Barbara Gamage Sidney, Countess of Leicester”; “Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Ermine: Elizabeth I’s Coronation Robes and Mothers’ Legacies in Early Modern England”; and an essay, reflecting upon thinking and working more globally as scholars, titled “A Renaissance Woman (Still) Adrift in the World.” A letter from the editors explaining the birth of this journal heads the volume, and five book reviews conclude it. Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme is a multidisciplinary, bilingual journal that publishes articles and book reviews on all aspects of the Renaissance, Reformation, and early modern world, including literature, geography, history, religion, art, music, society, and economics, and is available online via Iter by subscription. Three to six articles (roughly twenty to thirty pages) cover European cultures. Of interest to the literary scholar are “Shakespeare’s Joan and the Great Whore of Babylon,” “Donne’s Satyre and the Closure of the Law,” and “An Arbor of One’s Own? Aemilia Lanyer and the Early Modern Garden.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies is the official publication of the Group of Early Modern Cultural Studies, and embraces all disciplines and African, European, American, and Asian studies. The journal strives to challenge the limits of traditional scholarship and extend the boundaries to include cultural theory, gender studies, colonial and postcolonial studies, and postmodernism. Beginning with volume 5, one issue focuses on the fifteenth, sixteenth, and early seventeenth centuries, while the other is dedicated to the late seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. The four to six articles (twenty to thirty pages) address common genres (English Renaissance drama), themes (reading the material and social bodies), or theoretical approaches (a special issue on “Postcolonial Revisions of Early Modern”).

110

Chapter Five

Sixteenth Century Journal: The Journal of Early Modern Studies is an important interdisciplinary periodical that publishes essays on all aspects of sixteenth-century European culture, although it includes topics reaching into the seventeenth century. Literature is not emphasized. Issues contain seven to nine articles (twenty to twenty-five pages), with recent titles such as “Englishing the Globe: Molyneux’s Globes and Shakespeare’s Theatrical Career,” “The Family of Love and Its Enemies,” “Bookburning in Tudor and Stuart England,” and the article for the record analyzed in chapter 1, “Women’s Reading Practices in Seventeenth-Century England: Margaret Fell’s Women’s Speaking Justified.” Within 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era, mid- to late-seventeenth-century authors are highlighted: Milton, Dryden, Wycherley, Cavendish, Davenant, Behn, Shadwell, Marvell, and Congreve. Each volume contains twelve to fourteen scholarly articles on literature and culture, aesthetics, and ideas; the editors state that “its emphasis on the aesthetic manifestations and applications of ideas encourages studies that move between the arts and the sciences—between the ‘hard’ and the ‘humane’ disciplines.” Volume 11 (2005) contains a special feature on rakes: “Rakes, Male and Female, in the Literatures of the Long Eighteenth Century” and “Rambler and Cully: Rochester’s Satire and the Self-Presentation of the Restoration Rake,” followed by articles on the French rake, Anne Bracegirdle’s Breaches, The Belle’s Stratagem, and concluding with “The Taming of the Rake: Congreve’s The Way of the World on the German Eighteenth-Century Stage.”

AUTHOR STUDIES Baconiana: The Journal of the Francis Bacon Society. Francis Bacon Society, 1892–. Annual. ISSN: 0961-2173. Former title: Journal of the Bacon Society. Ben Jonson Journal: Literary Contexts in the Age of Elizabeth, James, and Charles (BJJ). Edinburgh University Press, 1994–. 2/yr. ISSN: 1079-3453. www.geocities .com/benjonsonjournal/benjonsonjournal.htm. Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation (BorrowersL). Department of English, University of Georgia, 2005–. 2/yr. ISSN: 15546985. www.borrowers.uga.edu/cocoon/borrowers. George Herbert Journal (GHJ). Sacred Heart University, 1977–. 2/yr. ISSN: 01617435; E-ISSN: 1931-1192. www.georgeherbert.org/ghj.html. John Donne Journal: Studies in the Age of Donne (JDJ). Thomson-Shore, 1982–. Annual. ISSN: 0738-9655. english.chass.ncsu.edu/jdj. Milton Quarterly (MiltonQ). Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967–. 4/yr. ISSN: 0026-4326. Former title: Milton Newsletter (1967–1969). www.blackwell-synergy .com/loi/milt.

Scholarly Journals

111

Milton Studies (MiltonS). University of Pittsburgh Press, 1969–. Annual. ISSN: 0076-8820. www.upress.pitt.edu/browseDetailList.aspx?initial=45&type=series. Moreana: Bulletin Thomas More (Moreana). Imprimerie Legrand, 1963–. 2–4/yr. ISSN: 0047-8105. www.amici-thomae-mori.com/uk. Oxfordian: The Annual Journal of the Shakespeare Oxford Society (Oxfordian). Shakespeare Oxford Society, 1998–. Annual. ISSN: 1521-3641. www.shake speare-oxford.com. Shakespeare (Shakespeare). Taylor & Francis, 2005–. 3/yr. ISSN: 1745-0918; E-ISSN: 1745-0926. www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/17450918.asp. Shakespeare Bulletin: A Journal of Performance Criticism and Scholarship (ShakB). Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982–. 4/yr. ISSN: 0748-2558. www.shake speare-bulletin.org. Shakespeare in Southern Africa: Journal of the Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa (ShSA). Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa, 1987–. Annual. ISSN: 1011-582X. www.ru.ac.za/static/institutes/isea/shake/journal.html. Shakespeare Jahrbuch (ShJB). Verlag und Druckkontor Kamp, 1865–. Annual. ISSN: 1430-2527. www.shakespeare-gesellschaft.de/en.html. Shakespeare Newsletter (ShN). Iona College, 1951–. 4/yr. ISSN: 0037-3214. www .iona.edu/snl. Shakespeare Quarterly (SQ). Johns Hopkins University Press, 1950–. 4/yr. ISSN: 0037-3222. Former title: Shakespeare Association Bulletin (1924–1949). www .folger.edu/template.cfm?cid=542. Shakespeare Studies (ShakS). Associated University Press, 1965–. Annual. ISSN: 0582-9399. inside.fdu.edu/fdupress/03101501.html. Shakespeare Survey: An Annual Survey of Shakespeare Studies and Production (ShS). Cambridge University Press, 1948–. Annual. ISSN: 0080-9152. www.cam bridge.org/uk/series/sSeries.asp?code=SS. Sidney Journal (SiJ). International Sidney Society, 1980–. 2/yr. ISSN: 1480-0926. Former titles: Sidney Newsletter & Journal (1991–1997), Sidney Newsletter (1980–1990). www.english.cam.ac.uk/sidney. Spenser Review. International Sidney Society, 1970–. 3/yr. ISSN: 1559-1697. Former title: Spenser Newsletter (1970–2000). www.english.cam.ac.uk/spenser/spenrev. Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual (SSt). AMS Press, 1980–. Annual. ISSN: 0195-9468. www.english.cam.ac.uk/spenser/studiesabout.htm. Thomas More Studies. Center for Thomas More Studies, 2006–. Annual conference proceedings. www.thomasmorestudies.org/index.html.

Author-centered journals of the Renaissance and early modern period mainly exist for traditionally canonical figures: Ben Jonson, George Herbert, John Donne, John Milton, Thomas More, William Shakespeare, Philip Sidney, and Edmund Spenser. The journals focus on the lives and writings of the authors. They can include reviews of current theatrical interpretations of their works, book reviews, information about conferences, and, if sponsored by an organization, society news. Some may have annual review essays that

112

Chapter Five

survey the scholarly output of the previous year. These invaluable journals allow the author to be situated within the culture, politics, religion, literature, philosophy, and history of the era. Ben Jonson Journal: Literary Contexts in the Age of Elizabeth, James, and Charles, sponsored by the University of Nevada, publishes ten to twelve articles a year on Jonson, his contemporaries and the milieux of the era, along with book reviews, theater reviews, notes, a review essay, and, starting in 2005, a section with short (four to seven pages) overviews of modern research on such topics as Cynthia’s Revels, Sejanus His Fall, print culture, John Donne, and gender. The occasional bibliographic study reviews references to Jonson in non-Jonsonian research, for example “References to Jonson in Scholarship on Shakespeare.” Topics discussed include the editorial choices and reputation of Jonson in the eighteenth century, the absence of plague in The Alchemist, legal interpretations of defamation in Much Ado About Nothing, and the poetic voice in Jonson’s tetrameter lyrics. The George Herbert Journal publishes eight (five thousand words) essays on the life and work of the author, with eight to ten book reviews on subjects related to seventeenth-century poetry. Occasional special issues cover related authors or themes; volume 27, issue 1/2, is devoted to “George Herbert at the 2005 Cambridge Renaissance Society of America Meeting,” with articles on the theology of beauty, Herbert and Cambridge scholars, Herbert and the Book of Common Prayer in his nature poetry, sacrament in Donne and Herbert, and the Judaic past in Herbert. John Donne Journal: Studies in the Age of Donne, sponsored by the John Donne Society, publishes substantial articles on Donne and on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poetry and prose, with occasional book reviews, short notes, announcements, and descriptions of manuscripts, texts, and documents. Some issues address special topics such as one devoted to Richard Crashaw, which, in addition to critical essays, contains a more than two-hundred-page annotated bibliography of criticism on Crashaw covering 1981 to 2002. Another special issue on literature and music has essays on Donne, the biblical David, and the power of music; music, poetry, and performance in the court of James VI; and George Herbert and the Anglican hymn tradition. Some issues include a “Colloquium” section addressing a specific work, such as one on The Good Morrow with four short pieces: reading and teaching the text, establishing the text, the theme of betrothal, and impressions about the poem and the modern aubade. Two journals pertain to John Milton, Milton Quarterly and Milton Studies. Milton Quarterly, the earlier publication, typically features three to four articles and/or review essays (10–20 pages), book reviews, abstracts of recent scholarship appearing in other venues, review articles, and news and notes

Scholarly Journals

113

about academic activities pertaining to Milton. Found in alternating issues starting with volume 39, number 4, is an ongoing project titled “Milton’s Reformed Animals: An Early Modern Bestiary,” a dictionary of the animals appearing in Milton’s writings, starting with “Adder.” The short essays give background information about the animal, the Renaissance and early modern literary treatment of and/or understanding about the animal, and an analysis of Milton’s use of the animal in his texts. Other recent article and review essay titles include “Satan’s Journey through Darkness: Paradise Lost 9.53–86,” “Milton’s Biographies for the Current Century: A Review Article,” “Milton in Print: A Review of Some Recent Editions of Paradise Lost,” and “How Adams and Jefferson Read Milton and Milton Read Them.” Milton Studies, established two years later, is an annual forum for Milton scholarship and criticism that explores the literary, intellectual, and historical contexts that influenced Milton, including the work of his contemporaries and political and religious movements; his influences on other writers; and the history of critical responses to his work. Eight to ten essays range from fifteen to thirty pages. Recent articles cover floral imagery and “Green Milton”; sexuality, marriage, and divorce in seventeenth-century England; heresy, intolerance, and tolerance; and radical religion. Moreana: Bulletin Thomas More, sponsored by the Amici Thomae Mori, is a bilingual journal devoted to More and to the world of the sixteenth century. It has as an additional goal the examination of More and his century in order to contribute to the understanding of our own times. Recent articles include an ongoing series on references and allusions to More from 1641 to 1700, “Service, Loyalty, and Betrayal in George Cavendish’s The Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey,” “Thomas More as a Young Lawyer,” and “Thomas More’s Views on Language and Translation and Their Places in the Classical and Humanist Traditions.” The publication also has book reviews, and both articles and book reviews are available online to association members. Since 2006, the refereed proceedings of the annual Thomas More Studies conference have been published online at the Center for Thomas More Studies website. There is a plethora of publications devoted to Shakespeare; we will provide details on two of the titles, and will give an overview of other titles we’ve listed. Bracken’s Reference Works in British and American Literature (discussed in chapter 2) has helpful annotations on some of these titles. In addition, you can fill in the details and conduct some preliminary evaluations of periodicals by using these strategies: on the journal’s website, read the description about the publication and submissions guidelines, and examine the editorial board; consult MLA Directory of Periodicals and Ulrichsweb.com (and, if available, the evaluative annotations from Magazines for Libraries);

114

Chapter Five

look at the tables of contents for several issues; and read articles of interest to get a flavor of the journal. These steps will introduce you to the titles available, and enable you to determine which periodical may be most beneficial to your research. Shakespeare, a peer-reviewed journal sponsored by the British Shakespeare Association, is a recent addition, with scholarly articles, book reviews, and theatrical performance reviews. The editorial board includes actors, academics, and representatives from the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. The journal aims to address developments in, and the gap between, performance and academia from a variety of critical approaches. Issues feature essays, discussions about performance, and debates concerning Shakespeare studies. A special issue examined “Shakespeare and the Cultures of Childhood.” Topics explored were: “When the Cock Crew: The Imminence of Hamlet,” “Killing Shakespeare’s Children: The Case of Richard III and King John,” “Sex, Lies, and Videotape: Representing the Past in Shakespeare in Love, Mapping a Future for Presentism,” and “Uneasy Coalitions: Culpability, Orange Jumpsuits and Measure for Measure.” The older, more established, Shakespeare Quarterly, published by the Folger Shakespeare Library and founded by the Shakespeare Association of America, is an essential publication of two to three critical essays (generally twenty-five to thirty pages) on Shakespeare, his works, and his times, as well as book and theater reviews, notes, and an annual “World Shakespeare Bibliography” issue (discussed in chapter 4). Recent subjects explored include the medieval roots of gendered representation of the Jewish race in the Merchant of Venice, and collaborative practices in The Book of Sir Thomas More and collective citizen activity at the time. Shakespeare Studies, one of the major international Shakespeare journals, publishes essays and studies about the cultural history of early modern England as well as the place of Shakespeare’s productions, and those of his contemporaries, within it. The editors have implemented new ways to engage contributors in scholarly conversations about early modern literatures. Two such innovations are the “Forum” and “Early Modern Drama Around the World.” The Forum features short essays on a debatable topic, such as “Is There Character after Theory?” and “The Future of Renaissance Manuscript Studies.” Debuting in 1948, and available online as part of the Cambridge Collections Online, each volume of Shakespeare Survey: An Annual Survey of Shakespeare Studies and Production has a particular theme (“Editing Shakespeare,” “Shakespeare and Religions,” “Shakespeare and Narrative,” and “MacBeth and its Afterlife” ) and contains a review section that covers major British theater performances and review essays on the latest scholar-

Scholarly Journals

115

ship on textual, critical, and performance issues. Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation, an online, multimedia, peer-reviewed journal, encourages authors to use the Web format to its best advantage, and to incorporate images and audio. The journal solicits scholarship that explores the afterlives of Shakespearean texts in literature, film, music lyrics, multimedia, and critical histories, as well as Shakespeare’s appropriation for his own works and appropriation as a critical concept. Shakespeare Bulletin: A Journal of Performance Criticism and Scholarship publishes scholarly articles and features on Shakespeare and Renaissance drama performed on stage and screen. It began as the product of the New York Shakespeare Society, and, in addition to articles, book reviews, and theater and film reviews, it also attempts to note all Shakespeare productions in the United States, with selective coverage of Canada, Britain, and the rest of the world. Shakespeare in Southern Africa: Journal of the Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa publishes articles, commentary, and reviews on all aspects of Shakespeare studies and performance, with a particular emphasis on the response to Shakespeare in southern Africa. Articles may also explore views of Africa in early modern literatures. Shakespeare Jahrbuch, in German and English, is the oldest of the author-centered journals on the Bard, dating back to 1865, and is the product of the German Shakespeare Society, founded in 1864. Each volume is a special issue, with recent issues devoted to violence in Shakespeare, Shakespearean use of fairy tales and myth, and “Shakespeare—Goethe—Schiller.” The journal also includes reviews of productions in German-speaking areas. A small, scholarly, illustrated publication, the Shakespeare Newsletter publishes brief original articles, book reviews, performance reviews, and abstracts of articles, lectures, and dissertations encompassing all aspects of Shakespeare, his works, and his world. We conclude with two related publications you may see in the course of your research on Shakespeare, Baconiana: The Journal of the Francis Bacon Society and Oxfordian: The Annual Journal of the Shakespeare Oxford Society. The Francis Bacon Society that publishes Baconiana is known for championing the Shakespeare authorship question, advocating Bacon as the author, but it does include articles about Bacon, his writings, and his world. The Oxfordian contains articles, essays, and recent research on the Shakespeare authorship question, and on the claims for Edward de Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford, as the author. Sidney Journal, published by the Sidney Society, provides a forum for peer-reviewed discussion of Sir Philip Sidney, Mary Sidney Herbert, and other members of the Sidney family and circle. The journal accepts articles of any length, notes, queries, and responses to articles or reviews, as well as advance notices of conferences and other events, calls for papers, and any news of

116

Chapter Five

interest to Sidneians. A recent special issue was devoted to the Countess of Pembroke, while other recent article titles include “‘With a tale forsooth he cometh unto you’: Sidney and the Storytelling Poet,” “The Sidneys of Penshurst, the Earldom of Leicester and the Monarchies of England, Spain and France,” “Gabriel Harvey, the Sidney Circle, and the Excellent Gentlewoman,” and “The Political Commonplace Books of Sir Robert Sidney.” Finally, there are two publications for Spenser, Spenser Review and Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual. Spenser Review is a small publication that contains reports on major events such as new editions of Spenser’s work and special conferences, Spenser Society news, book reviews, abstracts and notices of recent articles, announcements (calls for papers and conference listings), and an annual bibliographic update on the work of Spenser. Spenser Studies annually publishes ten to fourteen scholarly articles on all sixteenthcentury English poets, with emphasis on Spenser and Sidney, as well as on the literary, historical, and intellectual context and influence of sixteenth-century English poetry. Some recent article titles include “Time Lords: Rhythm and Interval in Spenser’s Stanzaic Narrative,” “Spenser’s First Folio: The Build-It-Yourself Edition,” “Spenser’s Dragon and the Law,” “‘The sea it selfe doest thou not plainely see?’ Reading The Faerie Queen, Book V,” and “The Widow’s Mite and the Value of Praise: Commendatory Verses and an Unrecorded Marginal Poem in LSU’s Copy of The Faerie Queen 1590.”

GENERAL As is evident from the previous discussion, there are a large number of journals devoted to scholarship about the Renaissance and early modern period, and period authors and literatures. These are supplemented by the articles that regularly appear in important general and genre peer-reviewed publications for English literatures. Searches in MLAIB and ABELL will retrieve articles in these publications, but to provide a sample of what else is out there, we’ll list some common journals in which articles for Renaissance and early modern studies do appear. Core journals such as PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, ELH, English Studies: A Journal of English Language and Literature, Essays in Criticism: A Quarterly Journal of Literary Criticism, MLN, Modern Language Quarterly: A Journal of Literary History, Modern Language Review, Modern Language Studies, Representations, Review of English Studies: The Leading Journal of English Literature and the English Language, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, and Yearbook of English Studies publish substantial articles and often have information about conferences, job opportunities, calls for papers, and

Scholarly Journals

117

other news of importance to the academic scholar. Explicator publishes short text-based criticism on passages from prose and poetry. Notes and Queries, which started in 1849, publishes questions and answers to factual, rather than critical, inquiries. Genre titles of interest include Comparative Drama, Literature/Film Quarterly, Theatre Notebook: A Journal of the History and Technique of the British Theatre, and Theatre Research International. Two specialized journals with different approaches to the scholarly literature, and with titles descriptive of their contents, are Journal of the History of Ideas: The International Quarterly Devoted to Intellectual History and Emblematica: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Emblem Studies.

CONCLUSION The range of scholarly journals available for research within the Renaissance and early modern period is impressive, and, although the basic descriptions can all sound the same, each has a unique perspective and goals to accomplish. Take the time to acquaint yourself with the breadth of titles available and then make choices about which ones to follow closely. To keep abreast of the scholarship in this field, take advantage of the Web-based technology many publishers offer, such as RSS feeds and email delivery of tables of contents. Use MLAIB and ABELL to search widely on your specific interests. More and more journals are becoming available online, or are only available electronically, and Web-based technologies such as OpenURL and link resolvers allow libraries to interlink their electronic holdings with databases such as MLAIB and ABELL. Ulrichsweb.com, which incorporates the evaluative annotations from Magazines for Libraries, and MLA Directory of Periodicals provide directory information about a journal as well as brief descriptions. Book reviews published in most scholarly journals allow you to keep up with the equally impressive number of monographs published. The enormous world of scholarly output can be managed by using the journals most relevant to your research interests to keep you informed.

Chapter Six

Seventeenth-Century Periodicals

He ever leaves fome paffages doubtfull, as if they were fome more intimate fecrecies of ftate, clozing his fentence abruptly, —With hereafter you fhall heare more. Which words, I conceive, he onely ufeth as baites, to make the appetite of the Reader more eager in his next weeks purfuit for a more fatisfying labour. —“A Corranto-coiner,” from Richard Brathwaite, Whimzies: or, a nevv cast of characters, 1631.1

The Renaissance and early modern period represents a fascinating and tumultuous chapter in the history of British periodicals. Although literary scholars may be more likely to characterize the eighteenth century as the age of the periodical, especially given the canonical standing of the Tatler and Spectator and the important reviews published in the Gentleman’s Magazine and the London Magazine, the seventeenth century can claim the origin of the first British periodicals and is distinguished by the vital role periodicals played in early modern print culture. Periodicals were a new, unique, and relatively affordable way to present and disseminate information to the British public. The various periodicals published throughout the 1600s, from the earliest corantos and newsbooks to the partisan serials of the Civil War and the special-interest publications of the later century, provide insight into the political, social, and cultural world of seventeenth-century Britain and serve to broaden our concept of the literary to one that includes different forms of printed expression. This chapter begins with a brief historical overview that traces the development of these early periodicals and the political and social

118

Seventeenth-Century Periodicals

119

milieu within which they emerged, followed by a discussion of specific resources for conducting periodical research. The revolutionary changes that occurred at the beginning of the Renaissance and early modern period laid the foundation for the development of periodical publishing that took hold and flourished during the seventeenth century. Together, the Reformation and the expansion of printing were instrumental in creating a more literary, text-based society.2 In this climate, greater numbers of people learned to read and simultaneously created a demand for printed materials that would satisfy a broader spectrum of the population. Whereas books were the primary vehicle for religious texts, news became the provenance of the periodical. The printing of news was tightly controlled, however, and “royal permission had to be obtained before any news could be published.”3 The elite, including businessmen and diplomats, could bypass this restriction (to some extent) by hiring manuscript newsletter services. The earliest forms of printed news in the sixteenth century were news ballads that typically related a single event, such as “Strange and Wonderful Newes,” or government announcements issued as broadsides.4 Almanacs gave a summary of the previous year’s events and Elizabethan news quartos provided ongoing coverage of Henry of Navarre’s wars with the Catholic League in France from 1589 to 1593. The first extant periodical in English, however, is considered to be The new tydings out of Italie are not yet com, published on December 2, 1620, by Petrus Keerius and printed by George Veseler in Amsterdam. Through references in contemporary letters, it is thought that Thomas Archer also printed corantos in London during this time, but the first surviving coranto from England is Corante, or, newes from Italy, Germany, Hungarie, Spain and France, printed for “N. B.” on September 24, 1621. English corantos, from the French courante, or running, were single broadsheet publications with the text printed in two columns on both sides of the sheet. These were soon followed by newsbooks, eight- to twentyfour-page quarto publications that included an often detailed title page. Both corantos and newsbooks translated events from primarily Dutch, German, and other continental periodicals regarding developments in the Thirty Years’ War. Restricted to reporting only foreign news, this serial venture nevertheless caught on and in London was dominated by Nathaniel Butter, Nicholas Bourne, Thomas Archer, William Sheffard, and Bartholomew Downes, either working together in various combinations or separately. Unlike previous news ballads and pamphlets, these publications had numbers and/or dates that demonstrated an intention to continue publishing on a regular and ongoing basis, even if this was not always achieved.

120

Chapter Six

English corantos and newsbooks flourished (in various series) up until October of 1632 when the Star Chamber decree prohibited further publication: Upon Considerac[i]on had at the Board of the greate abuse in the printing & publishing of the ordinary Gazetts and Pamphletts of newes from forraigne p[ar]t[e]s, And upon significa[ti]on of his ma[jes]t[ie]s expresse pleasure and Com[m]aund for the p[re]sent suppressing of the same, It was thought fitt and hereby ordered that all printing and publishing of the same be accordingly supprest and inhibited. And that as well Nathaniell Butter & Nicholas Bourne Booke Sellers, under whose names the said Gazetts have been usually published . . . p[re]sume not from henceforth to print publish or sell any of the said Pampletts, &c, as they will answer the Contrary at theire p[e]rills.5

Butter and Bourne resumed publishing their newsbooks on December 20, 1638, when they received a royal warrant granting permission to do so; however, their partnership was finished by the end of 1639. They continued to publish their newsbooks separately for just a few years more, until public interest shifted from affairs on the continent to developments in England as events leading to the Civil War were under way.6 The outbreak of conflicts between Charles’s supporters and the Parliamentarians resulted in the public’s hunger for domestic news. When the Star Chamber was abolished in July 1641, the result was an explosion of new periodical publications. One of the first to meet this need, diarnals (after giorno, or daily) were weekly publications that presented parliamentary speeches, proclamations, and other news arranged by day. In fact, the very first newsbook of domestic news, The Heads of Severall Proceedings in this Present Parliament, later renamed A Perfect Duirnall of the Passages of Parliament, was printed at this time. In 1642 newsbooks called passages appeared; these attempted to provide factual, if still biased accounts, by publishing reports collected from a variety of sources. Arriving next on the scene, the mercuries were the first periodical publications to try unabashedly to sway public opinion with their “partisan commentary on the news.”7 There were mercuries for the king, such as Sir John Birkenhead’s Mercurius Aulicus (the Court Journal), Mercurius Melancholicus, and Mercurius Rusticus, and mercuries that supported Parliament, like Marchamont Nedham’s Mercurius Britanicus (the People’s Journal), Mercurius Civicus, and Mercurius Politicus. All of the Intelligences, Posts, Spies, and Scouts attest to the effort papers took during this period to promote their exclusive access to accurate information, and many added such reassuring phrases as “true information,” “impartially communicating,” “faithfully communicating,” and “to prevent misinformation” in their titles. The important role these periodicals played in shaping public opinion is underscored by the statement that “the ensuing Civil War was fought as fiercely with printed words as with muskets and cannon.”8

Seventeenth-Century Periodicals

121

In addition to periodicals concerned with news, there were also Interregnum publications that Sommerville classifies as “periodical pornography.”9 These periodicals reported on “cuckolded husbands, rapes, unnatural acts, farts, excrement, and pubic hair,”10 for example, and are exemplified by such titles as John Crouch’s Mercurius Fumigosus and Man in the Moon. By 1655, only two newsbooks were licensed to publish, the Publick Intelligencer and Mercurius Politicus. Some scholars estimate that more than three hundred serials were published between 1641 and 1655, but that most of these titles lasted for only one or a few issues, with approximately thirty-three continuing to publish for a year or longer.11 Thanks to the foresight of the seventeenthcentury bookseller, publisher, and collector George Thomason, many of these Civil War and Interregnum periodicals survive today. After the Restoration, Charles II sought to control the press again, and in 1662 the “Act for preventing the frequent Abuses in printing seditious, treasonable, and unlicensed Books and Pamphlets, and for regulating of Printing and Printing Presses,” also known as the Licensing Act, was issued. Sir Roger L’Estrange, who was acting simultaneously as an official licenser or censor, was granted an exclusive patent for “‘writing, printing and publishing all narratives or relations not exceeding two sheets of paper and all advertisements, mercuries, diurnals and books of public intelligence’ together with other forms of ephemeral printing.”12 L’Estrange’s weekly newsbooks, the Intelligencer and the Newes, like the earlier corantos, contained mostly translations of foreign news with limited coverage of domestic events, in addition to book ads and other advertisements. The first issue of the Intelligencer made L’Estrange’s antagonistic views on the public’s right to be informed clear when he stated that A Publick Mercury should never have My Vote; because I think it makes the Multitude too Familiar with the Actions and Counsels of their Superiours; too Pragmatical and Censorious, and gives them, not only an itch, but a kind of Colourable Right and License, to be Meddling with the Government.13

This attitude of approving government control of the news was manifested in the next official publication, the London Gazette, which began as the Oxford Gazette when the court was in Oxford to escape the plague in November 1665. Regarded as the first English newspaper primarily because of its format, the London Gazette was printed on a single sheet of paper and presented the news in two columns. Like L’Estrange’s periodicals, the London Gazette printed the government’s version of foreign news; the only domestic news consisted of royal proclamations, executions, and official announcements, and even the Great Fire of London in 1666 was only briefly mentioned. Unlike previous periodicals that were associated with an authorial personality,

122

Chapter Six

such as the authors Nedham, Muddiman, and L’Estrange, the Gazette was written by anonymous government clerks. The role of the London Gazette was to project “the image of a nation at peace with itself again after the upheaval of the Civil War and the uncertainties of the Interregnum; but a nation vigilant against threats to its stability from without or within . . . as evidenced from the number of Loyal Addresses printed in the Gazette, a nation united in loyalty to its king and government.”14 The struggle between the public’s desire for unfiltered news, and the government’s need to construct and control information, continued back and forth well into the eighteenth century. The introduction of coffee houses in the 1650s and their continued popularity as places to read and discuss current issues served to sustain and promote interest in periodical publications throughout the rest of the century. Coffee houses were frequented by diverse members of society, including women, and often catered to a specific clientele. Thus the Royal Society of London was associated with Garraway’s, and poets and authors with Duke’s and Will’s; the Whigs claimed the Grecian; the Tories went to the Cocoa Tree; and merchants and insurance brokers visited the coffee houses around the Royal Exchange.15 These coffee houses subscribed to many kinds of periodicals, which they made available to their customers. After the Restoration, a typical selection of coffee house news publications might include the daily broadside list of imports, London, Imported; the weekly Prices of Merchandise in London; advertising papers such as Mercurius Civicus, London Mercury, and City Mercury; the London Bills of Mortality; public executions and punishment schedules; and Mercurius Librarius, which featured a quarterly list of new books, in addition to the London Gazette.16 In 1665 the earliest English society publication appeared when Henry Oldenburg, the secretary of the Royal Society of London for the Promotion of Natural Knowledge, began printing the most important scientific discoveries in a monthly periodical, Philosophical Transactions, in order to help society members keep informed and to promote scientific knowledge. The Popish Plot of 1678, the unintended lapse of the Licensing Act in 1679 when Parliament was dissolved, and the creation of the Penny Post in 1680 (which increased distribution) are credited with the rise of numerous political newspapers, both those for the Whigs such as Weekly Pacquet of Advice from Rome, or, The History of Popery, Domestick Intelligence, or News Both From City and Country and Smith’s Protestant Intelligence: Domestick and Foreign, and Tory publications like Observator in Dialogue, Heraclitus Ridens, and Loyal London Mercury.17 When the Licensing Act was reenacted by Parliament in 1685, the press was curbed once again. James II briefly sponsored an official newspaper, Publick Occurances Truely Stated, which printed domestic news, but it was the London Gazette that announced

Seventeenth-Century Periodicals

123

James’s withdrawal in its December 10, 1688 issue and reported the final transfer of power to the Prince and Princess of Orange on February 11, 1689.18 Newspapers, whether official or unlicensed, continued to affect and reflect the political climate of the times. The last decade of the seventeenth century witnessed the establishment of monthly periodicals, including early prototypes of eighteenth-century review and essay journals. Some of these publications were scholarly in nature, such as the short-lived Universal Historical Biblioteque: or, An Account of most of the Considerable Books Printed in all Languages, which provided abstracts of books in Latin, Dutch, French, and Italian, followed by the similar Works of the Learned, or An Historical Account and Impartial Judgment of Books newly printed, both Foreign and Domestic, for which editor Jean de la Crose excluded works of fiction to focus on philosophical and other serious works, and The Compleat Library: Or, News for the Ingenious, which reviewed philology, philosophy, ethics, and history.19 Appealing to a broader audience, John Dunton’s Athenian Mercury aimed to educate its readers by answering their questions on a range of subjects, including “Divinity, Poetry, Metaphysicks, Physicks, Mathematicks, History, Love, Politicks, Oeconomicks . . . Visions and Revelations.”20 Although many of the questions did address religion, natural science, medicine, and other subjects, Helen Berry’s analysis of gender-related questions in the Athenian Mercury revealed that a large percentage of questions were concerned with courtship, marriage, sexual behavior, adultery, and general conduct.21 Modeled after the Athenian Mercury and designed specifically for a female audience, the Ladies Mercury ran for just four issues in 1693. Publications like the Athenian Mercury reflected a growing readership, usually middle class and primarily urban, that was interested in self-improvement through reading.22 Catering to that need, as well as to entertain, Peter Anthony Motteux’s Gentleman’s Journal; Or, The Monthly Magazine was a cultural miscellany of news, fiction, poetry, music, history, philosophy, and translations. In print from 1692 to 1694, the Gentleman’s Journal is thought to have been a predecessor of the popular eighteenth-century miscellany, the Gentleman’s Magazine.23 Finally, paving the way perhaps for the social fiction of the eighteenth century, Edward Ward’s London Spy, published in November 1698, featured reports from a fictional countryman observing London and its inhabitants for the first time. The development of novelistic realism in the next century grew, in part, out of “the social and physical world that had been made literary by periodical publications.”24 Seventeenth-century periodicals mirrored the changing needs, motivations, concerns, and desires of society and were instrumental in shaping both an early modern national and literary identity.

124

Chapter Six

Studying seventeenth-century periodicals can be an exhilarating and frustrating endeavor. In the preface to British Newspapers and Periodicals 1641–1700, Nelson and Seccombe outline many of the specific problems inherent to periodical research, in particular the numerous title changes, short print runs, pirated editions, inconsistent numbering, and variations in dating (including Old Style or Lady Day and New Style) that make exploring this print medium so challenging. For a discussion about differences in the Julian and Gregorian calendars and dating practices, see chapter 2. Most of the reference books addressed below have changed Old Style volume or issue dates to follow the Gregorian calendar practice of starting the new year on January 1 rather than March 25. The definition of periodicals in this time period is very fluid but is based primarily on a stated or inferred intention to continue publishing the periodical indefinitely, and the presence of numbers and/or dates. Be sure to consult the introductory material in each reference source to determine criteria for inclusion. The rest of this chapter will describe the major digital, microform, and print reference sources that we hope will not only enable you to tackle this remarkable inheritance of seventeenth-century print culture with confidence, but will also encourage you to enjoy the discovery process.

BIBLIOGRAPHIES AND RECENT STUDIES Black, Jeremy. The English Press, 1621–1861. Thrupp, Stroud, Gloucestershire, UK: Sutton, 2001. Clarke, Bob. From Grub Street to Fleet Street: An Illustrated History of English Newspapers to 1899. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004. Frank, Joseph. The Beginnings of the English Newspaper 1620–1660. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961. Linton, David, and Ray Boston, eds. The Newspaper Press in Britain: An Annotated Bibliography. London: Mansell, 1987. Raymond, Joad. The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks, 1641–1649. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Sommerville, C. John. The News Revolution in England: Cultural Dynamics of Daily Information. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Weed, Katherine Kirtley, and Richmond Pugh Bond. Studies of British Newspapers and Periodicals from Their Beginning to 1800: A Bibliography. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1946.

Although digital projects have perhaps generated a renewed interest in early modern periodicals, researchers will find a solid foundation of previous studies devoted to investigating periodicals of the seventeenth and eighteenth

Seventeenth-Century Periodicals

125

centuries. A few older bibliographies, such as those by Weed and Bond and Linton and Boston, and the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (described in a later section) will guide you to these earlier works. Studies of British Newspapers and Periodicals from Their Beginning to 1800: A Bibliography by Katherine Kirtley Weed and Richmond Pugh Bond appeared as an extra series issue of Studies in Philology in 1946. This bibliography records 2,099 books and journal articles concerned with early periodicals that were published before 1945, arranged by the following categories: “Bibliographies and Bibliographical Studies,” “Beginnings of the Newspaper: Corantos, Newsbooks, Newsletters,” “General Studies,” “Individual Newspapers and Periodicals,” “Editors, Authors, and Publishers,” “Towns and Counties,” “Special Subjects,” “Newspapers and Periodicals in Europe,” and “Newspapers and Periodicals in America.” Although more than sixty years old, this bibliography is still considered worthwhile for finding pre-1941 studies about seventeenth- and eighteenth-century periodicals.25 The Newspaper Press in Britain: An Annotated Bibliography, edited by David Linton and Ray Boston, takes a broad approach to the subject by beginning with studies of sixteenth-century English news accounts and continuing through studies of twentieth-century British papers published before 1986. The 2,909 entries are arranged alphabetically by author, with most but not all of the books, journal articles, dissertations, or theses described typically in one to three sentences, thus making it difficult to identify those works specifically about seventeenth-century periodicals. A chronology of British newspaper history from the establishment of Caxton’s printing press in 1476 to 1986, and a location list for individual figures’ papers and newspaper archives, conclude the bibliography. Researchers may also want to consult Joseph Frank’s excellent study, The Beginnings of the English Newspaper 1620–1660, which provides a detailed chronological overview of early-seventeenth-century periodicals with several appendixes, including one on printed attacks on journals and journalists that appeared between 1625 and 1632, in addition to a bibliography and an index of seventeenth-century newspapers. More recent works that may be of interest are The News Revolution in England: Cultural Dynamics of Daily Information by C. John Sommerville, The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks 1641–1649 by Joad Raymond, The English Press 1621–1861 by Jeremy Black, and From Grub Street to Fleet Street: An Illustrated History of English Newspapers to 1899 by Bob Clarke, to name a few general studies. Additional books and journal articles can be identified by searching your library catalog, MLA International Bibliography, and Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature. Some useful Library of Congress subject headings are English newspapers—Great Britain—History, English

126

Chapter Six

newspapers—History—17th century, Journalism—Great Britain—History— 17th century, and English periodicals—History.

DIGITAL COLLECTIONS British Periodicals. ProQuest/Chadwyck-Healey. britishperiodicals.chadwyck.com. Early English Books Online. ProQuest/Chadwyck-Healey. eebo.chadwyck.com. Eighteenth Century Journals: A Portal to Newspapers and Periodicals, c1685–1815. Adam Matthew Digital. www.18thcjournals.amdigital.co.uk/. London Spy Compleat, In Eighteen-Parts. In Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Gale Cengage Learning. www.gale.cengage.com. Philosophical Transactions. JSTOR. www.jstor.org. The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674–1913. Old Bailey Proceedings Online. www.oldbaileyonline.org. 17th and 18th Century Burney Collection Newspapers. Gale Cengage Learning. gale .cengage.co.uk/britishlibrarynewspapers/.

Many new and ongoing digitization projects have opened up the periodical literature of the early modern period to scholars in unprecedented ways. It wasn’t long ago that periodicals from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were available for study only via microfilm and archival collections, with their limited indexing, or in print facsimiles. With the advent of digitized periodical collections, however, scholars now are able to identify relevant periodical literature through multiple points of access, including the ability to search for topic keywords across author, title, and (sometimes) imprint fields, and in some cases, are even able to access the full text of the periodicals themselves. No longer as difficult to investigate, seventeenth-century periodical literature is emerging as a rich, untapped resource that can enhance our understanding of the literary, cultural, and social context of the period. Scholars interested in this opportunity are fortunate to have exceptional access to the periodical literature of the early and mid-seventeenth century through Early English Books Online (EEBO). When completed this database, also discussed in chapter 11, will feature digitized versions of all the printed material listed in Pollard and Redgrave’s A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475–1640 (STC) and in Wing’s Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and British America, and of English Books Printed in Other Countries, 1641–1700, in addition to books, broadsides, pamphlets, manuscripts, and periodicals from the Thomason Tracts and Early English Books Tract Supplement collections. Since the periodicals represented in EEBO are drawn exclusively from Pollard and Redgrave’s STC and the Thomason Tracts (which spans the years between 1641 and 1663;

Seventeenth-Century Periodicals

127

Wing only includes annuals), the collection is strongest in early corantos, newsbooks, and Civil War through Interregnum (1650s) publications. All of the periodicals are integrated into the database and can be retrieved from any relevant searches in EEBO. However, you can also search only for periodicals through the “Periodicals Search” option; this enables you to search by keywords, title keywords, author or editor, imprint, bibliographic number (including Dahl and Nelson and Seccombe numbers explained later), reel position, and six different types of illustration, and to limit your search by date (the default is set from December 2, 1620 to March 12, 1663, which represents the earliest coranto in the database to the latest publication in Thomason). Since printers from this period frequently used certain letters interchangeably, savvy researchers know to select the typographical variants box in order to account for common spelling variants, such as v and u; i, j, and y; w and uu; and s and f in title words. Corantos and newsbooks have been indexed differently from the other periodical content and therefore can be searched in two ways; by individual issue (with its potentially unique title and date) and also by the general series record that groups together periodicals in serial order by date of issue. The periodical series found in the EEBO bibliographic records are those described by Folke Dahl in his work, A Bibliography of English Corantos and Periodical Newsbooks 1620–1642 (presented in a later section). Both individual issue and series records are included in the periodicals search. Examples of these different records are illustrated in figures 6.1 and 6.2 for the newsbook

Figure 6.1. Modified EEBO record for Briefe abstracts out of diuerse letters of trust newsbook. Source: Early English Books Online, ProQuest/Chadwyck-Healey.

128

Chapter Six

Figure 6.2. Modified EEBO record for Newsbooks First Series. Source: Early English Books Online, ProQuest/ Chadwyck-Healey.

titled Briefe abstracts out of diuerse letters of trust Relating the newes of this present weeke, out of Persia, Egypt, Babylon, Barbary, Turkey, Italy, Spaine, Germanie, Silesia, France, and the Low Countries, with diuers passages from the sea. The first record is for the individual issue, which gives the date, full title, and imprint, and indicates the series to which this newsbook belongs, Newsbooks First Series: Printed for Nathaniel Butter. Nicholas Bourne, Thomas Archer, William Sheffard and Bartholomew Downes; 15 Oct. 1622–2 Oct. 1623. Additional important information such as the publication frequency, bibliographic numbers from the STC and Dahl, and notes regarding the microfilm and original are also presented. As can be seen in this example, many of the periodical titles can be quite long and descriptive, so keyword searches of the title provide fairly good access to the contents, even though searching the full text of these publications isn’t yet possible. Searching for the names of particular individuals, countries, cities, and subjects, such as battles and companies like the East India Company, can be quite fruitful. Clicking on the corresponding series titles will retrieve eight individual issues associated with the Newsbooks First Series, as well as the series record. Figure 6.2 shows this record for Newsbooks First Series and explains that this was a series of fifty newsbooks and that the STC run is incomplete. Links to the eight issues available in EEBO are listed by issue number and

Seventeenth-Century Periodicals

129

date. Researchers interested in identifying the missing issues should consult Dahl’s bibliography. Records for other periodicals in EEBO, primarily those from the Thomason Tracts collection such as the one for Mercurius Civicus, Londons Intelligencer, or, Truth really imparted from thence to the whole kingdome to prevent misinformation, present information on additional titles, imprints, publishers, editors, printers (if known), bibliographic numbers, publication frequency, issue dates, any numbering peculiarities, a notes field, and links to the images for all available. As an alternative to searching, periodical content in EEBO may also be browsed separately. The “Periodicals Browse” page facilitates a chronological review by year and month from December 1620 to 1720, with document images available to date for titles published through 1663; periodicals can also be browsed alphabetically by title. Those researchers scanning the periodicals by date will note a distinct gap between 1632 and 1638 when the Star Chamber decree of October 17, 1632, prohibited any further publication of foreign newsbooks. The 395 periodicals in the Thomason Tracts collection can be browsed as they were collected by volume and tract number, browsed by date and title with other periodicals, or reviewed separately by title at eebo.chadwyck.com/about/ped_list.htm. All in all, EEBO is a powerful tool for searching and accessing a broad range of periodical titles from their beginnings in the early seventeenth century through the early Restoration. Even though EEBO does not provide full-text searching of the collection (unless your institution is a Text Creation Partnership member), nevertheless, the ability to search by keyword across several fields opens up these early periodicals to researchers in new and exciting ways, allowing more diversified subject access than was possible before. By featuring digital reproductions of early-seventeenth-century periodicals, EEBO is making a significant contribution to the study of this unique aspect of print culture. The 17th and 18th Century Burney Collection Newspapers, a joint venture of the British Library and Gale Cengage Learning, digitizes the impressive collection of Reverend Dr. Charles Burney, as well as other contemporary periodicals added over the years to the collection by the British Library. Like EEBO, this database has the potential to radically impact the nature of research on the development of early modern periodicals. Now scholars can examine the full text of nearly three hundred newspapers, newsbooks, and other serials from throughout the seventeenth century, beginning with the corantos in the 1620s up through the various Posts published at the end of the century. More than just periodicals, the database also includes selected monographs, pamphlets, and broadsides that fall within a wide range of subjects. The “Advanced Search” interface features keyword searching of the entire

130

Chapter Six

document or specific fields (e.g., document or publication title, date, day of the week) and can be limited to publication section, such as news, advertising, business news, and arts and sports (typically not sections available until the 1670s), publication place, or title. Be aware that news is typically the only section available until the 1660s, although there are exceptions. A search for chocolate or coffee in the entire document, for example, limited to periodicals published before 1700, retrieves an early classified ad from the Mercurius Publicus in 1663 announcing the sale of both these commodities at the coffee house in Exchange Alley, as well as tobacco, tea, and Turkish sherberts, “of Lemons, Rofes, and Violets perfumed” (Mercurius Publicus Comprising the Sum of Forraign Intelligence [London, England], Thursday, March 12, 1663; issue 11). Search terms are highlighted within the text, and the articles can be viewed individually or placed within the context of the journal page, which can be enlarged for easier reading. The periodicals may be browsed by title or place of publication, and individual issues can be browsed from the search results screen. Setting fuzzy searching capabilities to high, medium, low, and none allow for the variants in period spelling and different degrees of spelling accuracy from near to very broad matches. The “Help” menu describes the differences and gives examples. A separate “Publication Search” screen allows a title or partial title search to be limited by date, place of publication, or format, including broadside, form, manuscript, monograph, newsbook, newspaper, pamphlet, or serial. If you want to retrieve only pamphlets from the seventeenth century, for example, you can type in ** in the publication title field, and limit the search to titles published prior to 1700. The “Topic Guide” provides a good overview of early English periodical history, a bibliography of books related to the entire Burney collection, a timeline of events from 1509 to 1818, and three brief essays about early newspapers and the law, literature, and slavery and abolition. For scholars without access to the online database, the journals are available in the microfilm collection Early English Newspapers described later. Another promising digital project is British Periodicals, currently available from ProQuest in two separate collections. British Periodicals Collection I is based on the microfilm collection Early British Periodicals (discussed in the next section) and contains 169 titles published between 1681 and 1920. Five seventeenth-century periodicals are included in the collection and four of them are available to date online. British Periodicals II combines the microfilm collections English Literary Periodicals and British Periodicals in the Creative Arts (also discussed in the next section) to provide access to more than three hundred titles from the late seventeenth through early twentieth centuries, with approximately twenty-one periodicals from the seventeenth century that appeared in the last two decades of that century. The collection

Seventeenth-Century Periodicals

131

may be searched by keywords in select fields (citations, article title, excerpts, and full text), as well as by author, journal title, journal editor, and subject, and limited by publication date, frequency, or place, or to specific parts of the periodical (e.g., advertisements, article, poems). Although British Periodicals doesn’t comprise as many seventeenth-century periodicals as the 17th and 18th Century Burney Collection Newspapers and EEBO, it does feature many valuable titles for which the full text is searchable, with the images available in either high resolution bitonal or greyscale versions. Designed purposefully to complement rather than overlap with EEBO, Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), and the microfilm collection Early English Newspapers, Eighteenth Century Journals: A Portal to Newspapers and Periodicals, c1685–1815 is likewise presented in two collections. Eighteenth Century Journals I features ninety-five periodicals from the Hope Collection at the Bodleian Library published between 1693 and 1799, also available as the microfilm collection Eighteenth Century Journals. Eighteenth Century Journals II is based on the periodical collections at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, with additional recent acquisitions rounding out the collection. To date, four seventeenth-century titles are represented in both collections, Merlinus Redivivus: Being an Almanack for the Year of our Redemption, 1683, the Ladies Mercury (1693), the first volume of History of the Works of the Learned (1699–1703), and Weekly Pacquet of Advice from Rome; or, the History of Popery (1680–1683). The “Advanced Search” page enables full-text keyword searching of the journals and their accompanying metadata, with options for word stemming, proximity specifications, and phrase searching, in addition to limiting by date, journal title, place of publication (e.g., cities in England, Ireland, and Scotland), and either the Bodleian or Harry Ransom collection. Search results are displayed first by journal title and then within each specific journal. The journal results are given at both the image and document level, first for images where the term or terms are present on a single page, and then by documents, where at least one of the terms is included. These image or document results can then be viewed either as an HTML transcription of the original or as a JPEG of the original document; however, the search terms will only be highlighted in the transcription. It is also possible to view the transcription and original sideby-side in separate windows. A keyword search on love and fortune, limited to the Ladies Mercury, for example, returns images for several questions and answers in the journal concerned with the happy or unhappy conjunction of these two concepts. Figure 6.3 illustrates the results page for this search and the arrangement by image and document level. The journals in both collections can be browsed by title, date, place of publication, library collection, or by either section of the portal. Individual titles

132

Chapter Six

Figure 6.3. Modified record for The Ladies Mercury, with search results highlighted. Source: Eighteenth Century Journals, Adam Matthew.

can be reviewed by volume and issue either in the original or the transcript text; the entire run may also be downloaded as a PDF document. Brief essays by Jeremy Black introduce both collections, and an interactive chronology enables you to display selected events from the arts, print culture, literature, British politics, religion and philosophy, and science and industry for years from 1685 up to the early nineteenth century. Eighteenth Century Journals is another impressive example of the kind of digital projects that are revolutionizing the way scholars can access and investigate the early journal literature. Some individual seventeenth-century periodicals are offered either in subscription databases or for free on the Web. These titles will probably increase in number as more digitizing projects get under way. One example is the notable early scientific journal Philosophical Transactions, published by the Royal Society of London, which is available full text in JSTOR for the years 1665–1678 and 1683–1775. This digital version of Philosophical Transactions is based on the 1963 reprint by Johnson Reprint Corporation and Kraus Reprint Corporation. Philosophical Transactions can be searched by keyword in the full text, or in the author and title fields, and limited by date range, as well as browsed by volume. If your institution subscribes to Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), you will be able to access the London Spy in its compiled form, the London Spy Compleat, in Eighteen-Parts, which was printed in 1703. Researchers interested in early modern criminal trials will want to explore the Proceedings of the Old Bailey 1674–1913 website as it features full-text searching of the published trials, which were issued under various titles, with the most standard title being The Proceedings of the King’s Commission of the Peace and Oyer and Terminer, and Gaol-Delivery of New-

Seventeenth-Century Periodicals

133

gate, held for the City of London and the County of Middlesex, at Justice-Hall, in the Old Bailey. These proceedings may be browsed by date from 1674 to 1834, or searched by keyword and multiple fields, including defendant or victim’s surname, occupation, age, or gender; crime categories such as theft, deception, or sexual offenses; specific criminal acts (e.g., bankruptcy, coining, forgery, keeping a brothel, murder, pickpocketing, piracy, religious offenses, treason, vagabonding); verdict; punishment (e.g., branding, death, pardoned, whipping, transportation); and date of criminal offense, among other options. A brief introductory essay covers the publishing history of the Old Bailey proceedings and the website is rich with contextual material, including a glossary of judicial and historical terms and a bibliography.

MICROFILM COLLECTIONS Cox, Susan M., and Janice L. Budeit. Early English Newspapers: Bibliography and Guide to the Microfilm Collection. Woodbridge, CT: Research Publications, 1983. Early British Periodicals. 902 microfilm reels. Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms International, 1970–1979. Early English Books, 1475–1640. Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms, 1938–. Early English Books, 1475–1640, Selected from Pollard and Redgrave’s Short-Title Catalogue: A Guide to the Microfilm Collection. Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms International, 1966–. The Early English Newspapers, Burney Collection. 1,207 microfilm reels. New Haven, CT: Research Publications, 1978. English Literary Periodicals. 929 microfilm reels. Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms, 1951–1977. English Short Title Catalogue, 1473–1800. estc.bl.uk. Hoornstra, Jean, and Grace Puravs, eds. A Guide to the Early British Periodicals Collection on Microfilm with Title, Subject, Editor, and Reel Number Indexes. Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms International, 1980. Irish Newspapers in Dublin Libraries, 1685–1754. 23 microfilm reels. Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms, 1950–1953. Irish Newspapers Prior to 1750 in Dublin Libraries. Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms, 1950. Puravs, Grace, Kathy L. Kavanagh, and Vicki Smith, eds. Accessing English Literary Periodicals: A Guide to the Microfilm Collection with Title, Subject, Editor, and Reel Number Indexes. Ann Arbor: MI: University Microfilms International, 1981. Thomason Tracts. 256 microfilm reels. Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms International, 1977–1980. The Thomason Tracts, 1640–1661: An Index to the Microfilm Edition of the Thomason Collection of the British Library. 2 vols. Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms International, 1980 or 1977–.

134

Chapter Six

Several major microfilm collections enable researchers to view the content of seventeenth-century periodicals. As noted in the previous section, many of these collections have been converted or are in the process of conversion to digital format. This section will describe six collections, Early English Books, Thomason Tracts, Early Literary Periodicals, Early British Periodicals, Early English Newspapers, and Irish Newspapers in Dublin Libraries, but other potentially relevant collections may be found by consulting the microform reference books and guides described in chapter 11. You can request microfilm reels for specific titles or periodical collections through interlibrary loan, if they are not available at your own institution. Although microfilm has a reputation for being difficult, using microfilm is easier now that many libraries own digitizing microform readers that make it possible to scan and save images. Whether your library subscribes to any of the online digital databases that feature periodical content or not, it is possible that at some point a study of early periodicals will involve using a microfilm collection, so be sure to review chapter 11 for tips about getting the most from this medium. The primary microfilm collection for the early seventeenth century is Early English Books, 1475–1640 (EEBI), which reproduces almost all of the 26,500 books, periodicals, and printed material contained in Pollard and Redgrave’s Short-Title Catalogue and the revised STC (which added an additional ten thousand entries). Many early corantos and newsbooks are represented in the collection, including several but not all series titles described in Dahl’s A Bibliography of English Corantos and Periodical Newsbooks, 1620–1642. Although there is a print guide to the collection, Early English Books, 1475– 1640, Selected from Pollard and Redgrave’s Short-Title Catalogue: A Guide to the Microfilm Collection, researchers may prefer to use the online English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) to identify individual titles and corresponding microfilm reel numbers and positions. The first unit of Early English Books was issued in 1938, and as of December 2008, eighty-three units have been released, with an anticipated schedule of one additional unit per year (as posted on the website, September 2009). To date, most of those microfilm units have been digitized and are available in the subscription database EEBO. According to the “About EEBO” section of the website, UMI estimates that it will take another five to ten years to finish microfilming every title in both Pollard and Redgrave’s STC and Wing’s STC in order to complete the project. The Thomason Tracts is named for George Thomason, a London bookseller and publisher who actively collected 22,255 books, pamphlets, newspapers, and manuscripts during the years 1640 to 1663. His original collection, preserved intact and purchased by King George III, was presented to the British Museum in 1761. The microfilm covers materials published in England and on the Continent for the years 1640–1661. Scholars interested

Seventeenth-Century Periodicals

135

in seventeenth-century periodical literature are fortunate that 395 titles and more than 7,600 issues are featured. Some titles are represented by single issues, and others contain more complete runs. This remarkable collection ranges from periodicals published during the Civil Wars, such as A perfect diary of passages of the Kings army, and their severall fights, treaties, and actions; with the Parliaments forces under the command of the Lord Fairfax and Mercurius anti-mercurius. Impartially communicating truth, correcting falsehood, reproving the wilfull, pittying the ignorant, and opposing all false and scandalous aspersions unjustly cast upon the two honourable Houses of Parliament, to titles of the Commonwealth era, such as Mercurius Heraclitus, or, The weeping philosopher, sadly bemoaning the distractions of the times communicating true news from wet eyes, sad hearts, and perplexed minds, concerning the agrievances [sic] of the people. Nelson and Seccombe caution in their preface, however, that the film is sometimes illegible.26 The finding aid, The Thomason Tracts, 1640–1661: An Index to the Microfilm Edition of the Thomason Collection of the British Library, is arranged in two parts; the first indexes the Thomason Tracts and the second is a cross-index to Wing’s STC. The complete Thomason Tracts collection is available online as part of EEBO. Beginning with titles from the later seventeenth century, English Literary Periodicals features 341 essay journals, magazines, reviews, and miscellanies published between 1681 and 1914. The collection is not strictly limited to a narrow definition of the literary, but also encompasses periodicals concerned with theater, politics, religion, history, economics, and social issues, among other subjects. Approximately twenty-one titles from the seventeenth century are available, including titles such as Heraclitus Ridens: or, A discourse between jest and earnest, where many a true word is spoken in opposition to all libellers against the government; The Gentleman’s journal: or The monthly miscellany. By way of letter to a gentleman in the country. Consisting of news, history, philosophy, poetry, musick, translations, &c.; The Athenian gazette, resolving weekly all the most nice and curious questions propos’d by the ingenious; and The Works of the learned, or An historical account and impartial judgment of books newly printed, both foreign and domestick. English Literary Periodicals is based upon a bibliography compiled by Richmond Bond at the University of North Carolina; Bond worked with a committee of scholars and UMI to recommend titles for the collection. The print guide is Accessing English Literary Periodicals: A Guide to the Microfilm Collection with Title, Subject, Editor, and Reel Number Indexes. The subject index to the collection is arranged alphabetically by Library of Congress subject headings that were assigned to the individual titles when cataloged, such as Dialogues, English and Great Britain—Politics and

136

Chapter Six

Government—1660–1688 for Heraclitus Ridens, or London (England)—Social Life and Customs and Satire, English for the London Spy. The database British Periodicals Collection II from ProQuest provides full-text access to all of the titles in English Literary Periodicals, as well as to those in the microfilm collection British Periodicals in the Creative Arts, which covers the later eighteenth through early twentieth centuries (1770–1930). Designed to complement and offer broader subject coverage than English Literary Periodicals, Early British Periodicals presents 169 titles published between 1681 and 1921, ranging from literary reviews to special-interest magazines to periodicals concerned with religion, slavery, economics, philosophy, history, the fine arts, social sciences, and science. Daniel Fader at the University of Michigan selected titles for the collection, with the goal of providing alternative access to those titles that were difficult to find in American libraries. Although Early British Periodicals is strongest in eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury periodicals, the microfilm collection does include five seventeenthcentury titles: the Observator, in dialogue; Weekly memorials for the ingenious: or, An account of books lately set forth in several languages; Momus Ridens: or, Comical reports on the publick reports; the Weekly Lampoon: or, Satyrical reflections on the last weeks publick news letters and Observator; and the Gentleman’s Journal: or the Monthly miscellany. To date, four of these titles are available in the online British Periodicals Collection I. The finding aid to the collection is titled A Guide to the Early British Periodicals Collection on Microfilm with Title, Subject, Editor, and Reel Number Indexes. Early English Newspapers, Burney Collection is based upon two significant collections of early periodicals, that of the Reverend Dr. Charles Burney, which was purchased by the British Museum in 1818, and that of John Nichols, whose collection was declined by the British Museum in 1812 but which was later purchased by the Bodleian Library at Oxford University in 1865. Burney’s collection contained seven hundred volumes of periodicals from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries (up to 1817), including parliamentary papers from 1603, corantos, diurnals, newsbooks, and laterseventeenth-century titles, in addition to printed and manuscript editions of classical authors and material relating to the history of English theater. Nichols’s collection focused on periodicals published in London from 1672 to 1737 and comprised more than one thousand items. Many of the papers contained in both collections were originally owned by Narcissus Luttrell, who collected periodicals during the 1680s and 1690s, and whose notes can be seen on some of the originals and microfilmed copies. The Early English Newspapers microforms cover these two collections, as well as selected nineteenth-century periodicals, to provide access to more than 1,300 titles. Of this number, more than 350 titles are from the seventeenth century, and range from

Seventeenth-Century Periodicals

137

early corantos like Weekly newes, from forraine parts (1623) to mid-century publications like the Parliament Scout: communicating his intelligence to the kingdome (1643–1645) and the London Gazette (1666–1788) to special publications like the collection of real estate, employment, and book advertisements in the City Mercury: from the office at the Royal Exchange (1681), those concerned with commerce such as A collection for improvement of husbandry and trade (1692–1697), or the satirical commentary on London life, the London Spy (1698–1700), which appeared toward the close of the century. Many of the seventeenth-century titles with short runs are grouped together into six reels labeled A through F. To find the location for a specific title, use the print guide, Early English Newspapers: Bibliography and Guide to the Microfilm Collection, or the online guide from Primary Source Media (microformguides .gale.com/BrowseGuide.asp?colldocid=1003000&Page=1). Focusing on periodicals published only in Ireland, Irish Newspapers in Dublin Libraries, 1685–1754 comprises more than fifty titles held in the National Library of Ireland, the Royal Irish Academy Library, the Dublin City Libraries, and the Library of Trinity College, Dublin. Only three seventeenth-century periodicals are part of the collection: the News-Letter (1685), the Dublin Intelligence (1690–1693, also in Early English Newspapers), and the Flying Post: or, the post-master (1699–1712). The print index, Irish Newspapers Prior to 1750 in Dublin Libraries, contains the first twenty-two reels. The contents of the remaining two are listed at the beginning of each reel. Irish Newspapers in Dublin Libraries is a University Microfilms International title, so perhaps it will be digitized in the future. An alternative to using the print finding aids to identify corresponding microfilm reel numbers for titles in these collections is to search for periodical titles in the English Short Title Catalogue. This online bibliographic database, offered without charge by the British Library and described fully in chapter 4, at present covers about five thousand newspapers and other serials published before 1801, in addition to every item listed in Pollard and Redgrave and Wing’s Short-Title Catalogues. The ESTC can be searched by periodical title, author name (including printers, publishers, and editors), place of publication, publisher, subject, genre heading (e.g., newspapers, newsbooks, periodicals), and keywords. If you are looking for a specific periodical, for example, the London Spy, you can search by title, add the keyword microfilm, and enter periodicals or newspapers in the genre field. The ESTC record for this periodical indicates in the “Surrogates” field that it is available in Early English Newspapers, unit 24, reel 1173 and in Early English Periodicals, reel 128, as well as in Early English Books Tract Supplement. Searching the ESTC by microfilm collection title can also give you an approximate representation of titles included in the collection. For example, searching on the exact phrase

138

Chapter Six

Thomason Tracts and entering for genre periodicals or newspapers retrieves 371 records, rather than all 395 periodical titles. The print finding aids must still be regarded as the authoritative guides to the microfilm collections, but the ESTC can be used for preliminary research, or in selected cases.

IDENTIFYING PERIODICALS Balay, Robert. Early Periodical Indexes: Bibliographies and Indexes of Literature Published in Periodicals before 1900. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2000. Crane, R. S., and F. B. Kaye. A Census of British Newspapers and Periodicals, 1620–1800. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1927. Dahl, Folke. A Bibliography of English Corantos and Periodical Newsbooks, 1620– 1642. London: Bibliographical Society, 1952. English Short Title Catalogue, 1473–1800. British Library. estc.bl.uk. Nelson, Carolyn, and Matthew Seccombe, comps. British Newspapers and Periodicals, 1641–1700: A Short-Title Catalogue of Serials Printed in England, Scotland, Ireland, and British America: With a Checklist of Serials Printed 1701–March 1702 and Chronological, Geographical, Foreign Language, Subject, Publisher, and Editor Indexes 1641–1702. New York: Modern Language Association, 1987. Stewart, James D., Muriel E. Hammond, and Erwin Saenger, eds. British Union Catalogue of Periodicals. 4 vols. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1968. Sullivan, Alvin, ed. British Literary Magazines. Vol.1, The Augustan Age and the Age of Johnson, 1698–1788. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983. Titus, Edna Brown, ed. Union List of Serials in Libraries of the United States and Canada. 3rd ed. 5 vols. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1965. Watson, George, ed. The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature. 2nd ed. Vol. 1, 600–1660. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974. ———, ed. The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature. 2nd ed. Vol. 2, 1660–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971. WorldCat. OCLC. www.oclc.org/firstsearch/.

Several sources described in this section are the foundation upon which the microform and digital collections are based. Since the periodicals reproduced in digital or microform format cannot represent all titles published in the seventeenth century, the sources discussed here will enable you to identify titles beyond those collections and also to find libraries where the original periodicals may be consulted. That being said, not any one source will provide a comprehensive listing of all periodicals published in the seventeenth century, and only a few feature indexing by subject. Therefore it may be necessary to peruse several different sources in order to identify the most relevant periodicals for a specific project.

Seventeenth-Century Periodicals

139

Much careful and diligent scholarship of the twentieth century produced bibliographic guides to early periodicals that continue to influence and shape investigations of periodicals today. One such contribution is Folke Dahl’s A Bibliography of English Corantos and Periodical Newsbooks, 1620–1642. Published in 1952 for the Bibliographical Society, Dahl’s Bibliography expanded upon his earlier Dutch corantos short-title catalog (Dutch Corantos: 1618–1615; A Bibliography [Koninklijke, 1946]) in an attempt to list and describe all English-language corantos and newsbooks that were printed between the selected years, from the earliest extant coranto of December 2, 1620 to the December 10, 1642 newsbook published by Nathaniel Butter as the Civil Wars were under way. Dahl was a librarian at the City and University Library of Gothenburg, Sweden. As testimony to the dedication and enthusiasm with which he approached his study of early periodicals, he writes: The reason why this bibliography has taken such a long time to compile is the fact that as my work progressed I realized, little by little, that for a better understanding of the first English newspapers it is necessary to have a certain knowledge of the continental press, especially the Dutch. So while this bibliography was in preparation I therefore devoted several years to the study of the Dutch, Belgian, German, French, Italian, and Spanish press during the first half of the 17th century.27

The result is a thorough, engaging, and helpful guide to the earliest Englishlanguage periodicals. Dahl prefaces the bibliography with brief discussions of the principal publishers of the first English corantos and newsbooks (Thomas Archer, Nicholas Bourne, Nathaniel Butter), the main differences between English and continental newsbooks, and the survival of copies with estimated original publication figures, in addition to outlining his methodology and the bibliography’s arrangement. The main body of the bibliography is divided into two parts, “Corantos” and “Newsbooks”; the difference being, according to Dahl, that corantos are one-leaf, broadsheet publications with the text in two columns on both sides of the sheet, and newsbooks are small, quarto volumes, typically consisting of three sheets or twenty-four pages but could also consist of fewer or more sheets.28 Dahl maintains this structural distinction, regardless of the periodical title. For example, An extraordinary curranto wherein is related, the late sea-fight betwixt the Spaniards and the Hollanders and The curranto for this weeke from Norimberg are both listed in the “Newsbooks” section. Dahl describes 404 individual issues in the bibliography, 349 of which he was able to find; the remaining non-extant 55 issues he has reconstructed from title page referrals to the previous number’s date of issue, entries in the Registers of the Company of Stationers, and from the Reverend Joseph Mead’s letters to Sir Martin Stuteville.29 The serial number,

140

Chapter Six

date of issue, and publisher for these reconstructed titles are set off in square brackets. Extant issues are not evenly distributed across the period, but exist primarily for the years 1622–1624 and 1631–1632. The “Corantos” section contains thirty-four titles, arranged chronologically by place of publication and by publisher. The majority of these periodicals were published in Holland, in the cities of Amsterdam; “Altmore,” an unknown city that could be Alkmaar; and the Hague; the rest were published in London. The “Newsbooks” section, also arranged chronologically and containing periodicals published exclusively in London, begins with unnumbered newsbooks, which Dahl argues were considered periodicals by the publishers, the public, and the Stationers’ Company despite their initial lack of dates and numbers (as supported by their frequent use of “weekly” in their titles). These are followed by the numbered and dated newsbooks, fourteen series in all, from the first published on October 15, 1622 through December 10, 1642, when, as Dahl writes, “the political situation in England, where the Civil War was on the verge of breaking out, turned the chief interest from ‘forraine’ to ‘domestick news.’”30 The bibliography concludes with three somewhat problematic series, identified by Dahl as “Newsbooks Published by Thomas Archer 1624–1628,” “Ralph Mabb’s ‘Currant of Newes’ 1627,” and “English Newsbooks Printed in Amsterdam in 1633.” Throughout the bibliography, each coranto subsection and newsbook series opens with a valuable introductory note that establishes the duration of the series and (as much as possible) provides background information about the publisher or publishers, in addition to other distinguishing characteristics. In these introductions, Dahl’s passion for early periodicals shines through and his use of quoted contemporary material brings these periodicals to life. Each entry features the date of issue, title, imprint, and physical description; for newsbooks this includes page numbering, signatures, and notes on blank pages. Coranto entries present the last lines for both recto and verso columns to aid with identifying copies that may be found in the future, since sometimes publishers issued more than one coranto on the same day with different material. The Pollard and Redgrave STC number is noted, or relevant page numbers from other bibliographies and catalogs (listed on pages 10–11) and the library or owner where a copy (or copies) is located is also mentioned (libraries listed on page 15). The notes for selected entries cover typographical features, such as printers, variant copies, or faulty catchwords, or describe something particular about the content, especially in cases where the title pages are missing. The most interesting content notes are the “editorial notices” that Dahl stresses are unique to English newsbooks. Here we have the editor addressing his audience directly, often providing insightful commentary about current

Seventeenth-Century Periodicals

141

political situations, or antagonistic relationships with the printing community. The early corantos and newsbooks were limited to reporting foreign news, principally the Thirty Years’ War that occurred between 1618 and 1648, and were clearly partisan in their support for the Protestant cause. In the July 3, 1622 newsbook (Dahl number 55), the editor tries to raise his audience’s spirits after reporting on the Protestant General the Duke of Brunswick’s defeat by the Imperial Commander General Tilly: Now courteous Reader, hauing heard the truth of the matter, moderate your griefe, and doe not discourage a young braue Warrior, by lamenting for some small losse by him sustained, seeing also that commonly the issues of Battailes and Warlike Actions are variable and inconstant, and that many times it happeneth, that those that the one day haue the worst, the next day haue the better hand. Wherefore let vs trust in God, hoping for better successe, firmely beleeuing, that hee neuer will forsake his Church or Champions.31

The editorial notice in the January 11, 1641 newsbook (Dahl number 367) sheds light on a battle closer to home between the publisher and the licenser, and the discontent the editor felt with his audience’s monetary support. Courteous Reader: Wee had thought to have given over printing our Forraigne avisoes, for that the Licenser (out of partiall affection) would not oftentimes let passe apparent truth, and in other things (oftentimes) so crosse and alter which made us almost weary of Printing, but he being vanished (and that Office fallen upon another, more understanding in these forraine affaires, an as you will finde more candid.) We are again (by the favour of his Majestie and the State) resolved to goe on in Printing if we shall finde the World to giue a better acception of them (then of late) by their Weekly buying them. It is well knowne these Novels are well esteemed in all parts of the World (but heere) by the more Iudicious, which wee can impute to no other but the discontinuance of them, and the vncertaine dayes of publishing them, which if the Post faile vs not wee shall keepe a constant Day every weeke therein, whereby every man may certainly expect them, and so wee take leave.32

Such detail in the notes field by Dahl makes his bibliography much more than a dry list of old periodicals, and instead illustrates the personalities and concerns embedded in these publications that are still vibrant after four centuries. Additional materials include reproduced coranto and newsbook pages, an index of printers, and a select (if dated) list of works on the beginnings of English journalism. Dahl’s private collection of early newsbooks, corantos, and newspapers is part of the special collections at Princeton University Library and outlined in an online finding aid, The Folke Dahl

142

Chapter Six

Collection of Early Newsbooks, Corantos, and Newspapers (www.princeton .edu/~ferguson/folkedahl.html). Dahl’s A Bibliography of English Corantos and Periodical Newsbooks, 1620–1642 serves as an excellent companion to the early periodical content in Early English Books Online. EEBO maintains Dahl’s coranto place and newsbook numbered series as a means of organizing the periodicals reproduced in the Short-Title Catalogue microfilm. Consequently, Dahl’s bibliography can be used to place the EEBO periodical issues within the context of other extant issues in the series, and specifically to identify other series issues that are not part of EEBO, such as those copies from the University of Minnesota Library in Dahl’s tenth series of newsbooks. You should note that EEBO does not include any newsbooks from Dahl’s third, fourth, sixth, eleventh, thirteenth, or fourteenth series. As mentioned previously, Dahl’s introductory series notes also help to provide background about the series publishers and publishing history, as well as historical information that is missing from the EEBO entries. Together the two resources complement each other, and give both context and full text to an impressive number of surviving early-seventeenth-century periodicals. Note that since the STC was revised after Dahls’s bibliography was published and ten thousand additional entries added, EEBO may actually have periodicals from the time period not listed by Dahl. Carolyn Nelson and Matthew Seccombe’s British Newspapers and Periodicals, 1641–1700: A Short-Title Catalogue of Serials Printed in England, Scotland, Ireland, and British America: With a Checklist of Serials Printed 1701–March 1702 and Chronological, Geographical, Foreign Language, Subject, Publisher, and Editor Indexes 1641–1702 is another monumental undertaking to describe and improve access to periodicals of the mid- through later-seventeenth century. This catalog picks up where Pollard and Redgrave’s Short-Title Catalogue coverage of periodicals ends in 1640, and complements Wing’s Short-Title Catalogue, which includes annuals for the period 1641–1700 but no other kind of serial publication. Both of these important resources are discussed in chapter 4. Nelson and Seccombe define periodicals for this work as “numbered and/or dated issues of proposed or actual sequences of pamphlets or sheets, bearing uniform titles and formats.”33 By drawing upon titles listed primarily in the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, as well as those in the British Union Catalogue of Periodicals, the Union List of Serials, and Crane and Kaye’s Census of British Newspapers and Periodicals (all described in later paragraphs), the compilers identified 711 unique titles for their catalog. Their careful examination of at least one copy of nearly every extant issue has contributed to a thorough and meticulous listing of periodical issues, with special care taken to clarify changes in titles and imprints, and to note variants such as counterfeits, mul-

Seventeenth-Century Periodicals

143

tiple typesettings, and reprints. This process also led them to discover some issues and titles not previously reported that were shelved with or contained in volumes of well-known titles, surely an incentive to browse the archives! The catalog is arranged alphabetically by periodical title, with a separate and logical numerical entry for each issue. An initial entry serves as the headnote for the series and contains the following information: the assigned catalog number for the series; a uniform title in bold, which is the shortened version of the title from the first issue of the series; a shortened form of subsequent titles if relevant; the series dates given in month and year in New Style, also in bold; and bracketed information listing format (e.g., quarto, folio, broadside, single sheet, duodecimo; a guide to the symbols used is on page xiv); average length of issues; periodicity (e.g., weekly with a note about the day it was published, biweekly, triweekly, monthly); price; author or editor, if known; remarks about variants; and citations to bibliographical authorities (listed on page xvi). Following the series headnote, each individual issue has its own entry; these are listed in chronological order, with title and imprint (stated in full for the first entry; subsequent entries replace this information with dashes if it is the same, or are restated in full if they change), volume number (if any), issue number, date or dates of the issue, and symbols for as many as twenty libraries that have that issue (the symbols for libraries are on the endpages and on page xvii), with the location of the copy that was used for the entry in bold. Cross-references are given in several cases, primarily from different kinds of title changes and variants to the main periodical entry, but also from the original to reprints in other cities, and from other catalog ghosts, or incorrect titles, to the correct title. An appendix of variants based on different typesettings is provided for titles published after June 1643. Although this sounds confusing, it makes sense once you begin to use the catalog. For a complete and detailed discussion of the numerical system employed and the entries, we highly recommend that you read pages x–xii of the preface. The periodical Mercurius fumigosus, or the smoaking noctvranal [sic], communicating many strange wonders out of the vvorld in the moon, serves as an interesting illustration of how the catalog is structured. The main series entry is assigned the number 324 and gives a shortened version of the title, Mercurius fumigosus, or the smoaking noctvranal [sic], and an abridged version of a later title, Mercurius fumigosus, or a perfect nocturnal, followed by the inclusive dates for this series, March through August 1660. The editorial note indicates that the periodical is a quarto of eight pages, and was edited or authored by John Crouch. A reference to the Crane and Kaye bibliography is cited to verify this information. The first entry in the series is assigned the number 324.1 and presents the full title, the issue number and date, a note

144

Chapter Six

from the colophon, and symbols for two holding libraries. The second issue is assigned number 324.2, but the entry is listed as “Not found.” The third issue, 324.3, has a different title, Mercurius fumigosus, or a perfect nocturnal, and contains similar information about the issue number, date, colophon note, and libraries, but issues 324.4 through 324.6 are also noted as not found. The seventh issue, 324.7, returns with a slight variation to the original title, Mercurius fumigosus, or the smoaking nocturnal, and finally the eighth issue, 324.8, has the same title but a unique number and date in addition to a colophon note and holding libraries. Again, we stress that reading the preface and working with the catalog makes this process much clearer than does reading a description. In addition to the precision and care with which each individual periodical issue is described, the other outstanding feature of Nelson and Seccombe’s work is the accessibility provided by six indexes. A “Chronological” index allows the researcher to pinpoint which particular periodicals, limited to extant issues only, were published in each month from January 1641 to March 1702. Therefore a researcher of the Revolution of 1688 (–1689) could examine issues of the London Courant, the London Mercury, the Orange Gazette, and the Oxford Gazette for December 1688 and January 1689 to access public reaction in print to William’s invasion and James’s flight and abdication. Studies of periodical publications outside of London will benefit from the “Geographical” index, which is limited in this time period to the cities of Dublin, Edinburgh, and Oxford, with just a few publications based in Cambridge, York, Glasgow, Leith, and two titles from Boston, Massachusetts. The “Editor-Author” and the “Publisher-Printer” indexes facilitate investigations of the various persons involved in creating these periodicals, such as the characters Marchamont Nedham, Ned Ward, and John Dunton, or female printers like Elizabeth Alsop, Abigail Baldwin, Jane Coe, and Elizabeth Mallet. Nelson and Seccombe caution that not all of the attributions in the “Editor-Author” index are reliable since the list was culled from the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, which based its information on the “highly speculative and frequently unreliable”34 History of English Journalism to the Time of the London Gazette, originally written by J. G. Muddiman in 1908. The “Foreign Language” index presents fourteen titles in French and one in Latin. The “Subject” index, while not highly detailed, nevertheless offers a starting point for identifying periodicals by their particular focus. Twenty-seven categories cover general topics such as advertisements, astrology, banking, book abstracts and reviews, commerce and industry, law and crime, music, news summaries, religion, science and medicine, and trials and executions, as well as specific subjects such as Bills of Mortality; Charles I, defendant; the English Parliament House of Commons and House

Seventeenth-Century Periodicals

145

of Lords; the Irish Parliament House of Commons; the East India Company; and William III. Since any subject access to seventeenth-century periodicals is difficult at best, this index functions as an initial place to begin further subject-based investigations. British Newspapers and Periodicals 1641–1700 is an indispensable tool for researchers interested in periodicals of the mid- and later-seventeenth century, whether in trying to identify every extant issue of a particular periodical, or in broader studies of periodical culture. Joad Raymond, a British scholar who specializes in seventeenth-century newsbooks, published corrections and additions to Nelson and Seccombe’s catalog in Notes and Queries.35 Since the catalog is more than twenty years old, it is a good idea to verify holding library information by checking that institution’s catalog or contacting them directly, if you are interested in examining original issues. Dahl’s Bibliography and Nelson and Seccombe’s British Newspapers and Periodicals together will provide very extensive coverage of seventeenth-century periodicals, primarily English, from the beginnings of periodical publication in the early 1620s through the end of the century. As we mentioned previously, Dahl compiled his list of titles from Pollard and Redgrave’s Short-Title Catalogue, in addition to other bibliographies, and Nelson and Seccombe derived their list from the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, union serial lists, and Crane and Kaye’s bibliography, among other sources. We next discuss a selection of these source bibliographies and checklists. The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (CBEL) is a standard reference tool in literary research used to identify primary and selected secondary sources about British authors (see chapter 4). CBEL also covers related literary material, including a section devoted to periodicals. Although third edition volumes are currently being published, scholars of early modern literature will need to use the second edition volumes, titled the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (NCBEL), until the updated volumes for the years 600–1660 and 1660–1800 are published. Watson’s New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, Vol. 1: 600–1660 addresses periodical newsbooks, nonperiodical pamphlets, broadsides, and ballads on domestic and foreign news/affairs; journalists, printers, and publishers active after 1640; and bibliographies and general studies in the fifth section, “News-Sheets and Newsbooks.” The brief introduction to the section defines periodical publication as the intention by the publisher to issue parts in frequencies of a month or less. Eight subsections outline the various types of primary and secondary sources, and subsections 4 “Unnumbered Newsbooks 1620–2” and 5 “Numbered Newsbooks 1622–41” reproduce the titles listed in Dahl’s bibliography, with the exception of the three anomalous series.

146

Chapter Six

Bibliographic information about the titles in all subsections is limited, and for periodicals only consists of an abbreviated title (in many cases), date, number (if available), and publisher’s last name(s), so keep in mind that you will find more complete bibliographic information on newsbooks up to 1642 in Dahl. The pamphlets of foreign and domestic news entries feature title, date, and author, if known. These selected titles would make for an interesting comparative study with the periodical news coverage. Subsection 8, “Newsbooks 1641–59” is a bit more complicated to decipher. The section, which begins with a detailed headnote, lists periodicals by title in chronological order by date of first issue. These entries may also include three different classes of variant forms that contain the same title and date: reprints wherein the same title, numbering, imprint, and text are set up differently; counterfeits having the same title and imprint but different text; and imitations in which the title is the same but the text and the imprint are different. Be sure to read the headnote for guidance about these variants, as well as details regarding dates (which are stated in the New Style), imprint attributions, and cross-references to similar and variant titles. The bibliographies and general studies are chronologically arranged in two subsections, “Bibliographies and General Studies to 1640” and “Bibliographies and General Studies 1641–59,” and are useful for identifying contemporary accounts about the periodical output of a particular time period, as well as for finding early periodical studies from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, up to those published in 1965. The subsection covering journalists, printers, and publishers after 1640 is arranged by individual, followed by the periodical(s) with which he was affiliated (only men are included), and, in some cases, selected reference sources, journal articles, and books about him. Although more bibliographic details about periodicals for this time period will be found in Dahl and Nelson and Seccombe’s works, the NCBEL is worth consulting for the comparative selection of foreign and domestic news pamphlets, and for the early commentary and scholarly studies about seventeenth-century periodicals. The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, Vol. 2: 1660– 1800, also edited by George Watson, has a more detailed arrangement to represent the higher periodical output of the long eighteenth century. The section devoted to periodical publications is divided into thirteen subsections that address specific types of publications, including periodical essays, magazines, miscellanies, learned journals, reviews, annuals, and newspapers printed in London, as well as those from the English provinces, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and the Channel Islands. Additional subsections (part of the thirteen) cover manuscript newsletters, and bibliographies, general studies, and contemporary and secondary sources regarding the history of the press. The chronological arrangement of titles within each subsection facilitates

Seventeenth-Century Periodicals

147

identifying those periodicals and sources that are relevant for the seventeenth century. Since definitions of these kinds of periodicals can be fluid, it is important to check all the format subsections so that you don’t miss a potentially relevant title. Subsection D, “Magazines, Miscellanies, Learned Journals and Reviews Published in London 1660–1800,” begins with the Royal Society of London’s Philosophical Transactions and is an example of those selected periodicals for which secondary sources have been identified and listed (usually published up to 1965). The subsection on London newspapers features periodicals beginning publication in the 1650s, with occasional secondary studies listed under an individual title, such as for Mercurius Politicus, the Intelligencer, and the London Gazette. Some real gems are to be found in subsection H, “Miscellaneous London Serials,” which serves as a catch-all category for question-and-answer journals, dialogue papers, periodical lists of books, and periodicals not classified elsewhere, including the Ladies Mercury, the first English periodical intended primarily for a female audience. The English provinces, Scotland, and Ireland subsections are organized by general studies and type of periodicals, following the same categories of periodical essays, magazines and miscellanies, and newspapers as those listed for London, and by city within those categories. Just a few titles in these sections were published in the seventeenth century, particularly in Oxford, Edinburgh, and Dublin. Bibliographical citations are brief, similar to those described in volume 1, and note inclusive dates of publication and issue numbers, if known. Researchers can use this volume of the NCBEL as a complementary source to Nelson and Seccombe’s catalog, since its arrangement by periodical type (and region) provides an additional kind of subject access, and the secondary studies elucidate early investigations of individual periodical titles and the print culture in which they flourished. Compiled by R. S. Crane and F. B. Kaye in 1927, A Census of British Newspapers and Periodicals, 1620–1800 has been superseded by Nelson and Seccombe’s British Newspapers and Periodicals for titles published after 1640 but can still be used to identify periodicals from England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales published before that date. The census is arranged in two parts, “British Periodicals, 1620–1800, Accessible in American Libraries” and “British Periodicals, 1620–1800, Not Found in American Libraries,” and covers newspapers, magazines, reviews, essay periodicals, and annuals. Within these two sections, the entries are listed alphabetically by title and include subsequent or variant titles, place of publication, initial and terminal dates if available (in New Style), names of printers, editors, or publishers if known, frequency of publication, and for the first section only, symbols for holding American libraries. The holdings information is no longer considered reliable and should be checked against another source, such as WorldCat or

148

Chapter Six

the print union serial lists. Cross-references from subsequent titles are provided to the main periodical entry. A chronological index facilitates access to periodical entry numbers by year, so that it is straightforward (but time-consuming) to identify periodicals from 1620 through 1640, with entry numbers in italics indicating titles in British libraries only. All of the eighteen unique titles listed for those years are included in Dahl’s bibliography. In fact some of the entries in this source are actually for groups of corantos, whereas Dahl gives details about individual issues, so the Dahl bibliography is recommended. A geographical index of periodicals published outside of London, including cities in England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, the Channel Islands, and the Netherlands concludes the census. Although Sullivan’s British Literary Magazines: The Augustan Age and the Age of Johnson, 1698–1788, the first volume in a four-part guide to literary magazines, is concerned primarily with titles from the eighteenth century, it does feature one seventeenth-century title, the London Spy. This successful and entertaining monthly periodical, edited by Edward Ward, is thought to be an antecedent of the Tatler and Spectator, with its “realistic London setting, the countryman’s visit to the city, satirical characters, [and] comic anecdotes.”36 A short essay describing the history and content of the periodical opens the signed profile and is followed by a bibliography of books and journal articles, a list of eighteenth- and twentieth-century reprint and microform editions, notes on British and American libraries that hold complete and partial runs, and an overview of publication details including title changes, volume and issue, publication frequency, publishers, and editors. Those researchers interested in tracing the early development of literary periodicals may find this source useful for its coverage of literary magazines of the longer eighteenth century. Indexing to the content of seventeenth-century British periodicals is available to a certain degree, but limited at this point in time to keyword searches in Early English Books Online and selected full-text periodicals available online, subject indexes to the Early British Periodicals, Early English Newspapers, and English Literary Periodicals microfilm collections, the subject and geographical indexes in Nelson and Seccombe’s British Newspapers and Periodicals, and the format-based subsections of the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature. In Early Periodical Indexes: Bibliographies and Indexes of Literature Published in Periodicals before 1900, Robert Balay has compiled an annotated guide to approximately four hundred resources that provide access to the content of early periodicals, including a few from the seventeenth century. Arranged by broad subject categories, the guide covers bibliographies and indexes that are general in nature, as well as those that fall within the humanities (e.g., philosophy, religion, languages, literature,

Seventeenth-Century Periodicals

149

visual arts, music), history and area studies (by periods, regions, continents, and countries), social and behavioral sciences, science and technology, and library and information science. Many of the bibliographies described have a particular subject emphasis, and so are not exclusively concerned with periodical literature but also may include books and other materials. The “Dates of Coverage” index is the best way to identify those resources that offer access to seventeenth-century periodicals, but be sure to follow Balay’s advice and ignore the first twelve titles since their initial dates are suspect. What remains is an interesting, if limited, selection of titles in French, English, Latin, and German, many on the publications of learned societies. Review of annotations for the few English-language titles reveals that the earliest periodical citations frequently are to articles from the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Even though there are few indexes for seventeenthcentury periodicals, Early Periodical Indexes remains a valuable and unique resource, one that could be especially helpful for comparative studies of early English and European scientific periodical literature. In order to verify titles and dates of issue, you can consult the British Union Catalogue of Periodicals and the Union List of Serials in Libraries of the United States and Canada. Both of these resources provide alphabetical lists of serial holdings in British, American, and Canadian libraries respectively. The online union catalogs WorldCat and Copac can be used for the same purpose, as well as to seek potential holdings information. Researchers can search WorldCat to learn where an individual title might be located, to identify periodical microfilm collections (including individual titles in the collection if they have been cataloged separately), or to conduct a general search for periodicals for a specific time period. For example, a search of the publisher location Dublin, set for the years 1660–1699 and limited to serial publications, retrieves six records for three titles, including the Dublin Intelligence, which is reproduced on microfilm as part of two series, Early English Newspapers and Irish Newspapers in Dublin Libraries, 1685–1754. The English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) covers newspapers and other serials published before 1801, and includes every item listed in Pollard and Redgrave and Wing’s Short-Title Catalogues. The ESTC is an excellent resource for finding detailed bibliographical information since the serial records feature more extensive notes than those in WorldCat. Compare the different records for the Dublin Intelligence in figures 6.4 and 6.5 that follow. The ESTC record provides specific details about the imprint variations, publisher, format (two columns), bibliographical references, other editions, and location of original issues in England and Ireland, and adds name headings for the printers and publisher. Also note that the WorldCat and ESTC records have assigned very different subject headings for the same

150

Chapter Six

Figure 6.4. Modified WorldCat record for Dublin Intelligence. Source: WorldCat, OCLC, via FirstSearch.

periodical. These subject headings can be searched to identify additional periodicals in each specific database. The genre heading Newspapers— Ireland—17th century in the ESTC record looks promising, but following that link retrieves results for the general genre heading for all newspapers (more than nine hundred records), not just those from seventeenth-century Ireland. Searching for periodicals within a certain date range or from a specific city or country can also be executed in the ESTC; just be sure to note that date range searches must be entered as follows, 1660–>1699. Using the “Advanced Search” screen to duplicate the WorldCat search for Dublin as the place of publication, newspapers or periodicals as the genre, and limiting to the same date range of 1660–>1699, returns seven results, including four titles not retrieved in the WorldCat search. For known title searches in the ESTC, the “Help” page recommends that you should browse the title index to identify the correct source.

CONCLUSION Researching early periodicals can be an exciting and rewarding enterprise. This unique medium can be mined for clues about the political, social, and cultural world of seventeenth-century Britain, either by placing literature of the time in its rich and nuanced historical context, or by studying periodicals in their own right as a form of printed literary expression. Throughout the seventeenth century periodicals closely reflected the developing and changing interests of the British public and were instrumental in creating an avid

Figure 6.5. Modified ESTC record for Dublin Intelligence. Source: English Short Title Catalogue, British Library.

152

Chapter Six

readership across a broader range of society. Now that these periodicals are increasingly available in digital form, researchers have a distinct advantage over their predecessors with an opportunity to explore these periodicals in previously unimagined ways. Nevertheless, since we are still in a time of transition, researchers will need to use a combination of standard print reference sources, as well as microfilm and digital collections, to fully appreciate, understand, and investigate periodicals of the seventeenth century.

NOTES 1. Richard Brathwaite, Whimzies: or, a nevv cast of characters (London: Printed by Felix Kingston, 1631), 15–16, STC (2nd ed.) 3591, in Early English Books Online, 0-gateway.proquest.com.bianca.penlib.du.edu/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2003&res_ id=xri:eebo&rft_id=xri:eebo:citation:99842031. 2. Jeremy Black, The English Press, 1621–1861 (Thrupp, Stroud, Gloucestershire, UK: Sutton, 2001), 2. 3. Bob Clarke, From Grub Street to Fleet Street: An Illustrated History of English Newspapers to 1899 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004), 13. 4. Clarke, 13. 5. Folke Dahl, A Bibliography of English Corantos and Periodical Newsbooks, 1620–1642 (London: Bibliographical Society, 1952), 221. 6. Dahl, 19. 7. Clarke, 35. 8. David Scott Kastan, “Print, Literary Culture and the Book Trade,” in The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature, ed. David Loewenstein and Janel Mueller (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 81–116. 9. C. John Sommerville, The News Revolution in England: Cultural Dynamics of Daily Information (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 55. 10. Sommerville, 55. 11. Sommerville, 35. 12. Harold Love, “L’Estrange, Sir Roger,” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, who references F. S. Siebert, Freedom of the Press in England, 1476–1776 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1952), 292–93. 13. Sommerville, 60. 14. Clarke, 29. 15. Helen Berry, Gender, Society and Print Culture in Late-Stuart England: The Cultural World of the Athenian Mercury (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003), 14–15. 16. Sommerville, 85–86. 17. Black, 7. 18. Sommerville, 97. 19. Sommerville, 113. 20. Quoted in Berry, 19. 21. Berry, 245.

Seventeenth-Century Periodicals

153

22. Berry, 102. 23. Alvin Sullivan, ed., British Literary Magazines, vol.1, The Augustan Age and the Age of Johnson, 1698–1788 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983), xxi. 24. Sommerville, 114. 25. James Harner, Literary Research Guide: An Annotated Listing of Reference Sources in English Literary Studies, 5th ed. (New York: Modern Language Association, 2008), 270. 26. Carolyn Nelson and Matthew Seccombe, comps., British Newspapers and Periodicals, 1641–1700: A Short-Title Catalogue of Serials Printed in England, Scotland, Ireland, and British America: With a Checklist of Serials Printed 1701–March 1702 and Chronological, Geographical, Foreign Language, Subject, Publisher, and Editor Indexes 1641–1702 (New York: Modern Language Association, 1987), viii. 27. Dahl, 7. 28. Dahl, 18. 29. Dahl, 22. Dahl writes that Mead occasionally sent London newsbooks to Stuteville, but that he more usually copied the important news from them. He also included in his letters to Stuteville handwritten newsletters regarding foreign events. The Mead correspondence is contained in British Library, Harley MSS 389 and 390. See also David Randall’s article, “Joseph Mead, Novellante: News and Sociability in Early Stuart England,” on the Center for the Study of Books and Media website, csb.princeton.edu/index.php?app=download&id=20. 30. Dahl, 262. 31. Dahl, 68. 32. Dahl, 251. 33. Nelson and Seccombe, vii. 34. Nelson and Seccombe, xiii. This page provides a full discussion of the authors’ decision to reproduce editor-author information and a key to symbols used in the “Publisher-Printer” index. 35. Joad Raymond, “Some Corrections and Additions to British Newspapers and Periodicals 1641–1700: A Short-Title Catalogue,” Notes and Queries (December 1995): 451–53. 36. Sullivan, 214.

Chapter Seven

Contemporary Reception

Written to a most excellent Booke, full of rare invention Goe learned booke, and unto Pallas sing, Thy pleasant tunes that sweetely sownde to hie For Pan to reache, though Zoylus thee doth sting, And lower at thy lawde, set nought thereby. Thy makers Muse in spight of envies chinne, For wise devise, deserved praise shall winne. —from Thomas Howell, Howell His Devises, for his owne exercise, and his Friends pleasure, London, 1581, regarding Sidney’s Arcadia. Zoilus, “a proverbially severe critic who dared to censure even Homer.” (Critical Heritage, Sidney, 94–95)1

Assessing the critical reception of an early modern author’s work is much different and more challenging than determining the reception for authors from later centuries. There were no reviewing media during the early modern period like the review journals of the eighteenth century, but an author’s works were certainly read, discussed, and made an impact on his or her audience. Keep in mind that an author’s potential audience could vary widely in size and composition. Factors influencing reception include whether the audience was public or private; if the work was printed, and the size of the print run; and if the work existed only as a manuscript circulated among a select set of family members, friends, or colleagues, or if it was performed. Many early modern manuscript works were never published, or were published posthumously (sometimes many years later) and so there may be very limited or no “contemporary reception” at all. Whether you are trying to measure the contemporary reception to a printed or a manuscript work will shape your strategies for where to look and your expectations for what kind of effect the 154

Contemporary Reception

155

work was likely to have made. Contemporary reactions to early modern literary works sometimes appears in letters and diaries (a very small portion of which survives), in the prefaces or prefatory material to other literary works, and often within literary works themselves, such as the commendatory poem by Thomas Howell praising Sidney’s Arcadia at the start of this chapter. Other examples include Anne Killigrew’s Poems, published posthumously in 1686, which contains a prefatory ode by John Dryden extolling her as “Excellent in the two Sister-Arts of Poesie, and Painting.” And of course there is Ben Jonson’s famous tribute to Shakespeare, “To the memory of my beloved, the author Mr William Shakespeare: and what he hath left us,” that introduced the First Folio (1623). More indirect reflections of reception are literary allusions that embed reference to one author’s work within another’s, indicating not only knowledge of the work alluded to, but an inferred criticism or appreciation. Just as we collect the works of popular or highly regarded authors’ works into published anthologies today, the same practice was true in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Another form of assessing critical reception is to review which authors were anthologized during the period, since the literary anthology compiled those works regarded for their merit. One early printed anthology is Songes and Sonettes, also known as Tottel’s Miscellany (1557), which presented poems by Henry Howard, Thomas Wyatt, and Nicholas Grimald, as well as by other unknown authors. England’s Helicon, published in 1600, gathered the works of Sidney, Spenser, Drayton, and Shakespeare, among others. Poetic miscellanies were especially popular during the early modern period, and in addition to print miscellanies, many manuscript copies survive to illustrate the enduring interest in particular authors or works. Since these miscellanies don’t always provide attributions to those works included, it may be necessary and also insightful to use a first-line index to determine if a particular author’s verse was copied and circulated both for print and manuscript versions. The same strategy can be employed to discover if an author’s verse was set to music, which may give some indication of its popularity. Commonplace books record an individual’s assessment of literary works by showing which works were considered important enough to copy or extract into a private notebook, or which were believed, by the compiler, to have personal significance. In addition, scholars of early modern literature can investigate a reader’s opinions and reactions as noted in the margins of both printed and manuscript literary works. Although not many records of private libraries survive, it is possible to determine which books comprised a private collection for certain individuals. These library lists give us a general idea of which authors’ books were considered worth collecting and reading during the early modern period.

156

Chapter Seven

A final means of assessing the popularity of printed works is to examine the number of editions for a particular title. Measuring a particular work’s impact in this way can reveal compelling comparisons between what was popular during the period and what later became part of the literary canon. For example, Eikon Basilike went through thirty-five editions just in 1649 alone, the year of Charles’s execution, with additional copies printed abroad. Although this work was exceptionally popular at the time, it is rarely read now. Even though there was no established or standardized critical or reviewing apparatus, readers did consider and respond to what they read in numerous ways, and the literary scholar can use some of the suggestions outlined above to explore the critical response to an author’s works. This chapter will present reference tools and other sources that can be used for assessing an early modern author’s reception by contemporaries, and will also offer recommendations and suggestions for search strategies. You may need to be inventive and consult multiple sources, however, to establish contemporary reception particularly toward the works of a non-canonical author.

CRITICAL RECEPTION SOURCES Cambridge Companions to Literature Series. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986–. Critical Heritage Series. New York: Routledge, 1967–. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Gale Cengage, 1978–. www.gale.cengage.com. Literature Criticism from 1400–1800. Gale Cengage, 1984–. Literature Criticism Online. www.gale.cengage.com. Matthew, Henry C. G., and Brian Harrison, eds. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (in association with The British Academy: From the earliest times to the year 2000). 61 vols. Revised ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. www .oxforddnb.com; updated three times a year. O’Donnell, Mary Ann, comp. Aphra Behn: An Annotated Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources. 2nd ed. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004. Shakespearean Criticism. Gale, 1984–. Literature Criticism Online. www.gale .cengage.com. Southam, B. C., ed. Renaissance Poets: Critical Heritage Set. 4 vols. New York: Routledge, 1995. ———, ed. The Restoration and the Augustans: Critical Heritage Set. 5 vols. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Few reference sources compile literary reviews for early modern authors to the same extent as for authors of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth

Contemporary Reception

157

centuries, when reviewing practices became an established part of book and theater production and the making of an author’s literary reputation. Since there are virtually no reviewing journals and newspapers for the period, likewise there are no indexes to literary reviews similar to those for later centuries, like Antonia Forster’s Index to Book Reviews in England, 1775– 1800 or Wellesley Index to Periodicals, 1824–1900. Recorded reactions to literary works appear in diverse sources, both public and private forums, and those that are extant can be scattered among printed works and private papers. Consequently, the literary researcher will need to be inventive to track down and identify those remaining sources that will help to construct a picture of contemporary reception. Fortunately, the Critical Heritage series, published by Routledge, provides that groundwork by bringing together contemporary critical reactions to canonical authors in one or several volumes. For the early modern period, the following authors have volumes devoted to their critical reception (to date): Shakespeare; Donne; Wyatt; Herbert; Marvell; Marlowe; Milton; Webster; Dryden; Massinger; Jonson; Spenser; John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester; Congreve; and Sidney. To identify any of these volumes in your own library, you can do a keyword search on the author’s name and add the phrase critical heritage. Intended to “show the inception and growth of critical views which were initially slow to develop” (according to the general editor’s preface), those volumes concerned with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century authors take into account the scarcity of surviving early opinions by tracing critical reception beyond the writer’s immediate time. For example, the John Donne volume covers reception to his works from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century and the Ben Jonson volume continues until the end of the eighteenth century. Each volume begins with a well-developed introduction, typically ranging from twenty to seventy pages, which gives a narrative structure to the excerpts that follow. Numbered and presented roughly in chronological order, these excerpts have their own brief introductory note and sometimes include comments from the author himself, such as those by John Milton on writing and education, or by Philip Sidney taken from A Defence of Poetry. The kinds of source material represented are varied and many of the excerpts are from literary works, such as the elegies on Thomas Wyatt by John Leland, who states in Latin, “None can justly claim that Wyatt has perished when the monuments of his genius still thrive”;2 other excerpts are from letters, diaries, prefatory material, or critical works like Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie (London, 1589). The Donne volume groups together as one entry quotations, imitations, and echoes of Donne’s poems, as well as general references to his poems or to Donne as a poet, and another entry presents a comment written in the margin next to the poem “To his Mistris

158

Chapter Seven

Going to Bed” from the Bridgewater manuscript. Comprising six volumes, Shakespeare: Critical Heritage covers reception from 1623 to 1692 in the first volume, including adaptations of his plays but no contemporary allusions. Some Critical Heritage volumes contain appended material, such as a list of the author’s works, bibliographies of critical bibliographies or reception studies, or in the case of Donne, a list of his poems set to music beginning with “The Expiration” in First Booke of Ayres (1609) to “A Hymne to God the Father” in Harmonia Sacra (1688). In addition to the individual volumes, Routledge is also offering thematic sets of previously published volumes, such as Renaissance Poets, which contains volumes for Wyatt, Donne, Herbert, and Marvell, and Restoration and the Augustans, which reproduces the Earl of Rochester, Dryden, Congreve, Pope, and Swift volumes. Consulting the Critical Heritage series is essential for the few authors whose reception history has been studied. Although not concerned exclusively with contemporary reception, the Cambridge Companions to Literature series publishes individual author volumes that occasionally feature chapters about early criticism (see chapter 2). The Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe (2004), for example, contains a chapter by Lisa Hopkins, “Marlowe’s Reception and Influence,” that examines accounts of his death and early allusions to his works. Robert C. Evans focuses on the reception to individual plays, Volpone, Epicoene, the Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair in the Cambridge Companion to Ben Jonson (2000). And Hugh Grady addresses Shakespeare criticism from 1600 to 1900 in the Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare (2001). An ongoing project, currently there are more than 130 volumes in the Cambridge Companions to Literature series, with volumes devoted to many early modern authors including John Donne, Edmund Spenser, John Milton, Aphra Behn, and John Dryden. Look for chapters that address reception to the author as well as to particular works, which may be reflected in such words as influence, afterlife, and reputation, or those chapters that concern an author’s audience or readers. Like the other Gale Criticism series, Literature Criticism from 1400–1800 provides an overview of a particular author’s critical reception, with excerpts from important works written between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. Now available electronically as part of Literature Criticism Online, the database permits searching within the full text, keyword fields, named author, named work, critic’s name, and source publication title, with fuzzy search options to account for variant spellings. The search can be limited by years of critical response. The pages of the original print volumes are reproduced as digital facsimiles that can be enlarged to make reading easier. Each entry in the volume begins with an introductory essay that discusses the author’s

Contemporary Reception

159

literary career and reception to individual works, followed by a list of principal works. Most of the entry is then dedicated to excerpts of criticism, from the earliest known responses to twentieth-century or current literary criticism; these range in length from a few lines to several pages and include excerpts from poems, letters, books, and journal articles. Each excerpt has a brief introduction that sets the context for the material to follow. A bibliography of sources to consult for further reading is also part of the entry. Though this sounds like a promising resource for identifying early reception, contemporary response is limited for many authors, even canonical ones. Sir Philip Sidney, for example, whose reputation as an author was established mainly after his works were published posthumously, contains an excerpt by Sidney himself, taken from the preface to the Arcadia; Thomas Moffet’s piece about Sidney’s life and death; and Fulke Greville’s biography of Sidney; the entry then skips forward two hundred years to William Hazlitt’s lecture in 1820. In contrast, the Critical Heritage Sidney volume offers more than twenty selections recorded before the end of the sixteenth century. It is important to keep in mind that Literature Criticism is an ongoing series and that frequently there will be more than one entry for an author. If you were to look for contemporary response to Aphra Behn in volume 30, 1996, you would only find an excerpt from Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, published in 1929. However, if you check the first volume in the series (1984), the entry begins with Behn’s preface to her work, The Luckey Chance, or An Alderman’s Bargain, followed by Gerard Langbaine’s An Account of the English Dramatick Poets (1691). Therefore, it is prudent to review each volume in order not to miss relevant early responses. Literature Criticism 1400–1800 also has entries dedicated to individual works, such as one for Oroonoko (vol. 42, 1998) and The Rover (vol. 135, 2007), neither of which offer criticism earlier than from the twentieth century. Despite these shortcomings, the database is useful for searches within the entries. A full-text search for aphra behn retrieves many hits to eighteenthand some seventeenth-century writers’ entries, such as to the Eliza Haywood introduction that states that Haywood modeled her novels after those of Aphra Behn. Shakespeare is not included in Literature Criticism 1400–1800 but has his own series, Shakespearean Criticism, that can be searched simultaneously or separately in Literature Criticism Online. A named author search on Shakespeare retrieves entries for individual plays that feature early critical responses, such as for King Lear, which has a selection by Irish playwright Nahum Tate (1681), and a section on Henry VIII that contains a letter from Henry Wotton dated 1613. Some reception history may be obtained from biographical sources, such as the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and the Dictionary of

160

Chapter Seven

Literary Biography, described more fully in chapters 2 and 8. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) essay on Katherine Philips, for example, concludes with a section about her final years and reputation and mentions that the 1667 folio volume of her poems, Poems by the most Deservedly Admired Mrs. Katherine Philips the Matchless Orinda (published posthumously) includes several tributes. By following up this lead in EEBO, you will discover poems praising her work by Abraham Cowley, James Tyrrell, Thomas Flatman, and others. The Dictionary of Literary Biography (DLB) entry includes some references to Philips’s contemporary reception and reputation; it notes that she was well regarded by John Dryden and Abraham Cowley and that her play, Pompey, was parodied in William Davenant’s play, Play-house to be Let. Although the reception history details may be slim and will vary depending on the particular figure and approach taken by the essay’s author, nevertheless the ODNB and DLB can be used to supplement other reference tools and help you to identify additional sources for contemporary response; these two dictionaries may be the only source of information for less-canonical figures. In addition to the reference tools discussed thus far, you should also review the standard bibliography or bibliographies for your particular author. Many critical bibliographies will identify contemporary reception sources and provide bibliographic information for finding them. Aphra Behn: An Annotated Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources by Mary Ann O’Donnell, for example, initiates the secondary bibliography with early mention of Behn and her work, such as found in the poem, “To Madam Bhen [sic]” published in Female Poems on Several Occasions (1679); the poem emphasizes that her work “might be Envy’d by the wittiest Men.” Other early listings include those by John Dryden, Charles Mordaunt, and Thomas Otway. This particular bibliography also presents an annotated list of works written or edited by others that includes material by Behn, usually her poems, many of which are unattributed. Collections of songs, like Methinks the Poor Town has been troubled too long, or London Drollery, illustrate how songs from the play, The Dutch Lover, were incorporated into popular culture and highlight another aspect to the reception of her work. An appendix of derivations from Behn’s works from the late seventeenth through the early nineteenth century likewise indicates the measure of Behn’s influence. To search for bibliographies in your library catalog, do a keyword search with the author’s last name, if distinctive, or full name and bibliograph*, or use the authoritative subject heading, such as Behn, Aphra, 1640–1689— Bibliography. Michael Marcuse’s A Reference Guide for English Studies gives standard bibliographies for selected authors, as does James Bracken’s Reference Works in British and American Literature and the Dictionary of Literary

Contemporary Reception

161

Biography. If a monograph bibliography does not exist for your author, try to determine if there is an author association that publishes a bibliography, either in their newsletter or posted on their website. For those authors with no bibliography, you can try a general keyword search with your author’s name and the words reception, reputation, or afterlife. The search mary astell and reception retrieves a chapter, “‘Dreading to Engage Her’: The Critical Reception of Mary Astell,” in the Ashgate volume, Mary Astell: Reason, Gender, Faith (2007). The search aphra behn and (reputation, reception, or afterlife) finds the book Aphra Behn’s Afterlife (Oxford University Press, 2000), which covers reception to The Rover and Oroonoko, writers influenced by Behn, and her literary reputation. Although this strategy doesn’t guarantee that you will find works about contemporary reception, it can be employed to identify relevant critical studies and as an alternative strategy when standard sources aren’t available. Refer also to chapter 9, “Genre,” for potential sources of drama reception. ALLUSIONS Bradley, Jesse Franklin. The Jonson Allusion Book: A Collection of Allusions to Ben Jonson from 1597 to 1700. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1922. The Shakspere Allusion-Book: A Collection of Allusions to Shakspere from 1591 to 1700. Originally compiled by C. M. Ingleby, Miss L. Toulmin Smith, and Dr. F. J. Furnivall, with the assistance of the New Shakspere Society: re-edited, revised, and re-arranged, with an introduction by John Munro (1909), and now re-issued with a preface by Sir Edmund Chambers. London: H. Milford, Oxford University Press, 1932.

If you are particularly interested in investigating allusions as a means of assessing contemporary response to an author’s literary works, there are allusion compilations for some canonical authors, including Shakespeare, Jonson, Spenser, and Milton. These sources can be identified either with a keyword search on the author’s name and allusions, (e.g, milton john and allusions) or by using the Library of Congress subject heading, if one exists, that follows the standard format: Spenser, Edmund, 1552?–1599—Allusions Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Allusions Jonson, Ben, 1573?–1637—Allusions Milton, John, 1608–1674—Allusions The Shakspere Allusion-Book: A Collection of Allusions to Shakspere from 1591 to 1700 represents allusions originally compiled in the late

162

Chapter Seven

nineteenth century with additions published together in 1909 and reprinted, with a few additional allusions, by Oxford University Press in 1932. The resulting two-volume book provides hundreds of allusions to Shakespeare and to his works from contemporaries and later readers through the seventeenth century, including examples of where his contemporaries borrowed from or plagiarized his work. Beginning with an extended introduction to the 1909 edition by John Munro and a chronological list of allusions, the selections range from earliest allusions by Edmund Spenser, Robert Greene, Thomas Nash, and other authors, both known and anonymous, to closing comments by John Downes from his Roscius Anglicanus, or an Historical Review of the Stage (printed in 1708). Designed to serve Jonson scholars in a similar manner, Bradley’s Jonson Allusion-Book: A Collection of Allusions to Ben Jonson from 1597–1700 covers early allusions by the Privy Council regarding “a lewd plaie [The Isle of Dogs] . . . contanynge very seditious and sclanderous [sic] matter” as well as those by Thomas Nashe, Philip Henslowe, John Bodenham, John Marston, and Thomas Dekker. Biographical documents related to Jonson’s literary career are included, such as money lent by Henslowe and Middlesex Sessions’ Rolls proceedings for the killing of Gabriel Spencer, but Bradley cautions that the volume does not contain doubtful allusions, imitations, or quotations. Due to the selections represented, Bradley suggests that the collection can also be regarded as a book of allusions to other Elizabethan and Jacobean authors for its overview of early dramatic criticism. MISCELLANIES AND COMMONPLACE BOOKS Baue, Frederic William. A Bibliographical Catalogue and First-Line Index of Printed Anthologies of English Poetry to 1640. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2002. Beineke Flickr Laboratory’s Photostream, at www.flickr.com/photos/brbl/. Case, Arthur E. A Bibliography of English Poetical Miscellanies, 1521–1750. Oxford: Printed for the Bibliographical Society at the University Press, 1935 (for 1929). Literary Manuscripts: 17th and 18th Century Poetry from the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds. Adam Matthew. www.literarymanuscriptsleeds.amdigital .co.uk/Index.aspx. Perdita Manuscripts. Adam Matthew. www.perditamanuscripts.amdigital.co.uk/ default.aspx. Renaissance Commonplace Books from the British Library, London. Marlborough, England: Adam Matthew Publications, 2002. 15 reels. Description available at www .adam-matthew-publications.co.uk/collections_az/RenCpbks-BL/highlights.aspx. Renaissance Commonplace Books from the Huntington Library. 4 reels. Adam Matthew. Description available at www.adam-matthew-publications.co.uk/collections_ az/RenCpBksHunt/highlights.aspx.

Contemporary Reception

163

Renaissance Commonplace Books from the Sloane Collection at the British Library. 21 reels. Adam Matthew. Description available at www.adam-matthew-publications .co.uk/collections_az/RenCpbks-BL-Sloane/highlights.aspx. Scriptorium: Medieval and Early Modern Manuscripts Online. scriptorium.english .cam.ac.uk/ Sheppard, Jane. Renaissance Commonplace Books from the Sloane Collection at the British Library. Marlborough, UK: Adam Matthew Publications, 2006. Sherman, William H. Renaissance Commonplace Books from the British Library, London: A Listing and Guide to the Microfilm Collection. Marlborough, UK: Adam Matthew Publications, 2003. Smyth, Adam. An Index of Poetry in Printed Miscellanies, 1640–1682. www.reading .ac.uk/emrc/printedmiscellanies.htm. Watson, George, ed. The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature. 5 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974. Woolley, James. First-Line Indexes of English Verse, 1650–1800: A Checklist. www .bibsocamer.org/BibSite/Woolley/index.pdf.

One of the first print English poetical miscellanies, The Court of Venus, was published in the early sixteenth century (1535–1539), but the genre really grew in popularity following the arrival of Songes and Sonnettes, known to us as Tottel’s Miscellany. The later sixteenth century witnessed the flourishing of the poetic miscellany, and these compilations can serve as mirrors to public taste by providing insight into the fluctuating appeal of particular authors and works from the period, especially for those miscellanies that experienced multiple editions. Tottel’s Miscellany went through nine editions from 1557 to 1587, but other miscellanies were equally successful, including The Paradise of Dainty Devices, which came out in ten editions between 1576 and 1606, leading Elizabeth W. Pomeroy, author of Elizabethan Miscellanies: Their Development and Conventions, to nominate it “most popular of all the miscellanies.”3 Other notable period miscellanies include A Mirror for Magistrates (1559), Handful of Pleasant Delights (1584), Brittons Bowre of Delights (1591), The Phoenix Nest (1593), The Passionate Pilgrim (1599), England’s Helicon (1600), England’s Parnassas (1602), and A Poetical Rhapsody (1602). Pomeroy notes that popularity of the verse miscellany waned during the seventeenth century and that lyric collections didn’t really appear in print again until after the Restoration.4 Adam Smyth asserts in “Profit and Delight”: Printed Miscellanies in England, 1640–1682, however, that printed miscellanies were “consistently popular” during the mid-seventeenth century and gives, as an example, The Academy of Complements, which went through twelve editions between 1640 and 1685.5 These collections brought together previously published and unpublished work, ranging from poems circulated in manuscript, work copied down in commonplace books, verse pirated from other printed works, play texts, broadside ballads, and songs, which then

164

Chapter Seven

were collected and published by an editor or printer. Smyth emphasizes the ambiguous nature of these miscellanies, stating that since “one of the defining attributes of these texts is their close, often intimate, relationships with other types of books, neat delineation of the boundaries of the printed miscellany is tricky.”6 Not all the work contained within these anthologies was attributed—in fact, sometimes only initials are given—or works are falsely attributed, or noted as anonymous. To determine if your author’s work appears in one or more of these miscellanies, you can use the first-line indexes described in chapter 8 for various verse manuscript collections or consult one of the appropriate guides to printed miscellanies. A Bibliographical Catalogue and First-Line Index of Printed Anthologies of English Poetry to 1640, by Frederic William Baue, covers fifty-three verse anthologies for the defined period, including some additional titles not identified by Case (discussed later). The catalog lists the full title of the first edition of each anthology, imprint, physical description, copy examined, notes, subsequent editions, and UMI microfilm number, arranged in ShortTitle Catalogue (STC) number order. The first-line index comprises the main part of the work and presents lines for all poetry in the selected anthologies, except for Bel-vedere, or the Garden of the Muses due to its excessive number of single and two-line poems. Each first line is referenced by the relevant STC number and folio position. Although lacking the more sophisticated first-line indexing of the manuscript reference sources, Baue’s guide still functions as a preliminary resource for identifying an author’s poetry in the earlier printed miscellanies. For poetic miscellanies of the mid- to later-seventeenth century, Adam Smyth’s An Index of Poetry in Printed Miscellanies, 1640–1682 features a database of forty-one printed miscellanies that represent 4,639 poems. The texts can be searched by first line, last line, miscellany title, date, poem title and pages, number of lines, and author (if known), or by keyword across all fields. A search for Behn as author retrieves ten records in sources such as London Drollery (1673), Covent Garden Drollery (1672), Oxford Drollery (1671), and Westminster Drollery (1671), but a search on the word Amyantas in the first-line index retrieves possibly two additional unattributed instances of her song published in the New Academy of Complements (1669) and Windsor Drollery (1672). A search for Jonson as named author retrieves sixty-five records, whereas Dryden returns thirty-eight poems. The indexed collection can also be browsed alphabetically by first line. Sample miscellanies indexed include Wits Interpreter (1655), Parnassus Biceps (1656), Sportive Wit (1656), Folly in Print (1667), New Court Songs (1672), and Wit and Mirth (1682). Although the collection is limited to miscellanies published only during part of the seventeenth century, this is nevertheless an excellent resource for identifying the presence of authors’ works anthologized in popular print

Contemporary Reception

165

collections during that period. Be sure to check James Woolley’s First-Line Indexes of English Verse, 1650–1800: A Checklist, described in chapter 8, for additional sources, including first-line indexes for song collections. Although these sources may guide you to the appearance of individual poems, you may also want to examine verse miscellanies in their own right to obtain a general appreciation for the popularity of specific authors, verse forms, and/or themes. Arthur E. Case’s A Bibliography of English Poetical Miscellanies, 1521–1750 describes 481 miscellanies, including “Original or translated verse by British subjects, written in any language and printed in any country,” as long as it contained three or more authors; however, Case does not cover collected works prefaced by commendatory poems, song books with music, or hymn books. The miscellanies presented here were drawn primarily from the British Library and the Bodleian, Yale, and Harvard libraries. Arranged in chronological order by earliest known edition, each entry provides a transcription of the title page in roman, italic, or black-letter type, collation, some description of content but not a listing of individual poems, notes on irregularities, editions/issues, and other bibliographical information, and locations, which should be verified in the English Short Title Catalogue or WorldCat given the original publication date of this work. Following the earliest known edition entry, later editions are described in separate entries up to 1750. Case begins his survey of miscellanies with the fragment, “Thus endeth the Christmasse carolles” (1521) and presents many miscellanies of verse in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, and Italian. Indexes of titles; books without London imprints (many from Cambridge, Dublin, Edinburgh, and Oxford); authors and other people referred to in the title pages, dedications, and prefaces; printers and publishers; and a chronological index conclude the work, but again, unfortunately, there is no first-line index to the represented miscellanies’content. Some of the well-known poetic miscellanies are reproduced in print facsimile, such as England’s Helicon 1600 and The Phoenix Nest 1593, both by Scolar Press; of course, these print miscellanies will also be available in digital form in Early English Books Online. The first volume (600–1660) of the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, in the “Renaissance to the Restoration” poetry section, lists miscellanies and representative ballad collections in English; in volume 2 (1660–1800), the “Poetry” section also contains a subsection devoted to poetical miscellanies, song books, and verse collections by multiple authors arranged by year from 1660 to 1800. These sources should enable the researcher to identify a wide range of miscellanies from the Renaissance and early modern period. Early modern commonplace books offer a more private assessment of works important to the individual reader. Interesting comparisons could be

166

Chapter Seven

made between literary works that appear in printed miscellanies and those that were included in commonplace books. Although many early modern readers used commonplace books to copy excerpts from classical authors, they also extracted contemporary works and thus commonplace books can provide insight to the private reception of contemporary literature. In addition to works of prose and poetry, commonplace books could also reflect a wide range of reading material; examples include prayers, proverbs, observations, and receipts. Referring specifically to private manuscript commonplace books, Havens writes: The sheer multiformity and irregularity of these manuscript compilations also push the very definition of the term “commonplace book” to the outermost margins of literary classification. Each manuscript compilation is, to borrow Auden’s analogy, a “map” of a different universe of reading, occupied by the individual compiler within his historical moment.7

These individual maps of reading can give the researcher a unique means of evaluating reception. Existing primarily in manuscript, several of the firstline indexes described in chapter 8, Manuscripts and Archives, can be used to identify poetry that was transcribed in this manner. Finding the prose content included in manuscript commonplace books can be much more challenging since there isn’t a single index for the commonplace genre. Sometimes commonplace books are arranged by topical headings or include an index, a practice that would offer some guide to the contents once you have the actual manuscript in hand, but this was not a consistent practice. Renaissance Commonplace Books from the Huntington Library, Renaissance Commonplace Books from the British Library, London, and Renaissance Commonplace Books from the Sloane Collection at the British Library, reproduced on microfilm from Adam Matthew, feature limited descriptions of contents in the digital guides (available on the Adam Matthew individual collection websites) and in the accompanying printed guides, Renaissance Commonplace Books from the Sloane Collection at the British Library and Renaissance Commonplace Books from the British Library, London: A Listing and Guide to the Microfilm Collection. The Huntington Library collection consists of fifteen commonplace books, written during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, from Thomas Butte; Thomas Grocer; Edward and Henry Stafford; Sir Nicholas Bacon; Elizabeth Hastings, Countess of Huntington; Sir Edward Dering; Sir Thomas Egerton; and anonymous authors. The books cover poetry and prose by Jonson, Sidney, Raleigh, Francis and Nicolas Bacon, Earle, and Wotton. Almost fifty commonplace books, dating from 1550 to 1700, are reproduced in the British Library collection, including those written by Milton, Raleigh, Thomas Harriot (which

Contemporary Reception

167

contains the earliest known quotation from Henry IV Part 1), Sir Julius Caesar, Sir John Gibson, and the “Waferer” commonplace book that has poetry by Shakespeare, Raleigh, and Essex. Largest of all, the Sloane Collection from the British Library represents more than ninety commonplace books and miscellanies compiled between 1570 and 1700, such as those by Thomas Browne, Nathaniel Highmore, Daniel Foote, James Stanley, Henry Power, James Petivar, and Abraham Hill. Even if your library doesn’t own one of these microfilm collections, you can review the digital guides from the Adam Matthew website to determine if a particular collection might have material of interest, and if so, order the microfilm through interlibrary loan. The subscription manuscript databases, Literary Manuscripts: 17th and 18th Century Poetry from the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds, and Perdita Manuscripts, described further in chapter 8, both feature digital facsimile commonplace books and miscellanies. The contents of the Literary Manuscripts collection can be searched by first lines, verse titles, verse forms, authors, or by manuscript type, including commonplace books (comprising thirty-five titles, not all seventeenth century, by Henry Fairfax, William Fairfax, Jo Tempest, and Charles Deynes, among the named seventeenth-century authors) and miscellanies (forty-two titles), with some overlap between the categories. Perdita Manuscripts can be searched by first line for either prose or poetry, or genre within the document; however, the collection only contains two designated commonplace books, one by Sarah Cowper (1673–1710) and another by an English lady (1599–1608), and seventeen miscellanies by Anne Southwell, Margaret Douglas, Mary Howard, Anne Cornwallis, and Elizabeth Welden, among others, with the miscellany titled Katherine Thomas’s Commonplace Book (1665–1694) remarkably not indexed as a commonplace book. This last example underscores the slippery nature of genre identification of period works, and the necessity of checking multiple genre categories when using the various digital and microfilm collections, if works are indexed in this manner. A few early modern commonplace books have also been made available for free on the Web. Based at the University of Cambridge, Scriptorium: Medieval and Early Modern Manuscripts Online offers eight digital commonplace books and miscellanies compiled between 1450 and 1720. In addition to the reproduced manuscripts, the website also provides a detailed description of contents and a bibliography of scholarly books and journal articles that address the work. The scholar can easily see, for example, that Elizabeth Lyttelton’s Commonplace Book (1670?–1713) contains works attributed to Thomas Heywood, Edmund Elys, John Norris, Thomas Browne, Elizabeth I, Walter Raleigh, John Foxe, Katherine Philips, Aphra Behn, and Thomas Carey, among those identified. The Beineke Library has created digital facsimiles of two seventeenth-century

168

Chapter Seven

commonplace books and a verse miscellany on Flickr, called the Beineke Flickr Laboratory’s Photostream. Although there is no index or search capability, the descriptions feature very limited clues to the contents: the miscellany includes poems by Herrick, Jonson, Corbet, Raleigh, May, and Gill, as well as by unidentified authors, and one of the commonplace books features “bawdy and satirical verse, mainly of a political, anti-Popery and academic cast.” As more libraries, archives, and institutions make their collections accessible on the Web, it is likely that other early modern commonplace books and miscellanies will become available in the future. At this point in time, however, you will need to use a combination of resources to access commonplace book contents, including the first-line indexes to poetry, digital or print guides to the microfilm collections, and the descriptions or search features available for subscription and freely available digitized collections. Finally, although it isn’t perfect, a search in your institution’s or a union library’s catalog, such as WorldCat, with the Library of Congress subject heading Commonplace books and the keywords early modern or renaissance, or even england or english, will enable you to identify other potentially useful collections, critical studies, or pertinent reference works as they are published.

MARGINALIA Alston, R. C. Books with Manuscript: A Short Title Catalogue of Books with Manuscript Notes in the British Library, Including Books with Manuscript Additions, Proofsheets, Illustrations, Corrections. London: British Library, 1994. Croft, Peter J., Theodore Hofmann, and John Horden, eds. Index of English Literary Manuscripts. 4 vols. New York: Bowker, 1980–1999. Superceded by Beal, Peter, comp. Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts 1450–1700. ies.sas.ac.uk/cmps/ Projects/CELM/. English Short Title Catalogue, 1473–1800. estc.bl.uk. Hamnet: Folger Shakespeare Library Online Catalog. Folger Shakespeare Library. shakespeare.folger.edu/.

Nothing reveals a more intimate reaction to a literary work than the notes and markings left by a reader in the margins. These manuscript traces of reading exist in many printed texts from the early modern period. William H. Sherman confides in his preface to Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England that following a comprehensive survey of the more than 7,500 volumes located in the Huntington Library’s Short-Title Catalogue collection (printed between 1475 and 1640), he was “astonished by the sheer volume of notes produced by early readers,” as well as by “the variety of techniques, habits, and interests they document.”8 As fascinating and rewarding as this

Contemporary Reception

169

particular approach to literary research can be, however, Sherman cautions that “Anyone who turns to marginalia with high hopes of easy answers quickly discovers that the evidence they contain turns out to be (if not always thin, scattered, and ambiguous) peculiarly difficult to locate, decipher, and interpret.”9 Indeed, trying to find manuscript notes in printed texts can be a challenging process, since there are few reference tools to assist with identification. The researcher will be dependent on the amount of detail contained in catalog record descriptions, on the few printed guides such as Books with Manuscript: A Short Title Catalogue of Books with Manuscript Notes in the British Library and Index of English Literary Manuscripts, as well as upon critical studies of early modern marginalia and readers.10 Readers’ reactions to the printed text range from illustrations, such as the manicule, or pointing finger to mark a specific passage, to very brief comments such as, “excellent good,”11 to annotations that threaten to overwhelm the printed text. Although there are plenty of readers’ recorded reactions extant, Sherman emphasizes that literary works were annotated far less often than legal, religious, and other works. He explains that: Renaissance readers tended to be more systematic and less psychologically revealing than post-Romantic readers. And a large percentage of the notes produced by readers had no obvious connection with the text they accompanied—but nonetheless testified to the place of that book in the reader’s social life, family history, professional practices, political commitments, and devotional rituals.12

Despite these limitations, the researcher can find evidence of contemporary reaction to early modern literary works. For examples, see Heidi Brayman Hackel’s study of early modern responses to Sidney’s Arcadia, Stephen Orgel’s review of Lady Anne Clifford’s copy of A Mirror for Magistrates, and James A. Riddell and Stanley Stewart’s survey of Ben Jonson’s annotations to Spenser’s 1617 Folio, The Faerie Queen: The Shepheard’s Calendar: Together with Other Works.13 These critical studies demonstrate that careful examination of surviving manuscript notations (either by a specific reader or as illustrating multiple reactions to a specific work) can contribute to a fuller understanding of contemporary reception. This section will address sources and research strategies that can be employed to identify manuscript marginalia for early modern literary works. R. C. Alston’s Books with Manuscript: A Short Title Catalogue of Books with Manuscript Notes in the British Library, Including Books with Manuscript Additions, Proofsheets, Illustrations, Corrections serves as an initial finding aid to books containing marginalia and other manuscript additions from the British Library’s general collections, with some exceptions (books with marginalia in the Manuscript, Music, and Map collections are

170

Chapter Seven

not included). Alston lists more than twenty-five thousand books that have “MS. notes” or “Few MS. notes” in the General Catalogue record and that were found to be substantial enough for inclusion. Arranged alphabetically by General Catalogue entry heading, the entries represent authors, corporate authors (e.g., Bury Saint Edmunds, England) and works from all time periods; anonymous works are entered by their title. If the author of the manuscript notes is identified, that information is given and known owners of the particular work are also noted, in addition to the shelfmark. Even though several early modern authors are included, the annotations are not always by contemporaries. For example, eight works are given under the heading for Edmund Spenser but they all feature manuscript notes by eighteenth-century and later owners. Margaret Cavendish’s Plays, never before printed (1668) is listed with few manuscript notes, but there is no indication as to when these notes might have been made. Checking the British Library’s online Integrated Catalogue provides a more complete record for these titles but does not give any additional details regarding the notes. Consequently, Books with Manuscript is a good place to start identifying early modern sources with marginalia, but you will need either to write to the British Library for more information or personally examine specific copies of interest. Also keep in mind that Books with Manuscript only represents holdings from the British Library’s printed catalogs, and as Sherman notes, “it will need to be updated and added to the fuller records that electronic catalogues allow.”14 Books with Manuscript concludes with two indexes of owners and authors. Described more completely in chapter 8, Index of English Literary Manuscripts can be used to identify marginal notes in printed books made by some of the canonical authors represented. Arranged alphabetically by author’s name in two volumes for our period, volume 1 covers British and Irish authors who wrote between 1450 and 1625 and volume 2 covers the years 1625 to 1700. If you are interested in a particular author’s reactions to his contemporaries, you may find some leads here, although frequently the manuscript annotations are to earlier works or to non-English authors. Be sure to check both the introduction to the author section, since it may address marginalia in printed books if applicable, as well as the category “Marginalia in Printed Books and Manuscripts” within the listing of sources. The William Drummond introduction, for example, mentions five printed books that are known to contain his autograph annotations and also recommends McDonald’s Library of Drummond of Hawthornden (Edinburgh University Press, 1971), which not only presents a list of the books in Drummond’s library and reproduces his book lists, but which also reviews Drummond’s marginalia. The “Marginalia in Printed Books and Manuscripts” section points to Drummond’s annotations in copies of William Alexander’s The Monarchicke

Contemporary Reception

171

Tragedies (1607), Edward Fairfax’s Godfrey of Bulloigne (1600), and Ben Jonson’s Workes (1616), as well as Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiae (1486) and Robert Estienne’s Les mots francois selon l’ordre des lettres (1544). Each entry for these works has the citation, location and manuscript number or shelfmark, if relevant; and reference to a related book or journal article. In this particular case it is also worthwhile checking the “Miscellaneous” category, since it has Drummond’s autograph miscellanies with extracts from other authors and lists of books read by Drummond. Although not every author section will prove this helpful, and many in fact do not have marginalia categories, nevertheless the Index of English Literary Manuscripts is a good source to consult for an individual reader approach to literary reception. Keep in mind that the Index of English Literary Manuscripts can also be used for other approaches to assessing reception. The author sections list poetry and prose included in period miscellanies, and the introductions frequently cover extant letters, the contents of an author’s library, and extant volumes, any of which could be used to construct a record of what was read and reactions to those works. The English Short Title Catalogue can be searched for preliminary identification of literary works that possess manuscript or marginal notes. This level of detail is usually found in the individual library catalog records, but the information is sometimes included in the ESTC record for the work, frequently in the “General Notes” field. For the most precise searching, start with the advanced search screen and type in ms notes (exact phrase) and limit to the “Copy-specific Notes” field. You can also add marginal notes (exact phrase) as an alternative phrase in the “Copy-specific Notes” field (since the results will be displayed for each component of your search) and limit the search to the dates desired (remember the ESTC format for date, e.g., 1500–>1700) or add words to the author or title field as appropriate. Once you have selected works of potential interest, you will then need to determine which library owns the copy with notes. The “Holdings Details” link will display the copy-specific records for the holding libraries, from which you can identify the location of relevant copy/ies. A general search of the ESTC for the years 1500 to 1700 shows 7,936 records that contain the exact phrase ms notes in the “Copy-specific Notes” field, 516 with the phrase marginal notes, and 225 with ms annotations. Remember that catalog records vary tremendously in their level of detail. Some records will mention marginal or manuscript notes, annotations, or markings, including by whom if known, but other records will leave the information tantalizingly unclear. In general, don’t expect to be able to tell if the notes are contemporary to the work, unless the record clearly states by whom the annotations were made, or identifies the previous owners (who may or may not have been the person

172

Chapter Seven

marking the text). Despite these limitations, the ESTC does offer a means of identifying marginalia in period literature. In addition to the ESTC, you may also want to search individual library catalogs that have robust collections of early modern works. Some of these catalogs may have search features that give enhanced access compared with the ESTC. As one example, the Folger Shakespeare Library’s online catalog Hamnet has an advanced interface that permits keyword searching in the “Folger Copy Notes” field, so that you can search simultaneously for the phrases marginal notes, ms notes, ms annotations, or ms markings across their holdings, adding additional authors, titles, keywords, or other delimiters as needed. A sample search on sidney, philip in the “Name” field, and ms notes annotations markings marginal (any of these) in the “Folger Copy Notes” field retrieves twenty-seven items, including several editions and multiple copies of the Countesse of Pembroke’s Arcadia. The Folger Library records also permit searching by the “Form/Genre” field heading Annotations (Provenance), which will retrieve records for works that have manuscript notes. You could potentially make use of the “Associated Name(s)” search capabilities to identify works in the collection owned by or associated with a particular early modern figure. For example, there are fifteen items in the library’s collection that are assigned the heading, Jonson, Ben, 1573?–1637, former owner and one Jonson, Ben, 1573?–1637, signer. Since neither the Annotations (Provenance) nor former owner headings are available in the ESTC, it can be worthwhile to look for marginalia in multiple online catalogs, as well as in the print sources described above. Investigating contemporary reception through the marginal tracings of early modern readers is definitely a path for the diligent researcher, but it holds the possibility of unique insight into the place of literature within these individuals’ lives.

EARLY MODERN LIBRARIES Fehrenbach, R. J., gen ed., and E. S. Leedham-Green, ed. in the United Kingdom. Private Libraries in Renaissance England: A Collection and Catalogue of Tudor and Early Stuart Book-Lists (PLRE). Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1992–. Guide to Sale Catalogues. British Library. www.bl.uk/reshelp/findhelprestype/ prbooks/guidesalecat/salescatalogueguild.html. Jayne, Sears. Library Catalogues of the English Renaissance. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1956. Leedham-Green, Elisabeth, gen ed. Libri Pertinentes series. Medieval and Renaissance Texts & Studies. www.acmrs.org/publications/mrts/refser.html#PrivateLibraries.

Contemporary Reception

173

Munby, A. N. L., and Lenore Coral, comps. and eds. British Book Sale Catalogues, 1676–1800: A Union List. London: Mansell, 1977. On-line Provenance Resources. Consortium of European Research Libraries. www .cerl.org/web/en/resources/provenance/geographical. Pearson, David. Provenance Research in Book History: A Handbook. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 1998. PLRE.Folger: Private Libraries in Renaissance England. Folger Shakespeare Library. plre.folger.edu/.

In 1646, the Lady Anne Clifford had two copies of a triptych painted by Jan van Belcamp and possibly Peter Lely for her daughters. Known as the “Great Picture,” the painting depicts Anne in her mother’s womb and at ages fifteen and fifty-three. These side panels not only show Anne at significant stages in her life, they also document specific books that were part of her library painted in the background, thus leaving “some indication of both the scope and the emphases of her reading—the best such record we have from a noblewoman of the period.”15 Among volumes of religion, philosophy, science, history, geography, biography, and architecture are many literary works, such as Sidney’s Arcadia, all of Spenser’s works, Donne’s poems, Jonson’s Workes, Herbert’s Temple, Fulke Greville’s Works, John Barclay’s Argenis (translated from Latin), and George Sandys’s A Paraphrase upon the Psalmes of David.16 Although this painting is exceptional in many ways, it serves as a reminder that examining the libraries of early modern readers is another path toward understanding contemporary reception. Reconstructing these private libraries can be achieved to some extent through evidence left in manuscript and printed catalogs or inventories, book sale and auctioneer catalogs, account books, receipts, wills, and registers of gifts made to institutions.17 Because a 1521 statute required that the property of any deceased person in England had to be inventoried for probate, whether the deceased had a will or not, these manuscript inventories provide a rich source for identifying early modern material possessions, including lists of books owned. Individual titles are often noted, such as Mr. William Shakespeares comedies, histories, & tragedies, Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher’s The woman hater, and Jonson’s The workes enumerated in Sir Edward Dering’s collection, but sometimes an entry merely states, “2 playbookes.”18 Keep in mind, however, that the practice of listing individual titles declined at the end of the sixteenth century so that seventeenth-century inventories are more likely to assign books value as a group, and that inventory survival rate is low.19 Whether or not the books were read cannot be determined; however, just the fact that they were purchased indicates a certain level of interest that could be construed as reflecting a reader’s

174

Chapter Seven

literary (among other) tastes. As R. J. Fehrenbach emphasizes in the introduction to Private Libraries in Renaissance England, considering that the cost of books during the Renaissance, and especially in the sixteenth century, was relatively high, and that book-collecting as we know it from more recent years was not a common pursuit, there are good grounds for believing that a significant number of books recorded in private hands were actually read by the owners.20

Similar to Lady Anne Clifford’s library, a typical library contained works in English written by early modern authors listed among the works of continental authors, and in the company of many nonliterary works on law, theology, philosophy, history, science, and other subjects. T. A. Birrell’s study, “Reading as Pastime: The Place of Light Literature in Some Gentlemen’s Libraries of the 17th Century,” examines six libraries belonging to seventeenth-century gentlemen (e.g., professional men, civil servants, and country gentlemen rather than clergymen or academics), in particular their pleasure reading, to reveal consistent interest in English popular literature, including poetry, romances, plays in quarto, and miscellanies.21 Scholars can use the following resources to identify library contents as recorded and to assess the presence and popularity of particular works of literature. Before investigating library and book sales catalog sources directly, you should consult David Pearson’s Provenance Research in Book History: A Handbook as it offers a very good introduction to the topic and discusses relevant research tools and critical studies. The “Sales Catalogues” chapter covers their history, lists and indexes for identifying catalogs, catalog lists published in journals, facsimiles, selected catalog collections, auctioneers, and booksellers. The “Catalogues and Lists of Private Libraries” chapter addresses both printed and manuscript lists and inventories, wills, bibliographies of manuscript lists and catalogs, union catalogs, and subscription lists. See also the chapter on provenance indexes and the final chapter that includes studies of book collecting and collectors, as well as recommended bibliographies for identifying additional books and journal articles. Currently published by the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, the ongoing series Private Libraries in Renaissance England (PLRE) is a tremendous resource for scholars wanting to understand the range of texts that comprised various Renaissance libraries and to identify specific titles in those collections. The seven volumes published to date represent 166 sixteenth- and seventeenth-century (1507–1653) library catalogs belonging to bishops, lawyers, members of Parliament, scholars (both students and those with degrees), physicians, servants, merchants, butlers, a soldier, a sexton, clerics, manciples, and an almsman, among others; however, the

Contemporary Reception

175

majority of the library holdings published so far (volumes 2 to 7) reproduce primarily the inventories of Oxford University scholars. Each book list is preceded by a biographical overview of the owner ranging from a paragraph to several pages, some with a reference list, if applicable. The annotated book lists follow, with an assigned PLRE number for each title as they appear in the original manuscript. Titles, authors, editors, illustrators, and other contributors, Short Title Catalogue status, publication information (such as stationer), language, cost or appraised value, and the location of the extant copy are noted, if known. Annotations may include additional information, such as the entry for Sir Edward Dering’s copy of “Jhonson’s playes”: Probably STC 14751 et seq. A collection of plays in quartos might be intended, but if so, given the costs provided for other single editions in the account book, the collection would number about twenty, or nearly twice as many of Jonson’s plays printed by the date of this entry. Elsewhere Dering clearly gives the number of “playbooks” as he identifies single editions.22

Private Libraries in Renaissance England consists of three parts: the published annotated book lists, an online database that features searching of the published lists and additional period book lists published elsewhere; and a “Cumulative Catalogue” that presents information for both the print and online components. In volumes 2 through 7, the PLRE “Cumulative Catalogue” gives book list and title totals to date, owners arranged alphabetically by name and PLRE number, dates of book lists (from 1507 to 1650, so far), information about manuscript types (e.g., probate inventories, account books, bookseller’s accounts, memorial books), Renaissance-era locations of books with record totals for each location, owners’ profession, and owners’ social status (e.g., gentry, middle class, nobility, professional, retainer). Six indexes to each volume further facilitate access by author and works, editors and compilers, translators, stationers (publishers, printers, booksellers), places of publication, and dates of publication. The second part to Private Libraries in Renaissance England, the online database known as PLRE.Folger, complements rather than replaces the printed volumes. Hosted at the Folger Shakespeare Library, PLRE.Folger consists of two separate parts, the main “Books” database and a “Names” database that provides authoritative control over variant names of authors, editors, translators, compilers, or commentators appearing in the PLRE published volumes. Currently the “Books” advanced interface permits searching of 196 book lists (both those published in PLRE volumes and additional lists published elsewhere) by author, title, other contributors, place, stationer, date of publication, language, format, manuscript entry, STC or Wing number, PLRE number, owner, profession, social status, date of list, manuscript

176

Chapter Seven

type, or manuscript location in the Renaissance, as well as by full text. Such comprehensive access makes it easy to analyze the book lists by multiple qualifications. For instance, you could search for all English-language books owned by scholars (828 titles, including Songes and Sonettes and Sejanus). A straightforward author search on Jonson retrieves eight titles, seven of which are attributed to Ben Jonson, including Volpone, Sejanus, the Masque of Queenes, the Works, and a masque presented to King James in 1603. Clicking on “View” will display the full PLRE entry showing that these titles came from the libraries of Henry Sibthorpe (soldier/statesman), John Hutton (scholar), Walter Brown (cleric/scholar), Abel Trefry (scholar), Sir Edward Dering (member of Parliament), and Roger Townsend (member of Parliament). Be sure to consult the “Help” pages for both databases for more effective searching, since some fields have particular syntax restrictions (e.g., you can only enter a single year rather than a date range for date of publication). Also designed to complement Private Libraries in Renaissance England, the Libri Pertinentes series publishes monographs focused on specialist and general, as well as private and institutional, libraries of the early modern period (1500–1700). Some sample titles include The Library of a Jesuit Community at Holbeck, Nottinghamshire (1679), A Large Private Park: The Collection of Archbishop William King 1650–1729, and The Library of Lord George Douglas, ca.1667/8?–1693?: An Early Donation to the Advocates Library. Libri Pertinentes is part of the Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies series, based at the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Arizona State University. Described by David Pearson in Provenance Research in Book History as of “outstanding importance,”23 Library Catalogues of the English Renaissance is a bibliography of extant manuscript English library catalogs dated from 1500 to 1640. This bibliography covers approximately 850 manuscript catalogs that were owned either by private individuals or institutions and that comprised at least fifteen named titles. Following the detailed introduction, the main part of the bibliography is devoted first to institutional library listings in chronological order, and then private library inventories, beginning with that of Henry Beaumont in 1500 to that of Richard Wrench, Fellow of St. John’s College, Cambridge, in 1640. Private library inventories include those belonging to scholars, clergy, noblemen, and well-known authors such as Ben Jonson, but also those of figures like Rodolph Hamore and William Harrison, London merchants; Lucy, Countess of Bedford and her mother, Ann Harington; and unknown students, physicians, and other owners. Each private library inventory entry lists the inventory date, owner, a short description of the contents, manuscript location, and published version details, if

Contemporary Reception

177

available. Appended material comprises miscellaneous book lists from the same time period, the catalog section of the Royal Library from 1661, sample Cambridge inventories, and previous lists of English Renaissance catalogs, as well as a concordance to manuscript numbers and an index of names and subjects. Library Catalogues of the English Renaissance will be useful for scholars wanting to examine private library collections of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In addition to the private library holdings described in PLRE and Library Catalogues of the English Renaissance, you can also check later-seventeenthcentury book sale catalogs to identify titles that were owned by particular individuals. A. N. L. Munby and Lenore Coral’s work, British Book Sale Catalogues, 1676–1800: A Union List, provides information for extant catalogs held by libraries in England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, France, the United States, and Canada, as well as in some private collections. Expanding on the List of Catalogues of English Book Sales 1676–1900 now in the British Museum, published in 1915, British Book Sale Catalogues has pre-1800 catalogs from the Bagford Collection and the British Library’s Department of Manuscripts. The catalogs are listed in chronological order by the date the auction or sale started, beginning with the first known English book auction of Dr. Lazarus Seaman’s library in 1676. Auction dates that originally occurred between January 1 and March 21 under the Julian calendar have been assigned modern dates. Retail sale catalogs are also included but those for trade sales, open only to members of the book trade, are excluded. Each entry contains the consignor’s name (if identified), a brief title, information about the sale if it wasn’t an auction, name of auctioneer or bookseller, location of the sale, libraries that hold copies, other bibliographies that mention the catalog (if relevant), and reprints. Approximately four hundred sales catalogs represent collections that were sold before the beginning of the eighteenth century, so there are many personal library holdings from the early modern era listed here to be explored. The work concludes with a “Consignors” index and an “Auctioneers and Booksellers” index to assist with identifying named individuals. The British Library presents a useful overview of auction and sales catalogs held in its collections. Guide to Sale Catalogues describes catalogs located at shelfmark S. C., such as auctioneers’ and trade sales archival sets; provides advice about using List of Catalogues of English Book Sales 1676–1900 now in the British Museum and British Book Sale Catalogues 1676-1800: A Union List; addresses catalogs in the British Library’s Department of Manuscripts; and lists sources for information on sales in France, Germany, Spain, Netherlands, and North America, including those that cover seventeenthcentury sale dates. To assist with provenance research more generally, the Consortium of European Research Libraries offers an annotated selection of

178

Chapter Seven

provenance websites arranged by country at On-line Provenance Resources. The “England” section contains several projects of potential interest to scholars of early modern literature, such as David Pearson’s English Book Owners in the Seventeenth Century (www.bibsoc.org.uk/electronic-publications.htm) and William Hamlin’s Alphabetical List of Private Book-Owners and Institutional Collections (1500–1700; www.wsu.edu/~whamlin/list.html).

EDITIONS Early English Books Online. ProQuest/Chadwyck-Healey. eebo.chadwyck.com/home. English Short Title Catalogue, 1473–1800. British Library. estc.bl.uk. Watson, George, ed. The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature. 5 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974.

One strategy for assessing the popularity of an individual work is to examine its printing history. Contemporary reception, in this case, can be deduced to a certain degree by discovering if a work was reprinted or published in a second or in multiple editions during a particular time period. To determine the number of editions, begin by checking the author’s entry in the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (NCBEL). The section devoted to the author’s primary works will follow the title entry with dates for other editions. If we use John Milton’s The doctrine and discipline of divorce, restor’d to the good of both sexes from the bondage of canon law and other mistakes to Christian freedom, guided by the rule of charity, as an example, the entry indicates that it was published originally in 1643 (August) and again in 1644 (February) as a revised edition. In contrast, Paradise Lost: a poem written in ten books is listed as going through seven editions before the end of the seventeenth century, in 1667, 1674 (revised as a poem in twelve books), 1678, 1688, 1691–1692, 1693, and 1695 (edited by P. Hume). The Paradise Lost entry also includes information about translations into other languages, with dates, and a reference for editions of individual books. Many lesser-known authors are also covered in the NCBEL, such as the entry for Anne Collins (rather than An), which notes that her Divine songs and meditacions appeared only as one edition in 1653. Finding publication history for Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko: Or, the Royal Slave is less straightforward. Using the index to consult her main entry in the “Minor Restoration Drama, 1660–1700” section, a note states that her novels are covered in the general “Minor Fiction” section, where you need to hunt for the Oroonoko entry among other authors’ works arranged in alphabetical order by date of publication. Here we learn that Oroonoko was published in 1688 and 1696 but with an ambiguous note to see the above entry for publication information.

Contemporary Reception

179

As with these examples, you may want to verify the information provided in the NCBEL or possibly obtain additional publication details by checking a standard bibliography for your author. For example, Aphra Behn: An Annotated Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources, discussed earlier in this chapter, presents detailed descriptions of Oroonoko as it was reissued in Three Histories in 1688 and reprinted in The Histories and Novels of the Late Ingenious Mrs. Behn in 1696, thus clarifying the NCBEL entry. The bibliography also notes later reprints and translations. Companions to particular authors, such as the Cambridge Companion to Milton, can be used to identify bibliographies and topical scholarly studies that may address literary reputation specifically, or printing history of particular works more generally. In addition to these suggestions, both the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) and Early English Books Online (EEBO) may be used to assess the number of editions for specific works, especially for those authors who do not have a bibliography that includes information on editions. If we search for Milton’s The doctrine and discipline of divorce in the ESTC and EEBO, we discover records for 1643, 1644, and 1645 printings. The “Notes” field for the 1643 version in EEBO indicates that this is the first edition, according to Wing. Although the 1644 record does not have a note regarding the edition, NCBEL gives this date as the second edition. To confuse matters even further, the title of the 1645 version states that this copy is “now the second time revis’d and much augmented in two books.” Here is a case where the information is not clear from the ESTC and EEBO records, and so you would need to consult a standard bibliography or scholarly studies about the texts to determine the edition status. For some titles, you may discover that the publication history is ambiguous and that there may be scholarly disagreement or debate about particular editions. Since sources like EEBO, ESTC, and NCBEL are based on the work of Pollard and Redgrave and Wing, there may be inconsistencies or room for reinterpretation in determining publication history. To keep abreast of current scholarly assessments, be sure also to check the library catalog for monograph studies, or MLAIB and ABELL for relevant journal articles concerning the publication history for an author or for a particular work. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS SUBJECT HEADINGS Since studying contemporary reception of an author’s works may involve approaching the topic from several different perspectives, including perhaps broader studies of early modern readers or audiences, the book trade and book history, anthologies and canon formation, literacy, transmission of texts, or libraries, the following is a list of Library of Congress subject headings that

180

Chapter Seven

you may find useful, with specific author headings included to illustrate potentially relevant subheadings: Theater audiences—England—History—16th century Authors and readers—England—History—17th century Books and reading—England—History—16th century Women—Books and reading—England—History—16th century Private libraries—England—History—17th–18th centuries—Sources Private libraries—Great Britain—History Book industries and trade—England—History—17th century Literacy—England—History—16th century Fiction—Appreciation—England—History—17th century Transmission of texts—England—History—16th century Criticism—Social aspects—England—History—17th century Lanyer, Aemilia—Criticism and interpretation Behn, Aphra,—1640–1689—Criticism and interpretation—History Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Stage history Milton, John, 1608–1674—Contemporaries Canon (Literature) Anthologies—Publishing—Great Britain—History—17th century Commonplace-books—History Books and reading—History Women—Books and reading

CONCLUSION Determining the contemporary critical reception of an early modern author can be challenging. For some major canonical figures, questions about reception may be answered through standard reference sources, such as the Critical Heritage compilations or through bibliographies or scholarly monograph studies. The literary scholar may be content with these sources, or may wish to delve further by pursuing some of the other options for assessing reception discussed in this chapter. Scholars studying less-critically established figures will need to be creative and employ a variety of approaches to develop a picture of how that particular author’s works were initially received. We hope that the search strategies presented here not only will guide you in this process but may also encourage you to consider additional sources, such as miscellanies, commonplace books, marginalia, and private libraries, which can also provide potentially unique, interesting, and less-frequently explored ways to understand reception and literary reputation in early modern British society.

Contemporary Reception

181

NOTES 1. Martin Garrett, ed., Sidney: The Critical Heritage (New York: Routledge, 1996). 2. John Leland, “Naeniae in mortem Thomae Viati equitis incomparabilis, London, 1542,” in Wyatt: The Critical Heritage, ed. Patricia Thomson (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), 25. 3. Elizabeth W. Pomeroy, The Elizabethan Miscellanies: Their Development and Conventions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 11. 4. Pomeroy, 30. 5. Adam Smyth, “Profit and Delight”: Printed Miscellanies in England, 1640– 1682 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004), 1. 6. Smyth, 2. 7. Earle Havens, Commonplace Books: A History of Manuscripts and Printed Books from Antiquity to the Twentieth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University, 2001), 65. 8. William H. Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), xii. 9. Sherman, xiii. 10. Readers of early modern marginalia studies will also likely come across the title The Rosenthal Collection of Printed Books with Manuscript Annotations: A Catalog of 242 Editions Mostly Before 1600 Annotated by Contemporary or NearContemporary Readers by Bernard M. Rosenthal (Yale University Press, 1997). Although this source sounds promising, the collection represents books printed in continental Europe before 1600 (including many classical authors), rather than literary works by early modern British authors. However it may be of interest to researchers doing comparative studies. Another title you are sure to encounter is Roger E. Stoddard’s Marks in Books, Illustrated and Explained. Although it offers a fascinating introduction to the range of printers and readers’ marks, based on the Houghton Library exhibition, it gives few (and no substantial) examples of readers’ annotations to works by early modern English authors. 11. Stephen Orgel, “Marginal Maternity: Reading Lady Anne Clifford’s A Mirror for Magistrates,” in Printing and Parenting in Early Modern England, ed. Douglas A. Brooks (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2005), 280. 12. Sherman, xiii. 13. See Heidi Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005) and James A. Riddell and Stanley Stewart, Jonson’s Spenser: Evidence and Historical Criticism (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1995); Stephen Orgel’s study of Anne Clifford is cited in note 11. 14. Sherman, endnote 9, 186. 15. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Writing Women in Jacobean England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 137. 16. Lewalski, 137–38. See also George C. Williamson, Lady Anne Clifford, Countess of Dorset, Pembroke & Montgomery, 1590–1676: Her Life, Letters and

182

Chapter Seven

Work (1922; repr. Wakefield, UK: S. R. Publishers, 1967), 498–500 which contains a complete list of the books represented in the painting. 17. R. J. Fehrenbach and E. S. Leedham-Green, eds., in the United Kingdom. Private Libraries in Renaissance England: A Collection and Catalogue of Tudor and Early Stuart Book-Lists, vol. 1 (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1992), xvi. 18. Fehrenbach, vol. 1, 256. 19. David Pearson, Provenance Research in Book History: A Handbook (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 1998), 173. 20. Fehrenbach, vol. 1, xvi. 21. T. A. Birrell, “Reading as Pastime: The Place of Light Literature in Some Gentlemen’s Libraries of the 17th Century,” in Property of a Gentleman: The Formation, Organisation and Dispersal of the Private Library, 1620–1920, ed. Robin Myers and Michael Harris (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 1991). 22. Fehrenbach, vol. 1, 257. 23. Pearson, 177.

Chapter Eight

Manuscripts and Archives

Manuscript culture flourished in the Renaissance and early modern period. Although the introduction of the printing press in the fifteenth century fostered the development of printed materials throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, manuscripts remained a dominant form for writings of all types. Many authors, both canonical and less well known, are distinguished by their decision to circulate their work almost exclusively in manuscript; Sidney, Raleigh, Wyatt, Donne, Carew, Herrick, Strode, Corbet, King, and Philips were among them. Women authors of the period in particular participated in manuscript endeavors, both creative and practical. Groups of writers, based either among families and friends, or within intellectual, religious, legal, or political communities (e.g., universities, Inns of Court, the court) exchanged their work through manuscripts that were shared to form a continually evolving and fertile environment for social and communal authorship. Much has been made of the “stigma of print” that permeated the aristocracy during this period, as proposed by Saunders,1 but an author’s decision to choose manuscript publication could be founded on many reasons.2 Print and manuscript production served very different needs, with print tailored to longer texts and larger numbers of copies and manuscripts suited to more specialized readerships. As Elizabeth Clarke and Jonathon Gibson write in the introduction to Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Poetry: The importance of manuscript writing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries can hardly be over-emphasized. Many early modern writers of both sexes were reluctant to use print publication to distribute their work, preferring to write solely in manuscript, sometimes allowing or encouraging their work to circulate widely, sometimes drastically limiting its dissemination.3

183

184

Chapter Eight

Although surviving early modern manuscripts represent a range of genres (as much or as little as genres can be recognized at this time), including prose, poetry, drama, satire, religious and political writings, diaries, newsletters, translations, and more, manuscripts appear to have been a particularly favored medium for verse. Demonstrating the communal nature of the manuscript circles and poetic efforts in particular are the many poetic miscellanies from the period. These collections compiled poems by several writers, usually but not exclusively associated within a scribal community. Harold Love stresses that to read individual poems outside the context of their original presentation disregards the way in which they would have originally been read, interpreted, and exchanged: “Any attempt to enter that first reading experience must always take account of the company poems were accustomed to keep.”4 Commonplace books are a different example of literary endeavors that survive in manuscript. The commonplace book was an individual’s personal anthology of selected passages, existing originally in print or manuscript, that were copied into a book meant for edification and/or personal enrichment. The kinds of material that were collected in commonplace books ranges widely: Poetry is found along with personal letters, diaries and journals, household accounts, medical receipts, recipes and other useful forms of information—a sign that literary texts were part of a social life, not artificially segregated from the everyday world as they came to be in a developed print culture.5

Manuscripts are a rich and varied resource for exploring the types of literary output during the period and an especially important medium for understanding the intricate relationships between writing, reading, and transmission that existed in the early modern era. Manuscript works sometimes were printed many years after their creation, were printed in unauthorized versions, or were never printed at all; each had different consequences for their authors, contemporary readership, and literary research of the period. A literary canon biased toward printed texts and the predominance of women’s writings in manuscript form led to an absence of women from the critical tradition and a misunderstanding of the extent to which women wrote and circulated their work in the early modern era. New critical attention to individual manuscripts and to manuscript culture, with particular scholarly interest in women’s manuscripts, has led to a reassessment of literary activity for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Studies by Margaret Ezell, Peter Beal, Harold Love, Henry R. Woudhuysen, and Arthur F. Marotti are representative and provide insight into this exciting and evolving aspect of the field. Not only are digitizing projects such as EEBO

Manuscripts and Archives

185

opening up early modern printed texts to discovery and literary investigation in new ways, the same is also true for manuscripts of the period, with projects like Perdita Manuscripts and Literary Manuscripts: Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Poetry from the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds as fine examples (both described in the Microforms and Digital Collections chapter) and the British Literary Manuscripts Online, c.1660–1900. The work-in-progress Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts (ies.sas .ac.uk/cmps/Projects/CELM/) will also make searching by new and multiple access points possible. Whether authors chose to publish their work in print, manuscript, or both, understanding the role played by manuscript culture is integral to literary research of the early modern period. Studying actual manuscripts, however, is not without certain difficulties. Although some manuscripts are now available in digital or microforms, or in facsimiles, the majority have not been reproduced and can still only be accessed in special collections and archives. In fact, depending on your particular research needs, it may be imperative to examine the manuscripts in person, whether or not an alternative copy exists. Other problems associated with manuscript research from this time period are the wide scatter of manuscripts, with works by a particular author potentially being held at different institutions or private collections around the world; the range in document accessibility and levels of cataloging (or not being cataloged at all!); and, of course, challenges in reading handwriting from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Regardless of these potential obstacles, if your research interests lie in this direction, then you should certainly be encouraged to pursue them. For as Peter Beal emphasizes in his preface to In Praise of Scribes, there is something special and unique about manuscript texts: Unlike printed books . . . each manuscript is peculiar: it is physically and ontologically unique. Even multiple scribal copies of the same work, perhaps made by the same individual, are each a separate edition of that work, each one subject to contingent circumstances of production, readings, and interpretation, decisions of presentation within given traditions, and the influence of contemporary readers. And when we turn to physical evidence itself—to matters of paper, ink, and its application, as well as handwritings—we become even more aware that, ultimately, for all the usefulness of modern technology, there is no substitute for the original.”6

This chapter will aid you in investigating manuscripts and other archival material by outlining best practices for archival research, discussing the principal print and electronic resources for identifying relevant manuscripts and archives, and describing resources for period paleography.

186

Chapter Eight

GENERAL INFORMATION ABOUT ARCHIVES AND BEST PRACTICES English Manuscript Studies, 1100–1700. British Library, 1989–. Annual. ISSN: 0957-8080. Description available at www.press.uchicago.edu/Complete/Series/ BRITL-EMS.html. Norbrook, David. Exploring Literary Manuscripts. Centre for Early Modern Studies, University of Oxford, 2004. www.cems.ox.ac.uk/exploring_manuscripts1.shtml. Pearce-Moses, Richard. A Glossary of Archival and Records Terminology. Society of American Archivists, 2005. www.archivists.org/glossary/index.asp.

Conducting research in an archive or special collection is likely to be different than what you have experienced in an academic or public library. Most scholars are familiar with Library of Congress subject headings for their particular areas of interest and are quite accustomed to finding items in an online catalog or database and then retrieving those materials for themselves. Archives are a distinctive environment, however, with vastly different rules for cataloging, finding, and using primary source material. Understanding these differences will ensure that your experience at the archive will be as rewarding and productive as possible. The Society of American Archivists (SAA) defines an archive both as the “materials created or received by a person, family, or organization, public or private, in the conduct of their affairs and preserved because of the enduring value contained in the information they contain or as evidence of the functions and responsibilities of their creator,” and also the building that houses these archival collections.7 Archival materials can range widely, from handwritten manuscripts to photographs to born-digital files (and everything in between); underlying this spectrum, however, is the principle that archival materials are unique or rare items whose preservation for posterity is worthwhile. As a literary scholar of the early modern period you will most likely be interested in an author’s literary creations, either in that author’s hand or that of a scribe, but other personal papers such as notebooks, commonplace books, letters (by the author or his/her contemporaries), marginalia in printed books, some public documents such as wills, court trials, proclamations, or state papers, and other items such as paintings, drawings, and maps may also contribute to your research. You will find these kinds of resources at large institutions like the British Library, the National Archives, or university libraries, but they may also be held at small museums, local historical societies, and county records offices, or be in private collections. Although some of these repositories will have an online catalog for searching their archival collections, many will not. Instead, you may need to consult published and unpublished finding aids that serve as a list or inventory of the collection. If the archive does have an online catalog,

Manuscripts and Archives

187

keep in mind that cataloging practices can be different for archival materials; that catalog records can vary across repositories and even within an institution, especially one that has been collecting over hundreds of years; and that you may encounter limited access points to the holdings (for example, you may be able to search by name but not by subject). Moreover, even if an archive has an online catalog, it may not represent all of the collection. Always be sure to read any scope note or introduction to establish what is and is not included in the catalog. The SAA A Glossary of Archival and Records Terminology, cited previously, is a useful resource for understanding terms such as record, manuscript, holograph, finding aid, and others that you are likely to encounter in this type of research. The first step in preparing for archival research is to read as much of the relevant secondary literature as possible. Since your time at the archive will probably be of limited duration, you will want to be knowledgeable about your particular research topic and understand the historical context for any manuscripts or documents you plan to consult. Reading widely will ensure that you will be familiar with key figures, events, and dates (so that you don’t need to waste precious time at the archive looking up this kind of information). A thorough literature review can also introduce you to potential sources you may not have considered originally. If the authors you are reading did their own archival research, check their introductions and acknowledgment pages to determine which manuscripts and archival collections were consulted, and in the case of a recently published work, to find the names of archivists or librarians who were especially helpful. Researching the provenance of your manuscript, if available, or the history of the collection in which it resides, may enhance your understanding of the manuscript’s context. During your reading, note any questions that you hope to answer by examining the manuscript/s, or any particular elements that you want to investigate further. These notes should help you develop a research plan, so that you can use your time at the archives effectively. Keep in mind, however, that a research plan is not set in stone. You may experience unanticipated problems, including missing, damaged, or unavailable manuscripts, or viewing the actual manuscripts may generate an entirely new set of questions, or lead you in an unexpected research direction. Come prepared to be purposeful but also flexible in your research. For reading sixteenth- and seventeenth-century manuscripts, you must first become familiar with secretary and italic letter forms and handwriting, and also understand contemporary scribal and dating practices. The resources listed in this chapter’s paleography section can help you to prepare for reading period documents. David Norbrook has a very good general introduction to working with early modern literary manuscripts and manuscript culture

188

Chapter Eight

in Exploring Literary Manuscripts, posted on the University of Oxford’s Centre for Early Modern Studies website, including a narrative description of resources and a bibliography. You may also want to review volumes of English Manuscript Studies, 1100–1700, to see how scholars have used period manuscripts and to inform your own research endeavors. Volume 13, edited by Peter Beal and published in 2008, addresses new early modern manuscript texts and discoveries; volume 15 (2009), edited by A. S. G. Edwards, explores Tudor manuscripts from 1485 to 1603. Earlier volumes cover such topics as writings by early modern women (vol. 9), scribes and manuscript transmission (vol. 12), and seventeenth-century poetry, music, and drama (vol. 8). Published annually by the British Library, the series currently is available in the United States from the University of Chicago Press. After you have done your reading and have identified a manuscript or manuscripts you would like to examine, the next step will be to check the holding archive’s website to gather information about hours, collections, and procedures for visiting. Unlike an academic library that may be open evenings and weekends, archives typically may be open only during the work week and for shorter hours. Check for hours of operation and for any special days on which the archive is closed so that you can plan your visit accordingly. Although some archives make their collections available to the general public, this is not always the case. Be sure to know who is allowed access to the materials and whether or not you will need to apply for a reader’s card, as is required at the British Library, or if you need to present particular forms of identification or letters of reference from your department chair or dissertation supervisor. Depending on the archive, you may need to register for reading privileges in advance, or schedule an appointment for your visit. It is always a good idea to contact the archive before you visit anyway, so that you can confirm that the manuscripts you want to review are available and also to ask any questions. The staff are usually very knowledgeable about the collections and may be able to refer you to appropriate finding aids or make valuable suggestions. If you do not already have the manuscript number, shelfmark, or other form of location identification for the manuscript, check to see if the archive posts any online finding aids or features a catalog to the collections so you can obtain this information. Some archives permit ordering manuscripts for review in advance, which you should consider doing if possible, especially if the archive is at a distance. Typically you may only be able to view a few documents at one time, and you should expect a certain time delay between requesting a manuscript and having it delivered to you once you arrive at the archive, since the staff will need time to retrieve items. If you can order manuscripts in advance, you will be able to begin reading right away; be sure to factor in a time delay if you end up ordering additional materials while at the archive.

Manuscripts and Archives

189

Before traveling to the archive, you’ll need to learn whether the archive permits the use of laptops and what kind of Internet access, if any, will be available. Other questions to ask include, what kinds of reproduction services are provided, and what are the fees involved? Usually portable imaging devices such as scanners or cameras are not allowed, but the archive may make photocopies, digital images, slides, or microfilms depending on the physical state of the particular items. If you plan to include reproduced images in your published research, then you will need to review the applicable donor agreements and copyright restrictions, as well as the archive’s policies and possibly fees regarding publication of materials. In addition to this information, the archive may also post information about and directions to local restaurants, housing, or transportation, and advice about appropriate attire. If the archive you wish to visit does not have a website, review its entry in the directories listed in the “Locating Relevant Archives and Manuscripts” section and contact the archive directly for further information. Although all of these suggestions may seem like a lot to do and you may be eager just to get to the archive, knowing as much about the policies and procedures beforehand will only benefit you in the long run. By now you may have surmised that reviewing archival materials requires careful planning, can be time consuming, and may be potentially expensive, especially if the visit involves traveling long distances and staying several days or longer in a large (e.g., expensive) city, such as London, Washington, D.C., or Los Angeles. To offset (or cover) this expense, consider applying for a grant, fellowship, or research stipend either from your university, a professional association like the Renaissance Society of America, a national organization such as the National Endowment for the Humanities, or directly from the holding repository. The “Fellowships and Grants” section of PMLA (in each September issue) posts information about funding opportunities, including guidelines, applicant qualifications, stipend amounts, and deadlines. When you arrive at the archive, you will likely be required to check your coat or jacket, briefcase or laptop case, or backpack as a security measure. If you have applied for one beforehand, you will present your reader’s card or show staff the necessary identification. You may also be asked to fill out a user form or to read the archive’s policies regarding use of the collections. These guidelines may state that you only use a pencil or bring in a certain number of pages, and stipulate no food, drink, gum, or sharp objects in the reading room, among other requirements. Remember that these guidelines are designed to preserve the materials for future use and that your compliance is expected and necessary. You may then either pick up preordered items or submit your requests for materials. As stated previously, since the materials are kept in closed stacks, anticipate a wait for items (sometimes up to several hours) and

190

Chapter Eight

restrictions on the numbers of documents you may view at one time. Also keep in mind the final time for requesting materials for the day. Sometimes you will not be permitted to see the original document but may have to consult a facsimile or microfilm version instead—try to determine if this will be the case before you arrive. You will only be allowed to view the materials in the appropriate reading room and may be watched by archival staff. Depending on the type or arrangement of the materials, or your particular research topic, you may have to sort through an entire folder to find relevant items. Always take detailed notes while reading, since you will rely on this recorded information once back home. If you are transcribing a manuscript, you may want to follow the suggested semidiplomatic guidelines outlined in the CERES English Handwriting, 1500–1700 online course described in the “Resources for Early Modern Handwriting” section. Since you may be citing the archived resources in your research, be sure to carefully record the collection name and/or folder title, dates, folder and box number, manuscript number, or local shelfmark or call number. Try to cover the concerns addressed in your research plan, if possible, but also be open to new interpretations, questions, and avenues of interest. Build on your previous knowledge but allow your unique interaction with the materials to inspire, stimulate, and shape your research. The Huntington Library is renowned for its strong collection of English Renaissance materials, spanning 1500 to 1641, and will serve as a good example of an archive you might consult for early modern authors and topics. A private institution located in San Marino, California, the Huntington was founded by Henry E. and Arabella Huntington in 1919 and was originally based on their collections of rare books, manuscripts, art, and plants (comprising the other Huntington components of art collections and botanical gardens). The library currently holds almost six million manuscripts concerned with American and British literature and history. The Manuscripts Department website states that descriptions of more than one thousand of their manuscript collections are searchable in the online catalog through collection-level summaries (Online Catalogue) and in WorldCat, and that a card catalog for pre-1994 acquisitions and numerous finding aids provide additional access to the manuscript collections. You would not be able to search the catalog for individual manuscripts that were cataloged before 1994, which according to the catalog contents Web page, “represent approximately 95% of the Library’s core manuscript holdings.” So in the case of the Huntington, like many other archival institutions, you must use the finding aids and other resources for identifying manuscripts described in the next section. Only qualified scholars are permitted to consult the materials in the reading rooms and must first apply for reading privileges, with separate applications

Manuscripts and Archives

191

for faculty, doctoral students, and independent scholars. Doctoral students may request access if they have passed their qualifying exams and advanced to candidacy. They will need a letter from their dissertation advisor confirming their candidacy, along with a description of their research project and the reason why they need to consult the collections, in addition to the application form. If accepted, they will be given a registration appointment, to which they will need to bring their student identification and another form of photo identification, such as a passport or driver’s license. After going through the registration appointment and orientation, scholars then request and view manuscripts or rare books in the Ahmanson Reading Room. Laptops are permitted and Internet access is available. In addition to the archival materials, secondary reference materials covering books, periodicals, and microfilm are located on open shelves and can be used in either the Ahmanson or General reading rooms. The Huntington Library offers onsite reproduction services, including digital files and prints, slides and transparencies, photocopies, and microfilm. Readers are expected to understand and comply with copyright guidelines. For those readers interested in publishing images or texts from the Huntington collections, permission must be given by the institution in accordance with the terms outlined on the policy Web page, including compliance with donor agreements, copyright restrictions, and appropriate fees. We hope this description of procedures and policies at the Huntington Library will give you an idea of what you may encounter at similar archival institutions and will help you plan for your experience.

LOCATING RELEVANT ARCHIVES AND MANUSCRIPTS Ash, Lee, and William G. Miller, comps. Subject Collections: A Guide to Special Book Collections and Subject Emphases as Reported by University, College, Public, and Special Libraries and Museums in the United States and Canada. 2 vols. 7th edition, revised and enlarged. New Providence, NJ: R. R. Bowker, 1993. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. First-Line Index of English Poetry 1500–1800 in Manuscripts of the James M. and Marie-Louise Osborn Collection in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University (Osborn First-Line Index). New Haven, CT: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, 2005. Croft, Peter J., Theodore Hofmann, and John Horden, eds. Index of English Literary Manuscripts. 4 vols. New York: Bowker, 1980–1999. Superceded by Beal, Peter, comp. Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts 1450–1700. ies.sas.ac.uk/cmps/ Projects/CELM/.

192

Chapter Eight

Crum, Margaret, ed. First-Line Index of English Poetry, 1500–1800, in Manuscripts of the Bodleian Library, Oxford. 2 vols. New York: Modern Language Association, 1969. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Gale, 1978–. Available online at www.gale .cengage.com. Foster, Janet, and Julia Sheppard, eds. British Archives: A Guide to Archive Resources in the United Kingdom. 4th ed. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Matthew, Henry C. G., and Brian Harrison, eds. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (in association with The British Academy). 61 vols. Revised ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Available by subscription at www.oxforddnb.com; updated three times a year. May, Steven W., and William A. Ringler, Jr. Elizabethan Poetry: A Bibliography and First-Line Index of English Verse, 1559–1603. 2 vols. New York: Thoemmes Continuum, 2004. Milhaus, Judith, and Robert D. Hume, comps. and eds. A Register of English Theatrical Documents, 1660–1737. 2 vols. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991. Ringler, William A., Jr. Bibliography and Index of English Verse in Manuscript, 1501–1558. Prepared and completed by Michael Rudick and Susan J. Ringler. New York: Mansell, 1992. Woolley, James. First-Line Indexes of English Verse, 1650–1800: A Checklist. www .bibsocamer.org/BibSite/Woolley/index.pdf. WorldCat. OCLC. www.oclc.org/firstsearch/.

In conducting archival research, you will need to identify the manuscripts or documents pertinent to your research and then learn which archives or libraries hold these resources in their collections. Websites and online catalogs for various archival gateways and individual repositories have made this process easier than before but you will still need to consult standard print reference tools. Although the Internet has had a significant impact on literary research, as described throughout this book, scholars continue to work in a mixed environment of print and online reference sources, both subscription-based and those freely available on the Web. If your research is centered on a particular author or authors, the first logical step is to check the standard editions of their works or an authoritative biography. These sources should mention either specific manuscripts or collections that were consulted, typically in the acknowledgments section or introduction, but also potentially in the bibliography. Likewise, searching for print facsimiles or microform versions of your author’s manuscripts may lead you to the original location. Search in WorldCat or your local library catalog using your author’s name in combination with the keyword manuscript*. A WorldCat search for wyatt thomas in the “Author” field and manuscript* retrieves thirty-two hits, with some records identifying specific manuscripts

Manuscripts and Archives

193

directly, including the Blage, Cotton, Egerton, and Devonshire manuscripts. You can also try searching MLA International Bibliography and ABELL with the same search strategy for additional leads. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) profiles frequently noted individual manuscripts within the text of an entry and also provides information on archival holdings of literary manuscripts, correspondence, or other personal papers. For well-known figures, the ODNB can be a potentially rich resource for uncovering relevant manuscripts or interesting leads. The biographical profile for Lady Mary Wroth, for example, discusses not only the locations of her literary manuscripts but also identifies other documents that illuminate her literary reputation, relationships with family and friends, and the final years of her life. Underscoring how an author’s manuscripts can be widely dispersed, the unpublished holograph continuation of Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania is at the Newberry Library; one version of her sonnet sequence “Pamphilia to Amphilanthus” is at the Folger Shakespeare Library; her play “Love’s Victory” exists in holograph as a complete version at Penshurst Place and an incomplete one at the Huntington Library; and her letter to the duke of Buckingham requesting a warrant from the king to retrieve sold copies of Urania is at the Bodleian Library. Other relevant manuscripts include the De L’Isle and Dudley manuscripts; “Herbertorum Prosapia,” a history of the Herbert family; probate records; letters by contemporaries; Lady Anne Clifford’s diaries; a chancery deposition; and a privately owned copy of the printed folio Urania, with corrections in Wroth’s handwriting. Be sure to read the biographical profile carefully, as only the Bodleian manuscript is listed under the “Archives” section concluding the entry. A search for aemilia lanyer only retrieves her name within the Mary Sidney Herbert entry, in a list of Herbert’s contemporaries, but searching with the spelling emilia lanier obtains her full entry. Neither entry, however, lists any manuscripts associated with Aemilia Lanyer. If your author’s name has variant spellings, be sure to search each alternative. Keep in mind that not every author will have an entry in the ODNB. A search for marie burghope, author of the country house poem, “The Vision,” for example, returns no hits whatsoever. Consequently, you will need to use additional sources and search strategies for some authors. In the case of Marie Burghope, a WorldCat search (as suggested previously) is unsuccessful but the same search in a local catalog (once her last name is truncated to marie burghope*) retrieves the book Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Poetry (Palgrave, 2005), since the local record lists Marie Burghope and her poem in the table of contents as illustrated in figure 8.1. Furthermore, the table of contents link for this book in the Library of Congress Online Catalog gives additional information, specifically the

194

Chapter Eight

Figure 8.1. Modified record for Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Poetry, with Marie Burghope contents highlighted. Source: University of Denver Penrose Library catalog.

poem’s location at the Huntington Library and manuscript number, shown in figure 8.2. By reading the introduction to the poem in Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Poetry, however, we learn that the Huntington holds only a facsimile copy and that the original is in a private library. If you are working with noncanonical or less-familiar authors and a library catalog search with an author’s name is not fruitful, try a more general search such as manuscript* and poetry and (renaissance or early modern) to retrieve such compilations as Reading Early Modern Women: An Anthology of Texts in Manuscript and Print, 1550–1700 (Routledge, 2004) or single studies like the Arundel Harington Manuscript of Tudor Poetry (Ohio State University Press, 1960). The Dictionary of Literary Biography (DLB) gives general information about literary manuscripts and other papers in the author entries, although the details can vary significantly. Lady Mary Wroth’s entry indicates the locations for the same literary manuscripts as noted in the ODNB entry, but also records copies of individual poems at the British Library and the University of Nottingham Library (without the manuscript shelfmark, unfortunately). On the other hand, the Sir Thomas Wyatt entry presents major literary manuscripts and correspondence, complete with locations and manuscript number, and a detailed discussion of the manuscript legacy within the narrative. Frus-

Figure 8.2. Modified Library of Congress Table of Contents record for Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Poetry, with Marie Burghope contents highlighted. Source: Library of Congress Online Catalog.

Manuscripts and Archives

195

tratingly, the Aemilia Lanyer entry doesn’t mention manuscripts either in the opening overview or in the full entry, so perhaps no surviving literary or other manuscripts have been identified. Since their coverage of manuscripts can differ, be sure to check both the DLB and ODNB in order not to miss a potential source of interest. Long a standard in the field, the Index of English Literary Manuscripts is one of the first reference sources to check for identifying manuscripts by canonical authors. Comprised of four volumes that were published between 1980 and 1999, volumes 1 and 2, which were compiled by Peter Beal, cover the early modern period, from 1450 to 1625 and 1625 to 1700, respectively. The authors were selected from the Concise Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, 600–1950 (Cambridge, 1965) and reveal how much our notion of the literary canon has expanded just in the past twenty to thirty years. Particularly notable are the absence of female authors for the period; only two figures, Aphra Behn and Katherine Philips, make an appearance in the second volume. Despite this omission, the Index of English Literary Manuscripts is still a valuable guide to extant manuscripts for the seventytwo (vol. 1) and fifty-two (vol. 2) British and Irish authors who are treated. Although the emphasis is on literary manuscripts, including scribal copies, diaries, notebooks, and the author’s marginal notes in printed books, nonliterary manuscripts such as letters (except for those that contain or are considered literary compositions) and other works (business documents, prompt copies of plays) are excluded but discussed in the introduction to each author’s section. These introductions are important for assessing what was known at the time of publication about the author’s manuscript legacy. For example, the introduction for Sir Walter Raleigh gives a narrative account of the surviving autograph manuscripts, among them many letters, and describes those considered especially important (e.g., the Cynthia poems, the notebook that he kept while imprisoned in the Tower, his journal of the voyage to Guiana, his scientific papers, and his political memoranda). The introduction also discusses poetry and prose doubtfully and formerly attributed to Raleigh; the contents of his library and extant volumes known to have been owned by him; later transcriptions of his work, such as those copied in miscellanies or inscribed on monuments; seventeenth-century transcriptions of his letters, letters written by others, and other documents associated with his trial and execution; additional surviving documents such as maps; and Spanish documents related to his “piracies.” Beal not only traces what is extant but also notes manuscript sale histories, those lost or destroyed, conjectures, and locations of nonliterary material. The introduction for each author section is followed by an entry for extant manuscripts or printed works, arranged by genre: verse, prose, dramatic

196

Chapter Eight

works, diaries and notebooks, marginalia in printed books and manuscripts, and miscellaneous categories, with subcategories or omissions depending on the surviving work. An asterisk before an entry number quickly lets you identify those texts that are entirely or partially in the author’s autograph. The entry states the title of the work and first line, if a poem; whether the source is an autograph, scribal copy, or printed with manuscript additions; the number and identification of hands or the primary person responsible for compilation (e.g., a miscellany); variant or alternative titles; the nature of the manuscript in which the text appears; provenance; miscellaneous information such as endorsements, later annotations, or dedications; known or approximate date when written; number of pages or folios; and a brief content summary for diaries, journals, notebooks, and miscellanies. These details are followed by a comments section that may cover history of publication, standard editions, disputed or multiple authorship, references to relevant works, scholarly or editorial use of the text, later transcriptions, cross-references, photocopy or microfilm copies available, and finally the holding repository, shelfmark, and/or page and folio numbers. Manuscripts from repositories in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Europe, the United States, Canada, Japan, South Africa, and New Zealand are covered, as well as manuscripts from some private collections. Adding to the value of this index are the single manuscript page facsimiles, some clearer than others, that present examples of selected authors’ hands, from the even and regular lines of Samuel Daniel’s Panegyrike Congratulatorie to the King to the rounded flourishes of William Wycherley’s letter to Alexander Pope, dated May 23, 1709. Other useful material includes repository, private owner, auction house, and bookseller addresses and a glossary of terms. Unfortunately volume 5, which was intended to contain indexes for first lines, names cited, and titles, as well as a table of manuscripts by repository and shelfmark, was never published. Despite these shortcomings, the Index is still a valuable resource for initially assessing a canonical author’s surviving manuscripts. Fortunately, the Centre for Computing in the Humanities is sponsoring an online Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts 1450–1700 (CELM), compiled by Peter Beal and currently still in progress, that updates and supersedes the printed volumes. This project aims to be more comprehensive in scope by adding more authors, especially women authors, in order to become the manuscript equivalent of the English Short Title Catalogue. Such an endeavor has the potential to significantly impact research opportunities for exploring this traditionally challenging arena of literary inquiry. Identifying manuscripts would certainly be difficult without the diligent efforts of earlier (and current) scholars, who worked to create not only source bibliographies but who also provided multiple means of access through their

Manuscripts and Archives

197

careful indexing. For scholars of early modern poetry, several first-line indexes offer valuable guidance to period verse in manuscript. Since neither titles nor author attribution (sometimes an author is given and sometimes not) were entirely stable during this time, first-line indexes offer a viable means of checking a particular poem and tracing it across manuscripts and time. Michael Londry, in his article on using first-line indexes for researching English poetry, demonstrates the ways first-line indexes can be used for “uncovering evidence concerning attribution, dating, manuscript circulation, song-book anthologization, general textual dissemination, critical reception, literary influence, reading,”8 and biographical information. Both his article and James Woolley’s website (described below) offer an annotated list of first-line indexes to print and manuscript sources of the long eighteenth century. The following first-line indexes will help you identify potential manuscripts of interest when researching particular authors or subjects. Conceived as a companion source to his Bibliography and Index of English Verse Printed 1476–1558, William Ringler spent nearly four decades examining manuscripts for the Bibliography and Index of English Verse in Manuscript, 1501–1558, which was completed by Michael Rudick and Susan Ringler following his death. The finished work describes 2,446 copies, either in whole or in part, of 2,045 poems for which transcriptions can be dated to the specified time period; these poems were found in almost 400 sources: 342 manuscripts, 43 printed books (containing 60 transcriptions), and 8 inscriptions on funeral monuments. Through both projects, Ringler aimed to create a comprehensive list of early Tudor verse, ranging “from major long poems occupying an entire manuscript down to occasional scraps and extracts jotted in margins and flyleaves of older books.”9 As a result, Ringler’s selections represent many different types of period verse, from ownership rhymes to Middle English poetry, from blank verse to alliterative verse, and from proverbs to carols. The book is arranged in two parts; the “Bibliography” section presents the source documents, listed alphabetically by STC holding institution sigla (symbols indicating location, e.g., BO: Boston Public Library, L: British Library, London), and includes manuscripts from the British Library, university libraries, and private institutions primarily in Britain and the United States. Printed books are listed first by shelfmark and are followed by manuscripts arranged by either collection title, shelfmark, or catalog number. Each entry describes the manuscript contents, gives a citation of printings if relevant, notes the total number of poems and also lines of verse transcribed, and lists the individual poems by assigned index (TM) number. Making up the second and major section of this reference work, the “FirstLine Index” lists the first lines of poems alphabetically from “A babe is born, to blys us brynge” (TM 1) to “Yougth luste Reches or Manhod” (TM 2044).

198

Chapter Eight

First lines without TM numbers, typically variant first lines of numbered poems, are cross-referenced to the relevant source. Entries for the poems provide the collection siglum and manuscript shelfmark, date of transcription, inclusive folios, identification of the poem, number of lines, verse and stanza form, siglum of second manuscript copy (if relevant), bibliographical identification of the poem, and assigned subject and genre headings. Be sure to read the introduction and consult the book’s “Guide to the Use of the Index” for a complete overview of how to interpret the entries. The “First-Line Index” can be used to identify manuscript copies of a poem by a particular author that may or may not have been attributed. Although first lines are not entirely stable, looking for poems in this way is more reliable than searching by title, since titles during this period varied tremendously or, in many cases, were not given at all. For example, if we wanted to find a manuscript copy of Henry Howard’s poem that begins, “I that Ulisses yeres have spent/ to seeke Penelope,” by checking the “First-line Index” we learn that the poem is included in the British Library’s manuscript designated Harley 78, a “composite volume of papers of various dates, 15th and 16th centuries, collected by John Stow, containing historical notes and poems.” Reading Howard’s poem in the context of this collection supports comparison with the other sources and may lead to an interesting interpretation. In addition to access by first line, the poems are also indexed by burdens, or the leading theme or sentiment (e.g., “Do well and drede no man,” “Hegh nony nony”); refrains by last word (e.g., adieu, joy, liberty); verse forms and rhyme schemes; name of English poet (including false attributions and corrections if known; anonymous poems are not listed); composers; copyists, manuscript compilers, and owners; historical persons and events (e.g., Catherine of Aragon, Norman conquest, Siege of Rouen); kinds (including present genres and sixteenth-century terms taken from the titles and texts, such as allegory, chanson d’aventure, dream, letter, macaronic, narrative, pageant, prophecy, and satire); religion (Old Testament, hell, Jesus Christ, Virgin Mary, death, prayer, and saints’ lives); subjects, titles, and fictional characters (with love, moral, women, fortune, and alchemy having the most assigned poems); and translations and adaptations (French, Greek, Italian, and Latin). These detailed indexes facilitate identification of manuscripts by multiple means. If we wanted to find other manuscript poetry that used Ulysses as a conceit, then we could consult the book’s “Subjects, Titles, Fictional Characters” index. Although there isn’t an entry for Ulysses, there are several poems listed with the heading “Myth” that may prove useful for comparison. Since Henry Howard’s poem was assigned the subject “Love,” we could also select poems to examine from the 567 listed in this category. Bibliography and Index of English Verse in Manuscript stands as a significant

Manuscripts and Archives

199

achievement and will be an important guide to scholars interested in studying manuscript verse of the early sixteenth century. Realizing Ringler’s vision to provide first-line indexing for nearly all known Tudor verse, Steven May’s Elizabethan Poetry: A Bibliography and First-Line Index of English Verse, 1559–1603, which was founded on work initially undertaken by Ringler, completes coverage of the Tudor period through the reign of Elizabeth. Elizabethan Poetry indexes both printed and manuscript verse of the period, for an impressive guide to more than 32,500 poems, with approximately twelve thousand poems derived from manuscript sources, in addition to selected funeral monuments and Elizabethan paintings. Spanning three volumes, the work begins with a bibliography of printed sources containing English verse, listed by STC number or engraving designation, followed by a bibliography of manuscripts with transcribed verse, which were gathered from ninety-five archives in England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and the United States. May notes in his introduction that some sources will be listed in both bibliographies, if they contain printed and transcribed poetry. He also advises readers that the scope is limited to sources dated to Elizabeth’s reign, so only a few poems by Shakespeare and none by Donne are included since their appearance post-dates 1603. In fact, Elizabethan Poetry features medieval, early Tudor, and even some AngloSaxon verse that was printed or transcribed during the Elizabethan period, along with poetry composed during the latter-sixteenth century. May’s first-line index combines print and manuscript poems together and is as delightful to browse as it is useful for identifying individual poems. Sample first lines range from “Affections strong that do move us” to “Foggers and flattering foisters” to “Shoot forth no more those darts from lightning eyes” to “Your mouse am I/So will I die.” Following the first line, entries are similar to those previously described for Ringler’s index, and present the source document with either STC number or library sigla and shelfmark; author, if known; title or contextual and explanatory information; subscriptions to the poem; number of lines, number of stanzas, and number of lines per stanza; rhyme scheme; burdens and refrains in parentheses; and assigned subjects. Only some entries have citations for later print or manuscript copies of the poem, and even fewer contain citations to editions of single poems or scholarship. Due to the vast number of poems covered by the index, May was required to develop a more detailed subject index than that used by Ringler. Volume 3 has indexes for “English Poets”; “Fictional Names and Topics” (e.g., Apollo, fairies, Golden Age, Maid Marian, Uther Pendragon); “Historical Persons and Events” (e.g., Flodden Field, Spanish Armada, Tyburn); “Illustrations”; “Literary Kinds” (here is located emblem verse, as well as significant parts

200

Chapter Eight

of poems, such as preface, prologue, and title page verse); “Poems Set to Music”; “Rhyme Schemes and Verse Forms,” including burdens and refrains; “Scribes and Owners”; “Subjects,” with many subtopics; “Subscriptions”; “Titles”; and “Translations.” These indexes enable scholars to identify verse manuscripts in ways that will support a broad range of research projects. As with the other reference works described here, be sure to read the introduction for more thorough guidance to scope and arrangement. One appendix lists STC books not reviewed for inclusion. Together, May and Ringler offer a valuable means of exploring the full range of Tudor poetic output from the beginning to the end of the sixteenth century. The development of all three Ringler indexes and their role within Renaissance and early modern poetry scholarship are discussed at length in the poetry section of chapter 9. Representing the collaborative efforts of scholars working over several decades, the First-Line Index of English Poetry, 1500–1800, in Manuscripts of the Bodleian Library, Oxford was initiated by Percy Simpson in 1932 as a card index, with contributions from postgraduate students in English literature until Margaret Crum assumed the editorship from 1950 to 1961 when the project was completed. Consequently, the index covers only manuscript poetry acquired by the Bodleian until that date, but remains, as Harner states, “the essential index to the most important collection of English poetry manuscripts of the three centuries.”10 Before using the index, scholars should read the brief overview to entry arrangement. Entries are listed alphabetically by first line with modernized spelling (apart from names), with variants in brackets, and include the last line; author, if known; title; other information from the manuscript; editorial notes, such as printed versions; and a list of Bodleian manuscripts in which the poem is found, with autographs set on a separate line. A small selection of unidentified poems “imperfect at beginning” are indexed by final lines following the primary index entries. Five indexes complete this reference work: Bodleian manuscripts listed by shelfmark; authors, with many poems listed for Thomas Carew, Richard Crashaw, John Donne, John Dryden, Robert Herrick, Ben Jonson, Katherine Philips, Francis Quarles, John Wilmot, William Strode, and Edmund Waller, among others; names mentioned (e.g., Francis Bacon, George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham, Charles I, Ben Jonson, Roger L’Estrange); authors of works translated, paraphrased, or imitated; and references to composers of settings and of tunes named or quoted (e.g.; Thomas Bateson, “Come come my sweet”). The Summary Catalogue of Post-Medieval Western Manuscripts in the Bodliean Library, Oxford: Acquisitions 1916–1975 describes manuscripts acquired for some years after the First-Line Index cut-off date of 1961. Focusing on one particular collection and extending beyond the early modern period, the First-Line Index of English Poetry 1500–1800 in

Manuscripts and Archives

201

Manuscripts of the James M. and Marie-Louise Osborn Collection in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University (Osborn First-Line Index) contains an impressive 20,574 poems in manuscripts originally collected by Mr. Osborn in the 1930s and added to over the years. The entries are based on the same format used in Margaret Crum’s First-Line Index of English Poetry and so present the first line, last line, the author if known, title, editorial information (including Crum number, if also in the Bodleian collection, and references to printed versions, if applicable), and shelfmark. Extracts from poems that don’t contain the first line are excluded, but incomplete poems that do start with the first line of the complete poem are indexed. Although the work does not have a chronological index, researchers can use the “Index of Names” to identify poems by authors from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, at least initially for those authors whose dates are given such as John Austin, Lady Jane Cavendish, Henry Neville, and William Strode, among many others both canonical and lesser-known. Sir Thomas Urquhart, in particular, is especially well represented. Additional indexes are manuscripts by shelfmark; names mentioned; authors of works translated, paraphrased, or imitated (such as Horace, psalms, Shakespeare); and composers and tunes named or quoted (e.g., Matthew Locke, Henry Purcell, Cuckolds all a-row, In Crete day). Not as comprehensively indexed as the Ringler bibliography, the Osborne First-Line Index nevertheless serves as a useful tool for identifying manuscript poetry by first line, by author, and by limited subject access. To supplement the first-line indexes outlined above, James Woolley’s First-Line Indexes of English Verse, 1650–1800: A Checklist features a comprehensive list of print, online, and unpublished indexes to poetry of the later early modern period and up through the eighteenth century. Available on the Bibliographical Society of America’s Bibsite, this checklist briefly describes twenty-one indexes to manuscript verse and fifty-six indexes to printed or combined printed and manuscript verse (not all of which will be relevant). Since poetry frequently reappears in musical form, Woolley decided to also include first-line indexes of vocal music, such as the Roxburghe Ballads (Ballad Society, 1869–1895) and the Restoration Theatre Song Archive (described in chapter 12), among others. Single-author indexes are not covered, nor are first-line indexes containing fewer than a thousand lines. Look here for first-line indexes to important manuscript collections at the British Library, Huntington Library, Folger Shakespeare Library, Houghton Library/Harvard University Library, Trinity College Dublin Library, and the University of Nottingham Library, which are not described in this chapter. In the introduction, Woolley announces plans for a forthcoming online union index to manuscript verse, initially representing holdings from the Bodleian,

202

Chapter Eight

Folger, Harvard, Huntington, Leeds, and Yale libraries, to be compiled by Carolyn Nelson. Scholars interested in manuscripts related to Restoration drama will want to examine A Register of English Theatrical Documents, 1660–1737. Arranged in two volumes chronologically by date and theatrical season, the register covers sources about the management and regulation of the theater, including Lord Chamberlain’s manuscripts; lawsuit material (mostly from Chancery); manuscripts from the British Library, the Bodleian, the Folger, the Harvard Theater Collection, and the Huntington, as well as other institutions; printed letters, pamphlets, and ephemera associated with specific dates or productions; and periodical references (newspapers and magazines) not related to specific performances or the publication of plays. Sample entries range from the names of the Queen’s comedians sworn in on December 17, 1661, to mention that the actors were silenced for mourning (June 23, 1670), to a “Satyr on ye Players” (1684–1685 season) that gives a “violently abusive account of the personal and sexual lives of the principal actors of the United Company.” Entries are numbered and provide a date (either exact or approximate), bibliographic information, a descriptive title, details about the content, additional location information, and publication details for printed period sources or modern scholarly transcriptions. Consult the “Explanation of Dates” section to understand the dating system employed in the Register. Four appendixes, “Undateable Triumvirate Receipts, 1714–1716,” “Documents Spanning More than One Season,” “Documents Misdated by Earlier Authorities,” and “Chancery Lawsuits by P.R.O. Numbers” are followed by one index of names, titles, and subjects, such as audience, Bartholomew Fair, Aphra Behn, Thomas Betterton, censorship, fruit concession, Hall Theatre, Thomas Killigrew, musicians, the United Company, and Sir Christopher Wren. The Register of English Theatrical Documents, though not a guide to manuscripts of the plays themselves, places those plays in context, bringing to life the world of the theater during the later seventeenth century. To locate archives or library collections that focus on a particular subject area, two print directories offer guidance to holdings in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. The standard reference source is Janet Foster and Julia Sheppard’s British Archives: A Guide to Archive Resources in the United Kingdom. Now in its fourth edition, this directory describes 1,231 archives in England, Scotland, and Wales, organized alphabetically by town. Never intended to be a comprehensive listing, the editors instead envisioned this source to be a “first step to locating the whereabouts of archives.”11 Regardless, the directory features a wide selection of archives in libraries, museums, universities, societies, public records offices, and private collections, and also covers business archives in the current edition. The easiest way to

Manuscripts and Archives

203

identify literary collections is to use the book’s “Guide to Key Subjects,” which has a general entry for literature and separate subcategories for plays, poetry, popular literature, and writers, with entry numbers for particularly strong collections noted in boldface. Additional key subjects of potential interest depending on individual research projects include folklore, religious denominations, and performing arts (which covers dance, drama, and music). Unfortunately, there is no way to identify only those collections relevant for the early modern period without actually reading the archive profile. These entries give the parent organization; in some cases, contact information, hours when open and whether or not an appointment needs to be made; historical background notes on the institution or organization; acquisitions policy; a description of the archives, comprising dates if known and major collections; description of nonmanuscript material (such as drawings, photographs, maps, films, sound, reference sources); finding aids; facilities for photocopying or photography; whether conservation is done in-house or contracted out; and a list of publications about the archives or its holdings. Unlike earlier editions, the latest guide combines the previously separate “Alphabetical Listing and Collections Index” into one “Main Index” for access to entries by repository titles, parent organizations, significant predecessor organizations, personal names, and names of collections. The seventh edition of Subject Collections: A Guide to Special Book Collections and Subject Emphases as Reported by University, College, Public, and Special Libraries and Museums in the United States and Canada offers fairly detailed subject access to special collections in U.S. and Canadian libraries and museums. Although somewhat dated now since it was compiled from questionnaires sent to libraries and museums in 1992, this directory still serves a useful purpose in identifying areas of special emphasis as reported at that time. Arranged alphabetically by subject headings and then within those sections first by state or province, then by city and library, subjects range from the general such as “Broadsides—Collections,” “English Poetry,” and “English Literature,” to the more specific such as “Shakespeare, William, and Shakespeariana” and “Women in Literature.” Each library entry offers location and contact information, some indicate holdings, and some also have a notes field to describe collections; this varies depending on the information provided by the individual library. The “Milton, John, 1608–1674” section, for example, lists collections at thirteen libraries in the United States, including the Honnold Library at the Claremont Colleges, which has “first, limited, and special editions of books, pamphlets, offprints by or about him.” Although special collections generally remain stable, given the publication date of this source it would be worthwhile to verify that a library still maintains a particular collection by contacting the library or checking its website.

204

Chapter Eight

WEBSITES FOR LOCATING ARCHIVES AND MANUSCRIPT COLLECTIONS Abraham, Terry, comp. Repositories of Primary Sources. 1995. www.uiweb.uidaho .edu/special-collections/Other.Repositories.html. Access to Archives. The National Archives. www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/a2a/. Accessions to Repositories. The National Archives. www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ accessions/default.htm. Archives Hub. www.archiveshub.ac.uk/. Archives Network Wales. www.archiveswales.org.uk/. Archive Finder. ProQuest/Chadwyk-Healey. archives.chadwyck.com. ARCHON Directory. The National Archives. www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/archon/. DocumentsOnline. The National Archives. www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documents online. Guide to the Contents of the Public Record Office. London: H. M. Stationary Office, 1963–1968. Index of Manuscripts in the British Library.10 vols. Teaneck, NJ: Chadwyck-Healey, 1984–1986. Index to Personal Names in the National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections, 1959–1984. Alexandria, VA: Chadwyck-Healey, 1988. Index to Subjects and Corporate Names in the National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections, 1959–1984. Alexandria, VA: Chadwyck-Healey, 1994. Manuscripts Catalogue. British Library. www.bl.uk/catalogues/manuscripts/index.asp. The National Archives. www.nationalarchives.gov.uk. National Archives of Ireland. www.nationalarchives.ie/. National Archives of Scotland. www.nas.gov.uk/. National Register of Archives. The National Archives. www.nationalarchives.gov .uk/nra/default.asp. National Register of Archives for Scotland. www.nas.gov.uk/onlineRegister. National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections (NUCMC). 1997. www.loc.gov/ coll/nucmc/. Nickson, Margaret A. E. The British Library: Guide to the Catalogues and Indexes of the Department of Manuscripts. 3rd rev. ed. London: British Library, 1998. Scottish Archive Network. www.scan.org.uk/.

In addition to using the preceding print and subscription resources, you may also want to consult the websites outlined in this section to identify relevant manuscripts and archives. Some of these are directories that will lead you to archives and collections specializing in a particular subject area, and others are for archival institutions themselves. Once you have found the institution that owns the manuscript you would like to consult, be sure to look directly at the archive or library’s website, if one exists. Many archives and libraries have descriptions of their collections on the Web, as well as information

Manuscripts and Archives

205

about visiting hours, reader’s cards, access rules, and more. Be aware, however, that not all institutions’ archival collections will be searchable by an online catalog, and if they are, the items may have been cataloged according to different rules than those used for books in a regular collection. Always read the “Search Tips” or “Help” pages, if provided, so that you are sure to search the collections effectively. More common to special collections than online catalogs are finding aids that allow you to browse the collection by broad descriptions, rather than search through the indexed contents. In order to make their collections accessible to a wider audience, many archives and libraries are digitizing parts of their holdings and adding searchable metadata. The British Library, for example, has made high-quality digital editions of selected manuscripts and early printed books available in their “Treasures in Full” section, in addition to other virtual books and online exhibitions. Although many of the manuscripts you identify will be located in public institutions, some may be held in private collections, with even more restricted access or no access whatsoever. As previously advised, try to learn as much as possible about the individual manuscripts, the particular collection, and the holding institution’s rules and methods of access to ensure that your time at the archive is a rewarding experience. The British Library’s Department of Manuscripts holds an impressive number of manuscripts from the early modern period. Manuscripts in Western languages dating from the “pre-Christian era to the present day” acquired by the British Museum and the British Library since 1753 can be searched in the online Manuscripts Catalogue. This catalog is composed of two distinct parts, indexes and descriptions, and reflects the department’s original approach to cataloging manuscripts. In fact, the online catalog is essentially a scanned version of the printed catalogs, and not all of them are currently or completely represented. For the most up-to-date information, be sure to check the Web page for a hyperlinked list of included catalogs and information for those not yet online. We also highly recommend that you review the search tips that provide a detailed guide to successfully using the various components of the index and description search interfaces. The former enables you to search by personal name, place name, or subject terms, as well as by language, state of the manuscript, date, and manuscript number; the latter permits searching the descriptions by single or multiple keywords or by manuscript number. These descriptions are narrative summaries of the manuscript’s content, date, language, bibliography, provenance, and physical details and can lead you to relevant sources that may be missed by searching only the indexes. For example, we can search for manuscripts about the Renaissance poet Sir Thomas Wyatt’s son, also named Sir Thomas Wyatt, who was part of the rebellion in 1554 protesting Mary I’s intended marriage

206

Chapter Eight

to Philip of Spain. A name index search on wyatt in combination with an index entry search on rebellion finds only one manuscript, a paper relating to Wyatt’s rebellion, but a descriptions keyword search with the same terms identifies nine additional sources, including indictments against participants in the uprising and an account of the life of Queen Mary, written by Robert Wingfield in Latin, whose “narrative gives a unique East Anglian view of the events of the first year of her reign, and especially of the details of her bid for the succession and Wyatt’s rebellion, differing in some respects from other contemporary accounts.” The Manuscripts Catalogue website states that most manuscripts may be consulted in the Manuscripts Reading Room, but also notes that some manuscripts may not be available due to preservation concerns or other reasons. As is the case with any archival institution, it is always best to confirm the availability of particular manuscripts in advance; the British Library suggests that scholars traveling long distances obtain that confirmation in writing before visiting. Up to three manuscripts may be ordered in advance by phone (preferred method), email, fax, or mail, and you will need to provide the manuscript numbers. Once at the Manuscripts Reading Room, you can order up to ten manuscripts per day and four at a time. Please be sure to check the “Search for and Order a Document” Web page for more details (www.bl.uk/ reshelp/bldept/atyourdesk/docsupply/searchandorderadocument/index.html). If you are interested in obtaining a paper, microfilm, or digital reproduction of a particular manuscript, you can order copies through the library’s Imaging Services for a fee (www.bl.uk/reshelp/atyourdesk/imaging/imaginghome .html). Your library may have the print Index of Manuscripts in the British Library, which features access by name and title to the collections up through 1950 and may be useful for reviewing those collections not currently represented in the online catalog. You may also want to consult The British Library: Guide to the Catalogues and Indexes of the Department of Manuscripts for understanding the different catalogs to the collections. Formally named the Public Record Office, the National Archives is the official institution responsible for maintaining government documents for England, Wales, and the central government of the United Kingdom. Records in the National Archives range from the late-eleventh-century Domesday Book through modern documents, and also include an impressive collection of manuscript and printed historical maps. The online Catalogue (formerly PROCAT) provides access to more than ten million documents, which are organized by originating government department rather than by subject. A link to the most popular department codes lists several that may be of interest for early modern era research, such as ADM (Admiralty, 1205–1992), CO (Colonial Office, 1570–1990), KB (Court of King’s Bench, 1194–1987), SC

Manuscripts and Archives

207

(Special Collections, including Court Rolls, Papal Bulls, Ancient Petitions and Seals, twelfth through twentieth century), and SP (State Paper Office and Secretaries of State, 1231–c. 1888), among others. If your library owns a copy, you may also want to consult the Guide to the Contents of the Public Record Office, which gives an overview of the departmental codes. The catalog has two search interfaces: the main page that features searching by word or phrase, with options to limit by date range or department code, and a “Places, Prominent People, and Subjects” search for browsing or searching the records by index terms. Using the latter is a quick way to identify relevant documents for Shakespeare or for the Star Chamber, but keep in mind that not every person or subject has an index term. To ensure more comprehensive searching, use the first interface that searches for words in the record descriptions, some of which are quite detailed. Just as with the British Library manuscripts search for documents on Wyatt’s rebellion, an index search for wyatt sir thomas retrieves only one probate record, but a keyword search on wyatt limited to 1550–1558 obtains two King’s Bench cases for high treason against Thomas Wyatt and other participants in Wyatt’s rebellion, neither of which had assigned index terms. Once you have selected a document, the “Full Details” tab will present the record summary, scope and content, access conditions, administration history, and index terms, if noted. Up to three documents can be ordered in advance online or by phone for viewing at the National Archives; details about acquiring a reader’s ticket and necessary documentation are posted on the website. If you are unable to go to the National Archives, you can order paper, CD-ROM/DVD, or digital copies of documents by first using the online form to request an estimate. The DocumentsOnline section of the National Archives enables you to search for public records that have already been digitized by the Archives; some records may be freely accessed, and others available for a fee. Current digital collections include Prerogative Court of Canterbury Wills (1384–1858); Famous Wills, such as those by William Shakespeare, Sir Francis Drake, and Samuel Pepys; and Ancient Petitions, Henry III to James I. In addition to searching the catalog, records can also be identified with the archive’s research guides. These guides function as an introduction to exploring numerous predetermined subjects such as America and the West Indies during the early modern period, outlawry, Civil War soldiers, or to researching state papers, the Court of Star Chamber, King’s Bench, or Chancery proceedings. Catering to scholars, the Medieval and Early Modern Records Information Service (MEMRIS) features subject specialists who will assist with researching period documents, including help with reading early modern handwriting or Latin. Based in the Map and Large Document Room, researchers can either make an appointment in advance or request assistance at the enquiry

208

Chapter Eight

desk (www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/about/research-scholarship.htm). A list of subject specialists and their areas of expertise are linked from the website: currently, James Travers offers assistance with researching writers and the government from 1570 to 1660, with an emphasis on court cases concerned with authors, the book trade, and playhouses. The National Archives has instituted a “Global Search” feature, so that it is possible to search not only the Catalogue but also ten other archival catalogs and directories simultaneously, including the National Register of Archives and Access to Archives (A2A) database described below. Depending on the search terms used, you may retrieve a very large set of hits (potentially in the thousands). Fortunately, recommended searches and subject categories linked on the right enable you to refine your results. Another search on thomas wyatt identifies the following extract from the Talbot Papers (1550–1557) held in the Lambeth Palace Library: Henry [Fitz Alan, twelfth] Earl of Arundel, to [Francis Talbot, fifth] Earl of Shrewsbury, Lord President in the North, no place [London], 28 January 1553/4. The Queen is having difficulty with “certain naughty members of her commonwealth”—the Carews [Sir Gawen and Sir Peter] in the West and [Sir Thomas] Wyatt in Kent—over her proposed marriage with Philip II of Spain. [Henry Grey, the first] Duke of Suffolk has run away. 1p. Damaged Ms. Clerk’s and, signed. Endorsed. (Talbot Papers MS.3194)

Since such a large-scale search can potentially swamp you with many irrelevant hits, you may want to use the “Global Search” after searching the National Register of Archives first. Established in 1945 and overseen by the Historical Manuscripts Commission, the National Register of Archives (NRA) is a centralized collection of more than forty-four thousand unpublished lists and catalogs that describe and give locations of manuscripts and documents related to British history; it is not, however, a repository for the manuscripts themselves. Not only does the NRA collect descriptions of archival collections in the United Kingdom, it also maintains descriptions of holdings related to British history in repositories around the world. Available on the National Archives website, the NRA can be searched by corporate name (combining the “Business Index” and the “Organisations Index”), personal name (combining the “Personal Index” and the “Diaries and Papers Index”), family name, and place name, or by advanced search options that permit searching some of these individual indexes. Be advised that there are no subject indexes to the NRA; the available indexes are concerned with the person, family, or organization that generated the records. The “Personal Index” is designed to provide access to relatively well-known figures, such as those people who have entries in

Manuscripts and Archives

209

the earlier Dictionary of National Biography. A search for francis bacon in this index finds twenty-one records for the early modern figure, including literary manuscripts, papers, family and personal correspondence, speeches, advertisements, books, and confession of his faith held at the British Library, Lambeth Palace Library, Bodleian Library, Inner Temple Library, Queens College Library, Hatfield House Library and Archives, Victoria and Albert National Art Library, University College London, Centre for Kentish Studies, Beineke Library, Mirehouse, and the Francis Bacon Foundation Library. The “Diaries and Papers Index” was created to give access to lesser-known figures by offering content descriptions, so that papers can be identified by limited subject terms. Even more intriguing is a personal name search on unnamed, which retrieves 576 hits, such as an unnamed Cornish author (flourished 1600–1700) whose papers include Cornish mystery plays (held at the National Library of Wales), or the unnamed Scottish writer (flourished 1513–1575) who produced a diurnal of “remarkable occurents” in Scotland (Glasgow University Library). The National Register of Archives database is integrated with ARCHON so that the researcher can link directly from a NRA record to the ARCHON Directory description of the holding institution. For example, you can move easily from the unnamed Scottish author record to the directory entry for the Glasgow University Library, Special Collections Department, which gives a mailing address, phone and fax numbers, email address, website address, an online map, access information, an overview of NRA entries by index type for the repository, and a link to online finding aids for the repository. The ARCHON Directory provides contact information for repositories in the United Kingdom and abroad that are recorded in the National Register of Archives as having “substantial” manuscript collections. From the ARCHON Directory page at the National Archives website, researchers can browse for repositories by region within England (e.g., Yorkshire and the Humber), or browse repositories in Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Republic of Ireland, Channel Islands, or the Isle of Man, or they can search the ARCHON Directory by repository name, type (e.g., business, local, university), town, county, or country. Thus if you were interested in tracing Elizabeth I’s progress in East Anglia during 1578, you could search the directory for repositories in Norwich that might hold papers about her visit. Twelve repositories are listed for Norwich, with contact details, access information, and related NRA entries given for each one. The ARCHON Directory is maintained by the Historical Manuscripts Commission and new repositories are added to the directory when material is received by the National Register of Archives. The National Register of Archives focuses on documents related to British history. To identify archival collections in England and Wales from the

210

Chapter Eight

eighth century to the present that go beyond that particular scope, try the Access to Archives (A2A) online database, which contains records for catalogs describing archival collections. Access to Archives has over ten million records that represent 418 archives and other repositories with a wide range in catalog description details, from a brief description of an entire archive to detailed descriptions of individual documents. The advanced search option permits searching by keyword, place, repository, or region, and limiting by date range. A phrase search for wyatt’s rebellion finds the papers of the Sykes family of Sledmere, held by Hull University’s Brynmor Jones Library, containing a manuscript account of Wyatt’s rebellion in the miscellaneous section, as well as papers held by the Surrey History Centre, the Centre for Kentish Studies, and the Lambeth Palace Library. Researchers may also want to consult the Accessions to Repositories annual survey available on the National Archives website, which reports new manuscript acquisitions from approximately two hundred repositories in Britain. The accessions are listed first by year and then either by repository or subject category, including literary history, medieval and early modern history, women’s history, London, brewing, publishing, and Irish, Welsh, and Scottish history, among several other categories. A search for early modern manuscript accessions for 2007, for example, outlines many family papers and deeds in local, national, special, and university repositories, and the literary history accessions includes a genealogy from 1598 by the Welshlanguage poet Thomas Jones acquired by the National Library of Wales. Although these manuscripts can be found in the National Register of Archives, it is interesting to see what manuscripts have recently been added for various areas of interest. In addition to the several archival projects outlined above, you may also want to review specific national repositories. The National Archives of Scotland (NAS) online catalog can be used to identify government records, including those of the pre-1707 Scottish crown, parliament, and government, as well as records created by legal registers, courts, churches, families, and corporate bodies. Scottish Archive Network (SCAN) offers an online catalog describing more than twenty thousand historical records held by fifty-two Scottish archives, searchable by keyword and archive code. The “Digital Archive” component to SCAN features many online exhibitions, such as “The Horrid Sinne of Witchcraft” presenting documents about Scottish witch hunts from Dumfries burgh dated 1650–1671, and one about herbal remedies from the early modern period and later. The National Register of Archives for Scotland (NRAS) lists papers of historical significance held privately, as well as private papers deposited in libraries and museums in Scotland. Archives Network Wales provides a catalog to collections held by record offices, uni-

Manuscripts and Archives

211

versities, museums, and libraries in Wales; this can be searched by keyword, repository, or date, or browsed by personal name, corporate name, place, and subject indexes. For researchers investigating Irish authors or topics, the National Archives of Ireland may hold relevant documents. Unfortunately many early records were destroyed by fire at the beginning of the Civil War in 1922, but some government agency documents and nongovernmental archives, such as records from Church of Ireland parishes, hospitals, charities, business firms, and private individuals from the seventeenth century, remain. An online catalog permits searching all or selected databases. Of note is the Directory of Sources for Women’s History in Ireland database, which describes more than fourteen thousand collections from both public and private repositories in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland concerned with women’s history from the earliest times to the present. Be sure to also consult the Irish, Welsh, or Scottish national libraries to review their manuscript holdings directly. Finally, Archives Hub offers mostly collection-level descriptions of archival holdings in 169 UK (mainly but not exclusively) university and college repositories, to be browsed by select indexes or searched by collection title, personal name, place name, subject, repository, or full descriptions. A “Subject Finder” feature leads from a search term or phrase to related subjects. Depending on your particular interests, you may want to explore additional online archival finding aids. Check the major resources described in this section, but also be sure to review the links on these websites to other, sometimes more specialized, repository catalogs. If your library does not have a subscription to WorldCat, or if you want to search WorldCat only for early modern literary and historical manuscript holdings in the United States and other countries, the National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections (NUCMC) serves as a gateway for searching archival and manuscript collections, mixed materials (those collections that contain both manuscripts and other kinds of materials), and bibliographic materials that have been cataloged with archival descriptive rules. The NUCMC is a cooperative cataloging program supported by the Library of Congress with the goal of increasing the visibility of archival collections in the United States. Approximately 1.5 million records describing manuscript collections and sometimes individual manuscripts found in public, university, and special libraries can be identified with either a simple search of words in the title, notes, and subject fields, or a word search in all name fields. The advanced interface facilitates constructing author, subject, notes, form/genre, geographic name, or title field searches. A search for behn aphra either as author (personal name) or subject returns 135 records; unfortunately, most are modern critical editions of her works or books about her. Among the results, however, is a record for an autograph letter to Abigail, daughter of Edmund

212

Chapter Eight

Waller, offering condolences on Waller’s death. To discover which library holds the letter, you need to select the “Tagged Display” option. In the case of this record, the Morgan Library and Museum in New York is listed in the 952 field. If no institution is apparent from the record, check the letter code in the 040 field, then search on that code in the “Participating Institutions Search” page. Instructions for locating collections are posted on the NUCMC homepage. Be forewarned that the OCLC NUCMC gateway search times out after five minutes of inactivity; you may need to reinitialize your search and start over from the beginning. The subscription database ArchivesUSA, part of Archive Finder from ProQuest/Chadwyk-Healey, provides access to NUCMC records from its inception in 1959 to the present, while the print volumes, Index to Personal Names in the National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections, 1959–1984 and Index to Subjects and Corporate Names in the National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections, 1959–1984 cover only through 1984. Founded in 1995, Terry Abraham’s Repositories of Primary Sources is a gateway to more than five thousand websites from around the world concerned with archives, manuscripts, rare books, photographs, and other collections of primary source materials. Organized by region and by country, the site presents different categories for Ireland, Isle of Man, and the United Kingdom, ranging from repositories like the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust to the Anglesey Archives to the Dublin City Archives to Manx National Heritage, with numerous local, regional, and national libraries and universities also listed. Although there are no descriptions of individual repositories or of their holdings, you can link to the institution’s website to obtain more detailed information.

RESOURCES FOR EARLY MODERN HANDWRITING Croft, P. J., comp. and ed. Autograph Poetry in the English Language: Facsimiles of Original Manuscripts from the Fourteenth to the Twentieth Century. 2 vols. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1973. Dawson, Giles E., and Laetitia Kennedy-Skipton. Elizabethan Handwriting, 1500– 1650: A Manual. New York: W. W. Norton, 1966. English Handwriting, 1500–1700: An Online Course. Cambridge English Renaissance Electronic Service. www.english.cam.ac.uk/ceres/ehoc/. Greg, W. W., ed. English Literary Autographs, 1550–1650. In collaboration with J. P. Gilson, Hilary Jenkinson, R. B. McKerrow, and A. W. Pollard. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1932. Klaus Reprint, 1968. Jenkinson, Hilary, Sir. The Later Court Hands in England from the Fifteenth to the Seventeenth Century: Illustrated from the Common Paper of the Scriveners’

Manuscripts and Archives

213

Company of London, the English Writing Masters, and the Public Records. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1927. Ungar Reprint, 1969. Literary Manuscripts: 17th and 18th Century Poetry from the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds. Adam Matthew, 2006. www.literarymanuscriptsleeds.amdigital .co.uk/palaeography/index.aspx. National Archives. Palaeography: Reading Old Handwriting, 1500–1800: A Practical Online Tutorial. www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/palaeography/. Paleographical Commons. Beineke Flickr Laboratory’s Photostream. www.flickr .com/photos/brbl/sets/. Petti, Anthony G. English Literary Hands from Chaucer to Dryden. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977. Postles, David. Early-Modern Paleography. paleo.anglo-norman.org/. Preston, Jean F., and Laetitia Yeandle. English Handwriting, 1400–1650: An Introductory Manual. Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1992. Scottish Handwriting.com. www.scottishhandwriting.com/. Stewart, Alan, and Heather Wolfe. Letterwriting in Renaissance England. Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, published by the University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2004.

Certainly one of the challenges to working with Renaissance and early modern manuscripts is deciphering period handwriting. Not only can the physical state of the manuscript present barriers to interpretation, such as faded ink, wormholes, or mildew, but the writing itself with its sometimes unfamiliar letter variations, flourishes, spellings, abbreviations, punctuations, and pen strokes make it difficult to understand the text—not to mention the potential for varying degrees of legibility or individual idiosyncrasies. Fortunately, both print and online resources exist to prepare scholars studying manuscripts by discussing the historical development of handwriting during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and by providing examples of the types of handwriting likely to be encountered. This section covers a few selected paleography resources but you may also want to search in your library catalog using the following subject headings to identify additional resources: Paleography, English—Handbooks, manuals, etc; Manuscripts, Renaissance—Facsimiles; or Manuscripts, English—Facsimiles. You will soon discover that many of the print guides to early modern handwriting were published in the last century and, in some cases, are now twenty, forty, or more years old. Don’t let the publication date dissuade you from a resource’s potential usefulness, however, for learning to read period manuscripts. Giles Dawson and Laetitia Kennedy-Skipton’s Elizabethan Handwriting, 1500–1650: A Manual was designed to assist students of English literature and history with its particular emphasis on examples of secretary hand, which the authors argue in their preface was the hand of “literature,

214

Chapter Eight

correspondence, and business.” A solid introduction addresses manuscript survival; the arranged secretary and italic hands during the Tudor and Stuart periods and their antecedents; notes on particular secretary letters likely to cause difficulty (C, D, F, f, i/j, n, r, s, u/v); and discussion of spelling, punctuation, abbreviation, and contraction conventions. The introduction concludes with advice on learning to read and gaining proficiency, with specific examples from the manual recommended. What follows next are fifty chronologically arranged black-and-white facsimile photo reproductions (although a few plates comprise two separate manuscript examples) that represent mostly letters, but also poems, plays, deeds, and miscellaneous documents, including a receipt for armor, an inventory of furnishings, and an indenture of release. All of the manuscripts are from the Folger Shakespeare Library collections. Accompanying each plate is a full or partial transcription that preserves the original spelling and punctuation, a brief headnote to indicate the hand and any distinctive characteristics, and footnotes explaining particular points in the manuscript, such as when one letter is written over another, definitions of unfamiliar words, or eccentric spellings. Although the manual contains few literary examples and even fewer autographs, nevertheless it does fulfill its goal of providing a good range of variant secretary hand examples from throughout the sixteenth and into the mid-seventeenth century. Preston and Yeandle’s English Handwriting, 1400–1650 also relies primarily on manuscripts from the Folger Shakespeare Library to illustrate writing styles of the period, with most examples from the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras. The brief introduction addresses the development of textura, anglicana, secretary, and italic hands, discusses spelling, abbreviation, punctuation, counting, and dating, and concludes with advice for beginners. A bibliography precedes the examples, and features recommended paleography resources, including Grant G. Simpson’s Scottish Handwriting 1150–1650 (Bratton, 1973) which may be of interest to scholars working specifically with Renaissance and early modern texts from Scotland. Thirty-one plates, from Robert Mannyng’s “Handelyng’ off Synne” (c. 1400) to a “Poetical Commonplace Book” (c. 1650), provide black-and-white manuscript reproductions that offer many opportunities to practice reading the range of period handwriting, especially secretary, italic, and combination hands. Particularly helpful for the beginner are the seventeen manuscripts whose entries include a guide to that individual hand’s alphabet, which notes characteristic capital and lowercase letters and their variants to aid with interpretation. Like Elizabethan Handwriting, each manuscript is accompanied by an unedited transcription; a headnote describing the hand or hands employed, location, and date the manuscript was written; and footnotes for elaborating on specific details to the transcription. This collection of manuscripts also contains many

Manuscripts and Archives

215

autograph letters, such as those from Thomas Starkey, William Baldwin, Richard Topcliffe, Lady Grace Cavendish, Queen Elizabeth I, Fynes Moryson, and King James I. Scholars with a particular interest in early modern letters may want to consult Letterwriting in Renaissance England, the printed catalog to the Folger Shakespeare Library’s 2004–2005 exhibition of the same name. Although not a paleography guide per se, the catalog contains many color reproductions of manuscript letters, with accompanying transcriptions like those described above, that preserve the original spelling, punctuation, and syntax. Represented here are autograph letters from well-known and less-familiar figures, such as that from Robert Dudley to Elizabeth I, John Donne to Sir George More, and Mary Hatton to Randolph Helsby. Concerned with all aspects of letter writing, the collection addresses tools, letter-writing manuals, the postal system, social signals, and the secretary’s role, as well as letters centered around love and friendship. The letters reproduced span the early modern period from the early-sixteenth up through the early-eighteenth century. An index of senders and recipients makes it easy to identify specific letters relevant to research projects and the glossary defines related terms, such as pounce (a fine powder used to prevent the ink from spreading) or sign-manual (an autograph signature that serves to authenticate a document). The catalog concludes with a bibliography of books and journal articles about period letter writing, cultural context, and the postal system. Although James Harner cautions that Anthony Petti’s English Literary Hands from Chaucer to Dryden contains some errors and oversimplifications,12 this source can still be consulted for the approximately fifty blackand-white photo reproductions from early modern male authors’ handwriting, beginning with Thomas More, Thomas Wyatt, and Henry Howard at the start of the sixteenth century up through Andrew Marvell, Henry Vaughan, Thomas Browne, and John Bunyan at the close of the seventeenth. The reproductions vary in clarity and some are reduced from the original size, but nevertheless provide an opportunity to practice reading period scripts. Two other sources worth mentioning are P. J. Croft’s Autograph Poetry in the English Language: Facsimiles of Original Manuscripts from the Fourteenth to the Twentieth Century and W. W. Greg’s English Literary Autographs, 1550–1650. The two-volume work Autograph Poetry in the English Language reproduces autograph manuscript verse for 142 poets, approximately 40 of whom wrote during the early modern period, arranged in chronological order by date of birth. Each facsimile is reproduced at the original size and includes an accompanying detailed headnote and transcription. Valuable for its exclusive focus on poetical works, Autograph Poetry in the English Language gives us insight not only into the author’s handwriting

216

Chapter Eight

but also how he actually composed his poetry on the page. English Literary Autographs presents 100 photographic facsimile plates that illustrate the handwriting of 130 period authors, arranged by genre into dramatists, poets, and prose writers. Represented among them are Thomas Dekker, Philip Massinger, William Davenant, George Gascoigne, Mary Sidney Herbert, Samuel Butler, John Knox, William Laud, Richard Hooker, and Thomas Hobbes. An introduction and transcription is given for each author. English Literary Autographs is an excellent source for identifying the individual hands of many Renaissance and early modern writers. If you are interested in deciphering early modern documents in particular, see The Later Court Hands in England from the Fifteenth to the Seventeenth Century: Illustrated from the Common Paper of the Scriveners’ Company of London, the English Writing Masters, and the Public Records. Finally, don’t forget that the Index of English Literary Manuscripts (described previously) also contains many reproductions of author manuscripts. The Cambridge English Renaissance Electronic Service (CERES) presents a fine tutorial, English Handwriting, 1500–1700: An Online Course, designed to serve the needs of both beginners and those with more experience. Separate sections on transcription conventions and dating and describing hands offer advice for the novice. The transcription section covers contraction and abbreviation, letter forms and punctuation that can be tricky, and standards for semidiplomatic transcription, while the dating section addresses the different hands in use during the period, terms used to describe writing and letter forms, and dating pitfalls. Twenty-eight course lessons lead the student through increasingly challenging manuscripts to transcribe and feature a workspace for the transcription, an accompanying alphabet and list of common brevigraphs and abbreviations, and additional material regarding dating and the manuscript hand(s). Students can take a short test to assess their transcription abilities following each lesson and can also consult the correct transcription (these sample transcriptions may also be accessed separately). Each manuscript can be enlarged with a zoom function to aid in reading the handwriting. Experienced scholars who want to bypass the lessons can consult the “Manuscript Images” index directly to select manuscripts for practice from among fifty-eight selections from King’s College Archive, Trinity College Library, Gonville and Caius College, and Christ’s College Library collections. Additional features include an introduction to early modern handwriting, examples of the evolution of individual alphabet letters from 1500 to 1700, a digital edition of Martin Billingsley’s manual The pens excellencie or the secretaries delighte (1618), and a bibliography of print and online paleography resources. English Handwriting, 1500–1700 takes advantage of

Manuscripts and Archives

217

technology to create an excellent guide to learning how to read manuscripts of the Renaissance and early modern period. Following a brief overview of historical documents, the British National Archives tutorial Palaeography: Reading Old Handwriting 1500–1800 features ten document lessons, ranging from easiest to most difficult, designed to lead the student in building skills for reading period script. In addition to a digital facsimile, each document has notes about the context, tips for transcribing the document, a line-by-line transcribing exercise, the ability to view and enlarge the document in another window, a glossary of terms both within and about the document, a sample alphabet, and a complete transcription. For example, the first document is a letter from the princess Elizabeth to her sister Queen Mary I, dated 16 March 1554. The accompanying material describes not only the italic hand but also the letter’s context of Elizabeth’s house arrest and her implication in Thomas Wyatt’s failed rebellion. The transcription tips cover use of y/i and u/v, abbreviation signs, minums, and archaic spellings, and the glossary provides biographical sketches for the persons mentioned in the letter and defines paraventur, harkene, and italic hand. Additional documents from the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries are available for further practice, including Francis Throckmorton’s plea for royal clemency (1584), a recipe for six mince pies (early seventeenth century), and a petition from Manasseh ben Israel, a Dutch rabbi, to ask for freedom to practice his religion (1656). Highly interactive and easy to use, the National Archives tutorial will be especially attractive to beginning paleographers. If your research relates to Scottish early modern authors or topics, you may want to consult Scottish Handwriting.com, an online tutorial specifically focused on reading Scottish manuscript records from the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Currently three tutorials are available at the website: an hour-long introduction to secretary hand letters and other key aspects of Scottish handwriting; a tutorial using five letters by William Dunlop to illustrate the transformation over time of this seventeenth-century merchant’s son’s handwriting, with its idiosyncratic mix of secretary and italic hands; and an introduction to seventeenth-century Scottish court hand, using the Glasgow Burgh Justices of the Peace Court records. The “Coaching Manual” features advice for improving performance, a compendium of letter forms in Scottish documents, an example of numbers and dates, a problem solver for difficult words and letters, and a bibliography of Scots dictionaries, specialist glossaries and word lists, gazetteers, dating, and general Scottish paleography. Scottish Handwriting.com is produced by the Scottish Archive Network (SCAN). Created originally for seminars on medieval and early modern paleography at the Centre for English Local History, University of Leicester David Postles’s online tutorial Early-Modern Paleography is concerned primarily

218

Chapter Eight

with legal documents and uses examples from the West Sussex Record Office. Look here for examples of bastard, fair, and cursive secretary; italic; mixed; and departmental hands. Sample documents include receipts, a will, deeds, and a declaration of trusts; notes and a transcription are provided for each document, along with a dialog box that enables you to point with your mouse to obtain transcriptions and notes for specific words within the document. Although not as straightforward to use or as comprehensive as the CERES or National Archives sites, this tutorial may be worthwhile for additional practice or for practice in reading legal documents. In this line, the bibliography covers resources for probate records, early modern land law, and Easter books and churchwardens’ accounts. If your library subscribes to Literary Manuscripts: 17th and 18th Century Poetry from the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds, then you’ll have access to a paleography tutorial using six examples of seventeenth-century verse to provide an introduction to reading and transcribing period texts. For each document, a digital image may be downloaded and enlarged, a transcription can be viewed either side-by-side or separately, and a sample alphabet of letters drawn from the manuscript can be consulted. Although Perdita Manuscripts does not have a paleography tutorial, the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century manuscript images can be used to practice the skills acquired from other sources. The freely available Paleographical Commons, posted on the Beineke Flickr Laboratory’s Photostream website, features 119 digital images of early modern letters (some autograph), drafts of speeches, verse collections, excerpts from commonplace books, and other documents from the library’s collection. For each image, the metadata gives a sample citation and notes the page number, author or creator (if known), date, physical description, folder or box number, genre/form, repository, and call number, and gives a link to the Beineke Rare Book and Manuscript Library record. CONCLUSION The term archive conjures up the image of a stable, steady, unchanging entity, holding and preserving significant cultural and historical materials for all time. What you have probably realized, or guessed all along, however, is that the archive is in the process of changing just like every other component of literary research. Many archives have embraced digital technology to create online versions of their collections in an effort to open up the archive beyond its traditional walls and audience. Even though most archival collections have not been digitized at this point in time, the Internet has made the process of identifying relevant archives and materials much easier than before, as archives’ Web pages increasingly feature online catalogs and finding aids to

Manuscripts and Archives

219

their collections, and post relevant information about their visiting procedures and policies. Like the Renaissance and early modern period in which both print and manuscript existed and flourished simultaneously, for now you will need to use and appreciate the standard print resources for identifying archival holdings, as well as rely on subscription and freely available online resources. What hasn’t changed, however, is the unique interaction that occurs between the scholar and an original source, be it a manuscript poem, prose tract, play, letter, notes, or marginal scribblings. We hope that this chapter has inspired you to investigate the rich legacy of Renaissance and early modern literary manuscript culture, or to use period documents to enhance and illuminate your particular area of research.

NOTES 1. J. W. Saunders, “The Stigma of Print: A Note on the Social Bases of Tudor Poetry,” Essays in Criticism 1 (1951): 139–64. 2. Harold Love and Arthur F. Marotti, “Manuscript Transmission and Circulation,” in The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature, eds. David Loewenstein and Janel Mueller (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 55. 3. Elizabeth Clarke and Jonathon Gibson, “Introduction,” in Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Poetry, eds. Jill Seal Millman and Gillian Wright (New York: Manchester University Press, 2005), 1. 4. Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 6. 5. Love and Marotti, 61. 6. Peter Beal, In Praise of Scribes: Manuscripts and Their Makers in Seventeenth-Century England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), vi. 7. Richard Pearce-Moses, A Glossary of Archival and Records Terminology, Society of American Archivists, www.archivists.org/glossary/term_details .asp?DefinitionKey=156. 8. Michael Londry, “On the Use of First-Line Indices for Researching English Poetry of the Long Eighteenth Century, c.1660–1830, with Special Reference to Women Poets,” Library 7th ser., 5 (2004): 36. 9. William A. Ringler, Jr., Bibliography and Index of English Verse in Manuscript 1501–1558. Prepared and completed by Michael Rudick and Susan J. Ringler (New York: Mansell, 1992), vi. 10. James Harner, Literary Research Guide: An Annotated Listing of Reference Sources in English Literary Studies, 5th ed. (New York: Modern Language Association, 2008), 203. 11. Janet Foster and Julia Sheppard, eds., British Archives: A Guide to Archive Resources in the United Kingdom, 4th ed. (New York: Palgrave, 2002), vii. 12. Harner, 246.

Chapter Nine

Genre

Research within a genre of the Renaissance and early modern era can be challenging because, if the genre was well established, there is an overwhelming array of resources to consult, and if not, then the scholar struggles to find definitions, authoritative editions, consensus on what does or doesn’t fit into the genre, or even if the genre exists at all. Reference sources for the genres vary in type and abundance. Some genres such as drama have interesting and unique discovery tools, while others have spotty coverage. Modern rules for literary forms such as poetry and fiction didn’t exist in the Renaissance and early modern period, creating challenges for identifying such writings, and many of the genres no longer exist today, such as commonplace books, emblems, and jest books. Early modern studies encompasses writings formerly not considered part of the literary canon: diaries, letters, broadsides, ballads, and pamphlets. The most studied genres, such as drama/theater and poetry, have modern editions and a variety of finding aids to explore the topics; prose fiction and emblem studies, as we will see later in this chapter, have had strong academic advocates and therefore have seen the creation of a scholarly apparatus; other genres have minimal resources in the form of modern editions or research tools. In the following paragraphs we will discuss resources available for studying drama/theater, prose fiction, emblem studies, and poetry; those who are interested in other genres will still find these sections valuable, for they illustrate the types of tools available and are a blueprint for the work that can create the necessary foundations enabling scholarship within a genre to develop. In chapter 7 we explain the use of commonplace books for contemporary reception; in chapter 12 we describe websites useful for various types of genre research. In his introduction to English Renaissance Prose Fiction, 1500–1660, James Harner identifies the four fundamental requirements necessary for 220

Genre

221

the study of prose fiction to mature: “(1) broadly-based theoretical studies, (2) an adequate bibliography of primary works, (3) a detailed history of the subject, and (4) reliable scholarly editions.”1 These requirements form the scholarly apparatus that provides the foundation for literary inquiry into any genre. Without these, the researcher must develop his or her own tools, such as compiling a history and creating a modern edition from which to work. In any genre research project, strong search skills and thoughtful analysis of subject and keyword terms and of results are vital to creating a bibliography of primary and secondary sources using online and print tools. As we illustrated in chapter 4, it is much easier now than in the past to create specialized bibliographies that meet the needs of a project; using WorldCat, MLAIB, and ABELL, an initial list of primary and secondary sources can be compiled, and print publications such as New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (NCBEL) can be mined for sources. NCBEL is a valuable resource to begin finding primary and pre-1970 secondary source materials for any genre, but it is especially useful for less researched forms. In addition to poetry and drama, for example, volume 1, covering years from 600 to 1660, has bibliographies of primary and secondary sources for sermons and devotional writings; popular and miscellaneous prose (e.g., pamphleteers and miscellaneous writers, social satires, jest books and comic dialogues, riddles, tracts and satires on women and marriage, broadside ballads); character-books; prose fiction, news-sheets and newsbooks; travel; letters, diaries, autobiographies and biographies; and prose. Under the heading “Jest-books, comic dialogues, burlesques, mock prognostications, drolleries etc.,” we find two bibliographies to primary sources; seven nineteenth- and twentieth-century collections of works of jests, humor, and prose romances; a chronological list of primary source materials from 1519 through 1673 (and later editions, if available) that meet the criteria for this genre; and a list of secondary sources from 1886 to 1966. Turning to a different genre and examining the list of alphabetical titles in the “Autobiographies” section, we see that seldom is the word “autobiography” used. A scholar in search of potential material would be wise to make note of the terms that describe this type of writing, such as “memoir,” “witness,” “apology,” or “an account,” for, as we see when we search the keyword “autobiography” in Early English Books Online (EEBO), there are only ten records in the database. Looking in EEBO for the first entry from 1683 in NCBEL, Satan his methods and malice baffled by Hannah Allen, we find that it is assigned the subjects “melancholy” and “depression, mental,” but nowhere is the word “autobiography.” In this case it is best to take advantage of the work done by other scholars and find references to and bibliographies of autobiographies from this era first, and then look for additional works by subject and keyword searches in digital

222

Chapter Nine

collections. As always, remember to consult volume 5 of NCBEL, the index to the set, to ensure that you locate all references; volume 2 has no reference to Mary Rowlandson in its index, but in volume 5 we find the reference to her on pages 1455–56 in the second volume. If no modern edition exists, Web-based digital collections such as EEBO and facsimile collections such as Early Modern Englishwoman can provide access to the text. Commercial publishers such as ProQuest’s ChadwyckHealey offer subscriptions to full-text databases of poetry, drama, prose, and prose fiction from the Renaissance and early modern era. Libraries and archives with significant holdings may digitize their collections or create Web pages to highlight the material. For example, the National Library of Scotland has a page about its Scottish chapbook collection (www.nls.uk/collections/ rarebooks/collections/chapbooks.html), with a link to the library catalog and instructions to search in the subject index by Chapbooks—Scotland to find specific works. The Web page also contains a list of further readings, and links to other institutions with collections of chapbooks, so even though no comprehensive bibliography has been and may never be compiled, the Web does allow institutions with similar collections to link to each other, thus allowing scholars to locate relevant materials. Check chapter 12 for potentially useful websites of primary source materials and strategies to find others. To find bibliographies, indexes, or catalogs on a genre, search your local libraries, and if you find nothing, search WorldCat, which has the broadest coverage of print and electronic sources. When a potential Library of Congress subject heading is identified, browse the heading to see if any subheadings lead to bibliographies, dictionaries, handbooks, and so forth. For example, Ballads, English—Bibliography will retrieve Analytical Index to the Ballad-Entries in the Stationers’ Registers (1557–1709), compiled by Hyder Rollins (Tradition Press, 1967 [c. 1924]) and the reprint of the 1890 Bibliotheca Lindesiana: A Catalogue of a Collection of English Ballads of the XVIIth and XVIIIth Centuries, by James Ludovic Lindsay Crawford (B. Franklin, 1961). Although a specific resource may not exist expressly for the Renaissance and early modern era, broaden your search to find sources on the genre over time. British Diaries: An Annotated Bibliography of British Diaries, Written between 1442 and 1942, compiled by William Matthews (University of California, Berkeley, 1950) was found by using the broader heading English diaries—Bibliographies. In the following sections, we will discuss search strategies to find books and articles on various genres; these strategies can be applied to any we do not cover in depth, such as autobiography, confessional narratives, letters, diaries, journals, commonplace books, chapbooks, broadsides, ballads,

Genre

223

pamphlets, scaffold speeches, and jest books. It is our hope that scholars will continue to see the need for comprehensive bibliographies and indexes, but with the impact of the Web on research, it may be that such endeavors will cease to exist. Through this chapter, we hope that you will learn to appreciate the scholarship necessary to create the sources previous generations have compiled, and the value these sources have in establishing a foundation for research to move forward.

DICTIONARIES Donker, Marjorie, and George M. Muldrow. Dictionary of Literary Rhetorical Conventions of the English Renaissance. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982.

If new to genre research, understanding the definitions and use of terms in the Renaissance and early modern period is a helpful place to start. To find additional dictionaries and encyclopedias, consult chapter 2. Donker and Muldrow’s Dictionary of Literary Rhetorical Conventions of the English Renaissance contains short essays defining and describing a wide variety of terms relevant to genre research: anatomy, apology, blank verse, broadside ballad, common-place, couplet, elegy, emblem, epitaph, jest, masque, novella, ode, pastoral, romance, satire, sonnet, terza rima, and tragedy. The authors created these essays to describe “the literary norms and rhetorical controls that inform English poetry of the later sixteenth and earlier seventeenth centuries.”2 The authors are concerned with genres, verse forms, metrics, and other formal properties of a text, and wish to provide the linguistic and cultural contexts of words from the Elizabethan and Jacobean era. Essays typically range from three to five pages, begin with a Renaissance definition of that term, and conclude with a bibliography. The entry for Common-place (44–47) contains three definitions of the term in the era, followed by a fuller explanation of its application in writing and learning. Our understanding of particular genres, however, may have changed since the publication of this book. For example, Emblem is described as follows: “all three components—the picture, the motto (the word or vox), and the poetic text—were considered essential to emblem poetry”; as you will see in the discussion of emblem studies below, this definition is currently considered too narrow. Therefore, these essays need to be understood not only in terms of the Renaissance, but also in the context of scholarly work done since 1980. Use this source as a starting point, but as you define your terms, be sure to take into consideration the whole of research on the genre.

224

Chapter Nine

DRAMA/THEATER Bentley, Gerald Eades. The Jacobean and Caroline Stage. 7 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941–1968. Berger, Thomas L., William C. Bradford, and Sidney L. Sondergard. An Index of Characters in Early Modern English Drama: Printed Plays, 1500–1660. Revised ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Bergeron, David M. Twentieth-Century Criticism of English Masques, Pageants, and Entertainments: 1558–1642. San Antonio, TX: Trinity University Press, 1972. Chambers, E. K. The Elizabethan Stage. 4 vols. First published in 1923. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967. Dessen, Alan, and Leslie Thomson. A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama, 1580–1642. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Greg, Walter Wilson. A Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration. 4 vols. London: Printed for the Bibliographical Society at the University Press, Oxford: 1939–1959. ———. A List of Masques, Pageants, &c. London: Printed for the Bibliographical Society by Blades, East, & Blades, 1902. Harbage, Alfred. Annals of English Drama, 975–1700: An Analytical Record of All Plays, Extant or Lost, Chronologically Arranged and Indexed by Authors, Titles, Dramatic Companies, &c. 2nd ed. revised by S. Schoenbaum. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1964. Highfill, Philip H., Jr., Kalman A. Burnim, and Edward A. Langhans. A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers & Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660–1800. 16 vols. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973–1993. Honigmann, Ernst, and Susan Brock. Playhouse Wills, 1558–1642: An Edition of Wills by Shakespeare and His Contemporaries in the London Theatre. New York: Manchester University Press, 1993. Kawachi, Yoshiko. Calendar of English Renaissance Drama, 1558–1642. New York: Garland, 1986. Lancashire, Ian. Dramatic Texts and Records of Britain: A Chronological Topography to 1558. Toronto, Ontario: University of Toronto Press, 1984. Langhans, Edward A. Restoration Promptbooks. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1981. The London Stage, 1660–1800: A Calendar of Plays, Entertainments & Afterpieces Together with Casts, Box-Receipts and Contemporary Comment. 12 vols. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1960–1968. Records of Early English Drama (REED). Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 1975–. www.reed.utoronto.ca/index.html. Rutter, Carol Chillington, ed. Documents of the Rose Playhouse. Dover, NH: Manchester University Press, 1984. Stevens, David. English Renaissance Theatre History: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982.

Genre

225

White, D. Jerry. Early English Drama, Everyman to 1580: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986.

We’ve combined drama and theater in this section to highlight the types of sources available for both primary and secondary research within the genre of drama, and strategies for finding related materials. All of the following sources are reputable, and yet all must be used with care because at times the authors assign dates and authorship based on best guesses and knowledge of the time period, and therefore these may not be accurate. Scholars combed records, diaries, letters, pamphlets, periodicals, advertisements, and so forth to bring together scattered information to help us form a picture of theater and drama from the era. As a result, hard data may not be available, but evidence may point to probable facts. These sources are interdependent, each with a perspective into this time period and relying on the others to complete the picture. To begin research within a genre, consult both Harner and Marcuse for recommendations. Series such as the Cambridge Companions and Cambridge Introduction series provide excellent overviews. For books about a genre from the Renaissance and early modern era, conduct a keyword search on the genre term in combination with the type of source you want, such as bibliographies, companions, dictionaries, encyclopedias, handbooks, and other types of standard reference tools. Once you discover relevant sources, examine the subject headings within the records to locate others with that heading. For theater and drama, representative pertinent Library of Congress subject headings include: Theater—England—History—16th century—Bibliography Theater—England—History—17th century—Chronology English drama—Early modern and Elizabethan, 1500–1600—Chronology Theater—England—History Theater—Great Britain—History—Sources Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Stage history—To 1625 English drama—Early modern and Elizabethan, 1500–1600—Dictionaries Theater—England—Production and direction—History—16th century— Dictionaries Two bibliographies serve as starting points into the scholarship addressing the production and literary aspects of theater and drama. In his annotated bibliography English Renaissance Theatre History: A Reference Guide, David Stevens gives a chronological overview of scholarship about the history of play production from the eras of Elizabeth I to Charles I, starting with Richard Flecknoe’s Short Discourse of the English Stage in 1664 up to 1979.

226

Chapter Nine

Although there is very little direct evidence in the form of written records, scholars can use the research and writing of theater historians to develop a picture of the genre that we can understand. Brief annotations are descriptive rather than evaluative, and serve as a guide to the purpose, scope, and method of the sources, to help scholars determine if items are relevant. Stevens is not concerned with the literary form of drama, but with the physical aspects of theater: playhouses, actors and acting, costume, stage lighting, music, and so forth. A single, but thorough, index allows access to the contents by subject and name. For those in need of the literary perspective of drama, consult D. Jerry White’s bibliography, Early English Drama, Everyman to 1580: A Reference Guide, to find a critical history of drama as literature from 1495 to 1580. The author identifies scholarship about the early days of Renaissance and early modern drama and divides the volume into bibliographies, collections, general studies, and author/translator/title, with each section arranged in chronological order from 1691 to 1982. Entries contain bibliographic information and short two- to three-line descriptions. Almost eighty entries comprise the author/translator/title section, including such entries as John Bale, Jane Lumley, Seneca in translation, and Godly Queen Hester; these are arranged by author/title/translator, then by title of a work and date, followed by citations to bibliographies, studies, and editions arranged in chronological order. Indexes must be used to locate items for specific authors, titles, and subjects. Both Stevens and White provide entry into the secondary literature on drama, and both point toward some of the following titles that are classics and standards within theater and drama scholarship. In The Elizabethan Stage, Chambers documents the known history, up through the first quarter of the twentieth century, of Elizabethan theater from 1558 to 1616. The work, a series of essays arranged in chapters, covers the court, control of the stage, and the boy, adult, and international companies; lists actors; discusses playhouses (public and private, and the structure and conduct of theaters) and staging; and describes plays and playwrights (printing of plays, playwrights with some biographical information and their works with brief publishing histories, and anonymous plays, including masques). Thirteen appendixes contain documentation of various aspects of Elizabethan theater: a court calendar of plays, masques, and quasi-dramatic entertainments; an overview of documents and a chronological, tabular list of all entries in the Chamber and Revels accounts concerning court payments; documents of criticism summarizing or extracting various views about plays; documents of control of the stage by the authorities; plague records; and lists of academic plays, printed plays, lost plays, and manuscript plays. Bibliographic notes head each chapter and appendix, describing and commenting

Genre

227

upon the sources used and additional sources available. Indexes to plays, persons, places, and subjects conclude the final volume. In seven volumes published between 1941 and 1968, Bentley carried on Chambers’s work by documenting theater history from 1616 to 1642 in The Jacobean and Caroline Stage. Contents of volumes 1 and 2, subtitled Dramatic Companies and Players, comprise histories of companies with actor lists, provincial notices, plays at court, livery allowances, and repertory, as well as appendixes for wills, closing of theaters due to plague, records of Sir Humphrey Mildmay, Markham’s suit, Heton’s papers, and theatrical notes from Crosfield’s diary. Volumes 3 to 5, Plays and Playwrights, published in 1956, present the playwrights in alphabetical order with short biographical sketches, plays with dates of first production, editions, short critical bibliographies, seventeenth-century records, and discussions about performances. Published in 1968, volumes 6 (Theatres) and 7 (Appendixes to Volume VI and Indexes) conclude the set, and survey private and public theaters, theaters at court, and projected theaters; the appendixes document Lenten performances, Sunday performances, and annals of theatrical affairs (but not publication dates for plays or Stationers’ Register entries). Bentley excludes the publication dates for plays because these were ably documented by Walter Wilson Greg in A Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration.3 In 1923 Chambers wrote a disclaimer in his text stating that his notices of prints of plays may be deficient, and that once Greg’s research was completed, his work would be the authority.4 Published between 1939 and 1959, the four-volume descriptive bibliography is a chronology of printed (no manuscript) plays listed in the Stationer’s Records and written between 1516 and 1660 (plays written prior to 1642 and published before 1700, and plays written after 1642 and printed before 1660). Entries are assigned “Greg numbers,” standard numbers used by scholars to identify specific printed plays, and contain physical descriptions of the first and subsequent editions of the printed play. For example, Greg 141 describes the physical components of Shakespeare’s King Richard the Second, with known additions and omissions, from 1597, 1598, 1598, 1608, 1615, 1623, 1632, 1634, 1663, and 1685. In volume 4 Greg explains in great detail the layout of the entries and how to interpret notes, and his explanation, as we have stated in various parts in this chapter, must be read carefully to understand the scope of the work and the components of the descriptive entries. Greg lists the distinguishing features of each edition to aid scholars in making correct identifications, notes condition when imperfect or fragmentary, and tracks variations between editions to show where they differ and where there may be corrections. The notes for the second edition (b) from 1598 reveal that

228

Chapter Nine

most of the directions in signatures “G–I” are printed in the margin to save space; that this edition was printed from a copy of the previous edition (a) in which sheets A, C, and D were in the uncorrected and B and I in the corrected state; and indicate where copies are known to differ. The British Museum, Bodleian, Trinity College (Cambridge), Boston Public, Folger, and Huntington library holdings are listed, although the author examined and made notes for only the copies in England. Following the chronological section Greg lists Latin plays and lost plays; the latter were based on evidence that the play existed in print even if it subsequently only survived as a manuscript or not at all. Volume 3 contains catalogs of early collections of plays, and appendixes of advertisements (including newspapers), actors, publications (starting with Andrew Maunsell’s list in 1595), authors, plays held in private collections, and early play catalogs, and concludes with reference lists (e.g., authors; dedications and commendations; licensers; court performances; printers, publishers, and booksellers; and London signs and addresses). Volume 4 is vital to the understanding of this research tool as it contains an introduction to the scope and limits of the contents, explains the arrangement of the plays and the details found in the descriptive entry, and concludes with a title index to the entire set as well as additions and corrections. Greg’s work continues to serve today’s academics as the authoritative source for the physical descriptions of printed drama from the Renaissance and early modern era. In Annals of English Drama, 975–1700, Alfred Harbage compiled a chronological list of known or feasible first performances of “plays, masks, and other dramatic or quasi-dramatic representations devised in England, or by Englishmen abroad,” up until the year of Dryden’s death. Harner cautions very strongly against using the third edition, full of errors and inconsistencies, and recommends using the authoritative second edition from 1964, with the 1966 and 1970 supplements; he finds, however, both the second and third editions conservative in their attribution of dates and authorship.5 The second edition, revised by Schoenbaum in 1964, is a single volume consisting of a chronological table with columns for date, author, title, date of first performance, type of play, auspices if known, earliest texts, and year of last modern edition (at time of press). Using the playwright index, we find the following about Elizabeth Cary’s play Mariam, the Fair Queen of Jewry: it was probably first presented sometime between 1602 and 1605, and is therefore placed under 1604; it is a tragedy; its auspices listed as “Closet” (or not intended for performance); the earliest text printed is 1613; and the latest modern edition was 1914G† (the G tells us it was the Malone Society Reprints, with W. W. Greg as the general editor, and the dagger/obelisk symbol tells us it is the only modern edition to date). Annals of English Drama concludes with a supplementary list of plays omitted because of uncertain date and identity; lists of

Genre

229

editions referred to within the chronology; indexes of playwrights, plays, and translated or adapted foreign plays; an index of dramatic companies; a list of theaters, and an appendix of extant play manuscripts, their locations, and catalog numbers. This volume, along with The London Stage, 1660–1800 and Kawachi’s Calendar of English Renaissance Drama, provides scholars with a working chronology of play performances in the Renaissance and early modern era. In Calendar of English Renaissance Drama, 1558–1642, Yoshiko Kawachi focused more narrowly on the Renaissance and early modern era than did Harbage, and provides more detail. She records the daily activity of plays, masques, royal and aristocratic entertainments, and other theatrical representations from the year Queen Elizabeth I ascended the throne to 1642 when the theaters closed. All dates are adjusted to the Gregorian calendar. Arranged as a table with columns, entries comprise dates, division (using symbols to indicate if the play was performed or not), date of payment for the play, company on tour, entry in the Stationers’ Register, date licensed, and date of publication, dramatic company, location, “closet” drama (although Kawachi includes this because it is standard, she questions the use of this term), title, author(s), earliest texts, and sources (e.g., Harbage, Chambers, Bentley, Henslowe’s Diary, Records of Early English Drama, periodicals). Indexes to plays, playwrights, and dramatic companies conclude the volume. In the preface to part 1 of The London Stage 1660–1800, we learn that William Van Lennep was the visionary for this monumental multivolume set chronicling the daily theatrical entertainment in London between 1660 and 1800. Dr. Van Lennep died before the volumes were published, but his work was made a reality by other scholars. Part 1 covers the years 1660–1700. An extensive introduction presents an overview of the theatrical world: playhouses, concert halls, and fairs; theatrical financing; management and operations (company organization, licensing, maintaining decorum, performance times, and admission); advertising, scenery, costumes, props, and lighting; actors and acting (including brief summaries about contracts, salaries, and standards); dancers and dancing; musicians, singers, and music; typical repertories (e.g., comedy of manners, musical drama); production of plays (securing a play and a permit, reading a play, casting and rehearsal, premiere, and the run); and the audience and criticism and judgment. A calendar follows, organized by season, year (Gregorian), month, and day. An introduction heads each season to describe the status of companies and principal theatrical activities. Typical entries comprise the day and date, the venue, the title, author, cast (if known), and comments and source of commentary (such as Pepys’s diaries). In the comments for Saturday, March 2, 1666/67, we find that Pepys and his wife attended John Dryden’s Secret Love: or,

230

Chapter Nine

The Maiden Queen, performed by the King’s (Killegrew) Company at the Bridges Street, Drury Lane, with Nell Gwin [Gwyn] as Florimell. The play probably premiered in late February, and the King is said to have attended on Tuesday, March 5. The London Stage is complemented by another monumental theater reference tool, Highfill’s A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers & Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660– 1800, which provides biographical information on roughly 8,500 individuals. Corrections and updates to part 1of The London Stage can be found in “An Addendum to The London Stage 1660–1700,” in Theatre Notebook.6 Scholars interested in the calendar for documents on the management and regulation of theaters should consult the two-volume set edited by Milhous and Hume, A Register of English Theatrical Documents, 1660–1737 (Southern Illinois University Press, 1991). Those interested in regional theater activity should consult Records of Early English Drama (REED), and Lancashire’s Dramatic Texts and Records of Britain: A Chronological Topography to 1558, both listing documents related to theater in calendar form. REED publishes individual volumes for urban centers and counties citing relevant public and private documents related to dramatic activity prior to 1642, while Lancashire has compiled a finding list to documents relating to plays and their production in England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. For a more extensive discussion, see chapter 12. The Revels Plays Companion Library series publishes such guides to source documents as Documents of the Rose Playhouse, edited by Carol Chillington Rutter, and Playhouse Wills, 1558–1642: An Edition of Wills by Shakespeare and His Contemporaries in the London Theatre, edited by Ernst Honigmann and Susan Brock. The following are sample titles of more specialized reference works of interest to scholars of this genre. In Restoration Promptbooks, Langhans presents facsimiles of eleven complete professional London theater promptbooks from 1660 to 1700, and has transcribed the prompt notes of an additional nine as well as pieces of prompt copy in thirty printed plays. The author’s goal is to use such documents to learn how to better understand the staging of plays during the Restoration. In A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama, 1580–1642, Dessen and Thomson define and explain more than nine hundred terms found in stage directions that they gathered from surviving print and manuscript editions of more than five hundred professional plays. Analyzing the plays themselves, Berger, Bradford, and Sondergard used Greg’s Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration to identify Tudor, Elizabethan, Jacobean, Caroline, and Commonwealth printed plays in order to compile lists of characters and types of characters, and the plays in which they appeared. The resulting publication, An Index of Char-

Genre

231

acters in Early Modern English Drama: Printed Plays, 1500–1660, allows scholars to find specific and generic characters common to various plays. Within subgenres of theater, specialized research tools have been compiled and published. For example in 1902, prior to his considerable contribution to drama scholarship in the form of the bibliography of the English printed drama, Walter Wilson Greg created an early guide titled A List of Masques, Pageants, &c. And in 1972 David Bergeron produced a guide to the scholarship on masques and pageants in Twentieth-Century Criticism of English Masques, Pageants, and Entertainments: 1558–1642. Each of the titles in the preceding paragraph represents types of reference sources available for study within a genre, such as dictionaries, indexes, bibliographies for primary and secondary sources, and facsimiles of primary source material. In this section on the genre of theater and drama, we have attempted to bring to your attention the classic, standard sources that continue to guide scholars toward unique research opportunities and that inspired some of the subsequent works we’ve introduced. In addition, we described more narrowly focused reference sources providing depth to a specific piece within this genre. Other genres from the era will not have such rich resources to draw from, but those found in this section can serve as models for the types of scholarly sources, identified by Harner in the next section on prose fiction, needed for other genres. PROSE FICTION Barbour, Reid. “Recent Studies in Elizabethan Prose Fiction.” English Literary Renaissance 25, no. 2 (Spring 1995): 248–76. ———. “Recent Studies of Prose Fiction, 1603–1660, including Sidney’s Arcadia.” English Literary Renaissance 26, no. 1 (Winter 1996): 167–97. Early English Prose Fiction. ProQuest/Chadwyck-Healey. collections.chadwyck .com. Harner, James L. English Renaissance Prose Fiction, 1500–1660: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism. New York: G. K. Hall, 1978. ———. English Renaissance Prose Fiction, 1500–1660: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism, 1976–1983. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1985. ———. English Renaissance Prose Fiction, 1500–1660: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism, 1984–1990. New York: G. K. Hall, 1992. Letellier, Robert Ignatius. The English Novel, 1660–1700: An Annotated Bibliography. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1997. Mish, Charles C., comp. English Prose Fiction, 1600–1700: A Chronological Checklist. Charlottesville: Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, 1967. O’Dell, Sterg. A Chronological List of Prose Fiction in English Printed in England and Other Countries, 1475–1640. Cambridge, MA: Technology Press of MIT, 1954.

232

Chapter Nine

Salzman, Paul. English Prose Fiction, 1558–1700: A Critical History. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985.

Prose fiction from the Renaissance and early modern period is not a clearly defined genre, and, as a result, offers its own challenges. Researchers must read introductions to books and reference tools on the topic to understand an author’s parameters for inclusion and exclusion. A keyword search on the phrase prose fiction, combined with renaissance or early modern, is the most precise method for finding books and articles on the topic. Once relevant titles have been found, check the subject headings and descriptors for clues on how to proceed. In library catalogs, Library of Congress subject headings such as English fiction—Early modern, 1500–1700 and English prose literature—Early modern, 1500–1700 will prove valuable. As we explained in chapter 3, browsing the subheadings allows you to find useful reference tools (e.g., English fiction—Early modern, 1500–1700—Bibliography; English fiction—Early modern, 1500–1700—Biography—Dictionaries; English prose literature—Early modern, 1500–1700—Bibliography) and to locate such specialized titles as The English Civil War through the Restoration in Fiction: An Annotated Bibliography, 1625–1999, by Roxane C. Murph (Greenwood, 2000). To find articles in MLAIB, conduct the keyword search described above and then examine the subject areas; to find everything about fiction during the era, it would be best to combine fiction in the “Genre” field with English literature in the “Subject Literature” field and the appropriate dates in the “Period” field. Two literature reviews by Reid Barbour, published in English Literary Renaissance, provide an overview of the scholarly work done on prose fiction. Barbour, in “Recent Studies in Elizabethan Prose Fiction,” when possible identifies texts published in modern editions, collections, and anthologies, and traces the scholarship concerning sixteenth-century prose fiction (excluding Sidney). A short entry on modern editions is followed by a section titled “General Studies,” starting with Paul Salzman’s groundbreaking English Prose Fiction, 1558–1700, A Critical History, and concludes with a list of bibliographies for scholars to consult, such as those by Harner (discussed below). Next Barbour examines “Studies of Individual Genres” (romance, euphuistic fiction, the novella, picaresque and criminal fiction, and translations), and then “Studies of Individual Writers” (George Gascoigne, John Lyly, Robert Greene, Thomas Nashe, Thomas Lodge, Tomas Deloney, Barnaby Rich, William Baldwin, and others). A “See Also” list of selected texts for each of the sections closes the review. Barbour’s “Recent Studies of Prose Fiction, 1603–1660, including Sidney’s Arcadia” follows the same organization as the previous article, this time focusing on both Sidney and the

Genre

233

seventeenth century. The individual genre section contains romances, imaginary voyages, novellas, jest books, and translations. Studies of individual writers encompass Philip Sidney, Lady Mary Wroth, Francis Godwin, Robert Armin, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Middleton, Margaret Cavendish, and others. Both of Barbour’s essays are invaluable for research in the genre of prose fiction, and it is well worth the trouble for scholars interested in any genre to search English Literary Renaissance in order to discover other “Recent Studies” articles on genres, such as those on sixteenth-century (April 2005) and seventeenth-century (March 2006) letters. In the three volumes of annotated bibliographies that comprise English Renaissance Prose Fiction, 1500–1660, James Harner identifies the primary and secondary scholarship concerning prose fiction, which he defines, based upon consensus among scholars, as the imaginative narratives of the novellas, romances, jest books (more than four- to five-line anecdotes), anatomies, histories, or combinations of these types. In the introduction to the earliest volume, Harner lamented the lack of scholarly apparatus and foundation that hampered investigation of prose fiction from this era: lack of broadly based theoretical studies, inadequate bibliographies to primary sources, no detailed histories to provide context, and few scholarly or even modern editions. Over the next two volumes Harner found that some of these gaps were being addressed, and that important advances were made after 1976 in theory (applications of critical theories such as reader response, deconstruction, Bakhtin’s writings), history, and scholarly editions (many still only available as dissertations); the field doesn’t have a comprehensive bibliography to primary sources. Harner’s volumes are divided into “Bibliographies” (checklists of criticism and descriptive bibliographies), “Anthologies” (modern texts and reprints), “General Studies” (histories, theories, overviews, themes and character types, foreign influences, and types of narratives), and “Authors/Translators/Titles.” The first three sections are arranged alphabetically by author or editor, and the fourth section (authors, translators, and titles) is arranged in one alphabetical sequence, with each entry subdivided by bibliographies, editions, and studies. The earliest volume, with more than three thousand entries, covers the years 1800 to 1976; the next, with more than one thousand entries, spans the years from 1976 to 1983, and the last, with almost 750 entries, contains materials published from 1984 to 1990. The “Authors/Translators/Titles” section has the bulk of the entries in all volumes, with listings for authors such as Sir Philip Sidney, Thomas Dekker, George Gascoigne, Thomas Deloney, Thomas Nashe, John Lyly, Margaret Tyler, Anna Weamys, Margaret Cavendish, and Lady Mary Wroth, and titles such as The Decameron, The Deceyte of Women, and Life and Pranks of Long Meg of Westminster. Entries generally comprise author, translator, or title; STC number; bibliographies; editions; and studies.

234

Chapter Nine

One of the longer entries, Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller: Or, the Life of Jacke Wilton, STC 18380-18381, lists three bibliographies, sixteen editions, and about 125 studies. Harner does not categorize the types of fiction for the individual titles. Helpful brief annotations describe the contents of the works cited, and the table of contents and index provide access to the volumes via name and title, with subject access (e.g., humor, emblem, epic, jest books, women, translations, humanism) to the annotations of the editions and studies. Because Harner does not assign categories to the works, the subjects of the annotations may indicate the type of prose fiction the work is considered to be. Overall, Harner’s volumes are invaluable guides to the scholarship conducted for this genre between 1800 and 1990. Letellier’s The English Novel, 1660–1700 is intended to extend the work done by Harner to include the final forty years of the seventeenth century, and does so admirably. Part of the larger Salzburg Centre for Research on the Early English Novel (SCREEN) project, which intends to republish fiction from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and establish scholarly materials in support of early prose fiction, the annotated bibliography is arranged in two parts. “Part I: The General Period 1660–1700: Miscellaneous Works” encompasses bibliographies concerned with the English novel of this time period, anthologies of difficult-to-find texts, and general studies covering historical, cultural, and social contexts, and literary theory, themes, and topics. “Part II: Individual Authors and Specific Works of Fiction 1660–1700” contains an alphabetical list of individual authors, titles, and translations, and a selected chronological list of prose fiction. Letellier notes in his introduction that many of these authors and titles are obscure, such as The Memoirs of Monsieur du Vall by astronomer Walter Pope, whose nineteen-page work from 1670 has been identified by Letellier as a satire of criminal biography and Francophiles; the text is available online via EEBO. Others are well-known authors such as Aphra Behn and Margaret Cavendish. Entries typically contain a bibliographic citation with Wing number and are briefly categorized according to Paul Salzman’s designations or, when available, the descriptive tag used by NCBEL; editions; and scholarly studies. For example, the entry “Rowlandson, Mary” gives the title Captivity and Restoration (three American editions and one British edition, Wing R2094, Letellier’s description of the work as the “Origin of the uniquely American ‘captivity narrative’”), followed by modern editions (in anthologies and collections, as well as a critical edition in the form of a dissertation from Yale), and then by sixteen twentieth-century secondary sources listed by scholar. John Bunyan merits lists of collected works, bibliographies to 1987, and criticism from 1980 to 1993. The volume concludes with an index to the scholars and an index by subject and theme to the entry numbers. The subject index, however, does

Genre

235

not include categories and descriptions assigned to the works because those lack entry numbers, so the only access to the contents of Part II is through the author’s name; you cannot find all primary sources on captivity narratives or criminal biographies, or even satires, but you can find the secondary sources listed in Part I. O’Dell’s A Chronological List of Prose Fiction in English Printed in England and Other Countries, 1475–1640; Mish’s English Prose Fiction, 1600–1700: A Chronological Checklist; and the bibliography in Salzman’s English Prose Fiction, 1558–1700: A Critical History identify authors and titles of prose fiction from the early modern era. Because definitions of what constitutes prose fiction from this era vary, you should consult all three to find authors, titles, and editions of potentially useful texts. O’Dell and Mish list works chronologically, and have both British writings and translations; each concludes with an index by author or, when anonymous, title. Both consulted Pollard and Redgrave’s Short-Title Catalogue and Arundell Esdaile’s List of English Tales and Prose Romances Printed before 1740 (London, 1912) as they compiled their lists; neither categorize the types of prose represented within the individual titles in their bibliographies or indexes. Mish omits titles found in Esdaile that he determined were not fiction, while O’Dell states in his introduction that he has “loosely defined” the genre as “imaginative narrative not in verse.” There is overlap in the years covered in both volumes, from 1600 to 1640, but there are unique titles, mostly in O’Dell, that reflects his more inclusive definition of prose fiction. Salzman provides definitions and categories for identifying works as prose; his intent is not to be comprehensive, but to concentrate on one or two examples within the modes of fiction. He gives an important history of the subject in which he surveys the development of prose fiction, first in the Elizabethan era and then the seventeenth century, and defines specific types of prose and identifies works within those modes: the novella, courtly fiction (Gascoigne and Lyly), Sidney and Arcadia, development of romance, rhetoric and realism, Thomas Deloney and popular fiction, political and allegorical romance, French heroic romance, picaresque fiction (such as jest books and imaginary voyages), John Bunyan, reactions to romance (chivalric romance, anti-romance, “impure” romance), Margaret Cavendish and John Dunton, and the Restoration novel (including Aphra Behn). The volume concludes with a bibliography that mimics the arrangement of the text, illustrating the variety of types of prose fiction and listing authors and works within each: Elizabethan fiction is followed by seventeenth-century fiction, further subdivided by romance (Sidneian, short, continental, didactic, political/allegorical), religious allegory, didactic fiction, French heroic romance, jest books, criminal biography, imaginary voyage/ utopia/satire, picaresque, popular chivalric romance, popular compilations of

236

Chapter Nine

“history,” anti-romance, “impure” romance, the novella, memoirs, nouvelle historique, nouvelle galante, oriental tale, Restoration novel, and popular non-chivalric fiction. We have previously noted sources listing modern editions of prose fiction, and we recommend you also search library catalogs and WorldCat for monographs, anthologies, or collections that may have been published. For those works without modern editions, look for digital collections. Prose fiction can be found in EEBO, although the texts aren’t categorized as such. Use the bibliographies listed above to identify works of interest, and then use EEBO to find the digital copy, if available, searching by author, title, keyword, or STC number. Note, however, that only selected STC copies are in EEBO, so if the search is unsuccessful, try author or title. The online Early English Prose Fiction, which offers by subscription the full text of more than two hundred fictional works from 1500 to 1700, is a joint project between Chadwyck-Healey and the Salzburg Centre for Research on the Early English Novel, or SCREEN. The advisory board includes authors of reference tools for the genre—James Harner, Paul Salzman, and Robert Letellier. The stated purpose for developing this database is to provide access to early editions of well-known as well as rare, inaccessible texts. The database contains works such as John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller, Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, as well as works by John Lyly, Mary Pix, Margaret Cavendish, and Thomas Heywood. The earliest titles from 1518, Mary of Nemmegen and Vigilius, are both anonymous; roughly one-third of the titles were written before 1600 and two-thirds from 1600 to 1700. Entries typically consist of title, bibliographic details, STC number, title page, full text, and, when present, images; the full text is not a facsimile of the original but only the text of the work, with breaks in the body of the work noted (chapter numbers, page breaks). Mary of Nemmegen, derived from STC 17557, comprises thirty-eight pages, with sixteen parts and eleven images; the digital image of this work is also available in EEBO, and can be found searching by the STC number. The contents of Early English Prose Fiction can be browsed by author (or by anonymous), searched by keyword in the full-text, title, author, publication date, and author details (living in years, gender, nationality) fields, and limited by front matter, back matter, verse lines, epigraphs, cited quotations or authors, and title pages. As the text is transcribed using original spelling, the search engine provides the option to search typographical variants (for example, v for u or u for v). Searches can be limited by date, life years of author, gender, ethnicity, literary movement, and literary period. An added value of this database is the ability to browse representative types of prose fiction and to search across the text of all types to locate keywords of interest, acting somewhat as a concordance. To determine which prose

Genre

237

categories the works fall within, use reference tools that identify the type of prose fiction, such as Letellier’s The English Novel, 1660–1700 or Salzman’s English Prose Fiction: 1558–1700. EMBLEM BOOKS Black, Hester M. A Short Title Catalogue of the Emblem Books and Related Works in the Stirling Maxwell Collection of Glasgow University Library (1499–1917). Edited and revised by David Weston. Brookfield, VT: Gower Publishing Company, 1988. Emblematica: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Emblem Studies (Emblematica). AMS Press, 1986–. Annual. ISSN: 0885-968X. The English Emblem Book Project. emblem.libraries.psu.edu/. Daly, Peter M., ed. Companion to Emblem Studies. New York: AMS Press, 2008. Daly, Peter M., and Mary V. Silcox. The English Emblem: Bibliography of Secondary Literature (Corpus Librorum Emblematum). New York: K. G. Saur, 1990. ———. The Modern Critical Reception of the English Emblem (Corpus Librorum Emblematum). New York: K. G. Saur, 1991. Dees, Jerome S. “Recent Studies in the English Emblem.” English Literary Renaissance 16, no. 2 (Spring 1986): 391–420. Diehl, Huston. An Index of Icons in English Emblem Books, 1500–1700. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986. Glasgow University Emblem Website. www.emblems.arts.gla.ac.uk/. OpenEmblem Portal. media.library.uiuc.edu/projects/oebp/. Society for Emblem Studies. www.emblems.arts.gla.ac.uk/SES/. Tung, Mason, ed. The Impresa Index to the Collections of Paradin, Giovio, Simeoni, Pittoni, Ruscelli, Contile, Camilli, Capaccio, Bargagli, and Typotius. AMS Studies in the Emblem no. 21. New York: AMS Press, 2006.

Since the 1970s, emblem studies has grown as an avenue of academic inquiry. Scholars and publishers have and are working to provide the basic tools necessary to conduct research in this area, by creating modern, authoritative editions,7 compiling bibliographies and indexes, and establishing venues for scholarly discussion and conversation via a journal, conferences, and websites devoted to the genre. The Society for Emblem Studies holds conferences. AMS Press publishes a monographic series, AMS Studies in the Emblem (www.amspressinc.com/emb.html), edited by Peter Daly and Daniel Russell, that contains contributions to the scholarly apparatus for the discipline, such as Mason Tung’s The Impresa Index and Peter M. Daly’s Companion to Emblem Studies. Also published by AMS and providing a forum for scholarly communication is Emblematica: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Emblem Studies. Emblematica, founded by Daniel Russell and Peter

238

Chapter Nine

Daly, is international in scope and publishes articles, essays, specialized bibliographies, and a few illustrations. The 2007 and 2008 volumes were special issues of papers from “Emblems in the Twenty-First Century,” a conference held by the International Society of Emblem Studies. For research in English emblem studies, commercial digital collections such as EEBO and freely available digital collections through Pennsylvania State University Libraries’ The English Emblem Book Project and the University of Illinois Library’s OpenEmblem Portal allow scholars to search for and view primary source material online; in the case of the latter, the website has links to additional helpful resources such as bibliographies and forums (for more information about emblem-related websites, see chapter 12). Scholars can also browse the Web version of the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) for potentially useful publications from the Renaissance and early modern era. Lack of a clear consensus of what constitutes an emblem book, however, is the main stumbling block for using standard research practices and tools to discover potential sources. Perceptions about and definitions of emblems and the role they played in literature, the arts, and society in the Renaissance and early modern era changed throughout the twentieth century, and as a result the tools scholars use to identify sources of emblems are affected by these perceptions and definitions. According to Peter Daly, one of the founders of and authorities in emblem studies: As far as generic assumptions are concerned, opinions still differ on what constitutes an emblem, and this has shaped bibliography. Mario Praz [who compiled the first bibliography of European emblematic books in 1939] had a broad understanding of the emblem, and his bibliography is still the most valuable and informative. Rosemary Freeman, on the other hand, had a narrower conception, restricting the use of the term to the three-part combination of motto, picture, and epigram associated with Alciato. Consequently, her bibliography of English emblem-books is restrictive, omitting more works than it includes. John Landwehr’s bibliographies of German, Dutch, and romance-language emblem-books are useful, but frequently inaccurate and incomplete.8

For the purposes of this book, we will not enter into the discussion of what constitutes an emblem, but will use the various definitions to explain the best practices for scholars exploring this genre. Emblems played a vital role within European society of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, both in books and as part of everyday life. The narrow definition of an emblem is tied to its origins: in 1531, Andrea Alciato’s book Emblematum Liber was published, and a new genre as well as a new rage was born. His emblems consisted of the three-part combination of motto, picture, and epigram. Using Alciato as the model, one of the first influential

Genre

239

works, Rosemary Freeman’s English Emblem Books from 1948, narrowly defined an emblem book as “a collection of pictures . . . each accompanied by a motto and a moral exposition usually in verse.”9 Freeman sets emblem books within the world of the allegory: “All that can be said here is that the taste for emblems was part of a wider taste for allegory, and that wider taste for allegory formed one side, though by no means the whole, of the sixteenth and seventeenth century man’s view of the world in which he found himself.”10 She also states that in England, until the mid-seventeenth century and the publication of the works of Francis Quarles, Edmund Arwaker, and Christopher Harvey, English emblem books were rarely reprinted, in contrast to the practices on the Continent of re-editing and reprinting books. Peter Daly and John Manning both acknowledge Freeman’s important contribution to the study of the genre, but go on to discuss the emblem more inclusively, encompassing some forms Freeman may have seen purely as allegory and not as part of this genre. According to John Manning: One cannot understate the variety as well as the pervasiveness of emblematic modes of thought and expression during this period. Without exaggeration, from Catholic Spain to the Protestant Netherlands and from England to Russia the emblem impinged on every aspect of European Renaissance and Baroque life—and death. Over two thousand titles of printed books in who knows how many editions, manuscripts and various printed ephemera are only part of the surviving legacy of a phenomenon that decorated every aspect of domestic and civil life, however noble, however menial.11

Emblematic adornment covered all surfaces of everyday life: fireplaces, windows, curtains, walls, gardens, cabinets, chamber pots, and clothing, as well as public spaces and architecture. “No opportunity was lost to surprise the eye and the mind into moral reflection.”12 This expansive view of what constitutes an emblem grew over the course of the twentieth century. As a result of changes in perception and definition, the very tools scholars depend upon to discover the texts and images within this genre may be too restrictive and serve merely as the springboard into the literature, followed by the use of alternative keywords within EEBO and ESTC, as well as wide-ranging reading of the scholarly literature and use of scholarly emblem websites. Understanding the scope of a volume and the definitions employed by an author are crucial to the researcher engaging in this field of study. Carefully reading introductions and searching for reviews of books will help scholars encountering a potentially useful resource to evaluate and contextualize the item. The following selection of research tools will allow you to find primary and secondary material in English emblem studies.

240

Chapter Nine

A researcher new to emblem studies may encounter Huston Diehl’s invaluable yet limited book, An Index of Icons in English Emblem Books, 1500– 1700. In her introduction, Diehl, who based her volume upon Freeman’s research, describes the role of the emblem book within European culture, and how English authors adapted the genre and images to their own cultural needs. From the time Andrea Alciato first introduced the emblem book in 1531 until the end of the seventeenth century, this form of literature was widely and deeply popular across Europe, influencing other forms of writing and art, including religion and rhetoric. There were 140 editions of Alciato’s first book in the sixteenth century, and by 1616 seven hundred different editions had been in print. What is Diehl’s definition of an emblem book? Based upon Alciato’s book, An emblem book is a collection, or anthology, of individual emblems. Each emblem in a typical emblem book combines an enigmatic motto, either in Latin or the vernacular; a symbolic picture or icon; and an epigram or verse commentary. The motto and picture pose a riddle or enigma which the epigram solves or explains. Ideally, the three parts of an emblem are interdependent. Together motto, icon, and epigram reveal the emblem’s meaning, a meaning that was initially concealed by the enigmatic nature of the motto and icon. Separately, however, each part is inadequate to express the larger significance of the emblem.13

Scholars such as Peter Daly, Michael Bath, and John Manning now believe that the emblem may or may not have all three elements and do not think it was necessarily as enigmatic to the Renaissance and early modern reader as it appears today. In An Index of Icons in English Emblem Books, 1500–1700, Diehl indexes the images printed in twenty-five printed English emblem books (no manuscripts). Her intent is to allow scholars to discover the types of images found in emblem books from the period; these books served as important sources for motifs, images, themes, and stories. Entries comprise a subject word or phrase identifying the image, followed by the locations of specific images in the books indexed. The specific reference lists the motto, icon, and a synopsis or description of the motto. Using her example under “Melancholy” in Peacham’s Minerva Britanna, we located the image in the EEBO database; Diehl lists the STC numbers in the bibliography of books indexed, which facilitates locating these in the digital collection. Diehl cautions that she is indexing the image as identified within the text, not the idea of the image; therefore, an image of a woman identified as “Hope” is found under the term “hope,” but an anchor that may be interpreted as hope is only listed under “anchor,” not the idea it may express. The keywords she uses to categorize the images are taken from the Renaissance texts themselves, and she provides

Genre

241

“see also” and “see” references to direct users to relevant terms. Therefore, images of barrels can be found under “barrel” as well as the obsolete “hogshead” and “tun,” reflecting the identification within the text of the book. Cross-references from “barrel” allow the reader to find both of the other terms, but, although there is a reference back to barrel from tun, there is no reference from hogshead to either of the other terms. The book opens with a list of continental sources for the English emblem books, and concludes with an illustrated section with one representative picture from each book, a bibliography of the emblem books with STC numbers and references to modern editions, and an index to words in entries. For example, the listing for “Catholicism, Roman” leads to images listed under “castle, Christ, heretic,” “Dodonian tree,” and “ship”; in the last, the epigram reveals that the Roman Catholic faith is likened to a ship tossed by the winds of error. In his review of Diehl’s book, D. H. Woodward notes that the coverage of images isn’t exhaustive in that certain elements within some of the images aren’t indexed, such as the omission of the fading flower and mausoleum also present in a “snake biting tale” emblem,14 making this volume useful as a starting point, but requiring further examination of all relevant images. Peter Daly laments that Diehl’s volume “is based on Rosemary Freeman’s bibliography, which seriously compromises Diehl’s claim to completeness.”15 In 1986, the same year Diehl’s volume was published, Jerome S. Dees compiled the bibliographic article “Recent Studies in the English Emblem,” published in English Literary Renaissance. The author identified publications about English emblem writers from 1569 to 1660. In his assessment of the field at that point, he acknowledged that the important works have been in German, with few English-language scholars involved. Dees attributed this to Rosemary Freeman’s book, which “bears much of the responsibility for this condition, since it is such a good book of its kind. But her governing assumptions about the disjunction of picture and word, and her attendant bias toward aesthetic evaluation, coupled generally with scholarly demonstration of the ‘derivative’ nature of most English emblem books, seem to have inhibited a generation of English scholars.”16 Nonetheless, Dees manages to create a compact accounting of English emblem scholarship and a short-title list of works and translated works. In the useful volume published a few years later, The English Emblem: Bibliography of Secondary Literature, Daly and Silcox sought to trace the modern critical response to English emblem books and imprese, with the focus mainly on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when emblem books flourished. Since, as we have described, the authors find the definitions of emblems in Freeman and Diehl too narrow (twenty-four books in forty-six printings), they expand the genre beyond the traditional three-part

242

Chapter Nine

form, including translations but excluding fête books; spectacle that incorporates emblematic imagery such as royal entries, pageants, and funerals; and genres with close ties to the emblem such as the lyric and drama. In the chronological list of first editions published to 1900 located at the end of the book, the authors identify fifty-four titles published between 1500 and 1700, from Jan Van der Noot’s A Theatre for Worldings to Jeremias Drexel’s The Considerations of Drexelius Upon Death in 1699. Scholars can consult The English Emblem to find modern (pre-1990) sources for secondary studies on English emblem books and the individual authors, bibliographies (e.g., library holdings, microforms, and facsimiles), motif studies (arranged from “ape” to “whale”), and bookmaking. Although work on such types of scholarly apparatus has developed since 1990, and digital collections have grown, the subdivisions under the sections on individual authors and works to 1700 and on manuscripts provides a starting place for discovering editions, translations, microform copies, and modern editions and reprints available up to the printing of The English Emblem. The volume, which lacks an index, concludes with about thirty pages of illustrations of facsimiles of title pages and frontispieces. Although the book stands on its own as a reference tool, it is actually a companion to Daly and Silcox’s The Modern Critical Reception of the English Emblem, with a critical narrative weaving together the sources listed in the bibliography. The authors use the same section headings in both volumes: the European Emblem; iconographical and motif studies; the English emblem; individual authors; manuscripts; bookmaking; the emblem in education and social entertainment; and the emblem in painting, tapestry, carving, jewelry, funerary monuments, and imprese. This volume concludes with illustrations and indexes to critics and authors, which compensates for the lack of an index in the earlier volume. These two volumes together are an excellent entry point into English emblematic studies through the 1980s. Today, Glasgow University is a vital place for emblem studies and is working to ensure scholarly communication about the field. The university houses one of the largest emblem book collections, originally amassed by Sir William Stirling Maxwell in the nineteenth century and bequeathed to the university in 1956. As a result, the library “pursues additional emblem and fete literature with enthusiasm” (special.lib.gla.ac.uk/collection/stirling .html), and the original gift of twelve hundred titles has grown to roughly two thousand. The university has established a Centre for Emblem Studies (www.ces.arts.gla.ac.uk/html/links.htm) to promote interdisciplinary communication and research. The Centre comprises the annual themed publication Glasgow Emblem Studies (www.ces.arts.gla.ac.uk/html/ges.htm); the Glasgow Emblem Group, which holds research seminars four or five times a year to hear papers by visiting scholars; and funding from the Sir William

Genre

243

Stirling Maxwell Fellowship for visiting scholars. Information about the Centre, programs, and collections, as well as links to other websites collaborating to collect and digitize emblem books, are available at the Glasgow University Emblem Website. According to the website, The Glasgow Emblem Digitisation Project documents will be shared through the OpenEmblem Portal at the University of Illinois. The traditional print finding aid, A Short Title Catalogue of the Emblem Books and Related Works in the Stirling Maxwell Collection of Glasgow University Library (1499–1917), contains 1,777 entries for the collection: 1,500 emblem books, device books, emblematic encyclopedias, works on emblem theory, and iconologies; the remaining 2,077 books are ceremonial books that “commemorate visually” events such as royal weddings, masques, and triumphal entries. Books come from Italy, France, Germany, Austria, Spain, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Russia, and England. The catalog entries comprise heading, title, place of publication, date, and shelfmark location, and the volume concludes with a chronological list and an appendix of eighteen manuscripts. Scholars can search the collection, including materials added to the collection since the finding aid was compiled, using the Glasgow University library catalog; to locate all items in the collection, search by call number sp coll s m or use the link to the library catalog located in the “Finding Aids and Description” (www.emblems.arts .gla.ac.uk) section of the Glasgow University Emblem Website. Through support from libraries, universities, and publishers internationally, and by taking advantage of the Web as a means of communication between individuals, cooperation among institutions, and dissemination of digital images to researchers, emblem studies scholars have developed the scholarly apparatus Harner states is necessary to allow genre studies to come of age.

POETRY May, Steven W., and William A. Ringler, Jr. Elizabethan Poetry: A Bibliography and First-Line Index of English Verse, 1559–1603. 3 vols. London: Thoemmes Continuum, 2004. Ringler, William A., Jr. Bibliography and Index of English Verse Printed 1476–1558. London: Mansell, 1988. ———. Bibliography and Index of English Verse in Manuscript 1501–1558. Prepared and completed by Michael Rudick and Susan J. Ringler. London: Mansell, 1992.

As illustrated in the “Drama/Theater,” “Prose Fiction,” and “Emblem” sections of this chapter, basic reference tools are required to allow scholarship to move forward; otherwise researchers are constantly reinventing

244

Chapter Nine

the wheel. In chapter 8 we discussed the following Ringler sources to find poetry in manuscript form; here we will focus on these publications as a representative part of the scholarly apparatus that enables deep research into the genre. As he prepared an edition of poems by Sir Philip Sidney, Professor William A. Ringler found that he “spent more than two years merely in searching for early texts of his poems.”17 He knew that with an index he could have done the work in two hours, and as a result decided to create a project in which he would lead other scholars to the print and manuscript transcriptions of poetry from the late-fourteenth through the end of the sixteenth centuries. His vision of an index to first lines of Tudor and Elizabethan verse was realized in three publications: Bibliography and Index of English Verse Printed 1476–1558, the typescript he completed and submitted to his publisher before his death on January 1, 1987; Bibliography and Index of English Verse in Manuscript 1501–1558, completed by Michael Rudick and by his daughter, Susan J. Ringler; and the three-volume set Elizabethan Poetry: A Bibliography and First-Line Index of English Verse 1559–1603 by Steven W. May. Ringler intended these sources to supplement and carry forward the work of Carleton Brown and Rossell Hope Robbins’s Index of Middle English Verse (Columbia University Press, 1943), and its Supplement compiled by Rossell Hope Robbins and John L. Cutler (University of Kentucky, 1965). Ringler’s purpose in devising this project was to create finding lists for the printed and transcribed poems from the Middle English period through the reign of Elizabeth; the Short-Title Catalogue served as the primary tool for identifying printed books, while an assortment of bibliographies, as well as the notes Ringler left behind, served to identify potential manuscripts in archives. May followed Ringler’s methodology of searching page by page through both print and manuscript. At this point it is important to note that manuscripts of poems that have not been transcribed are not included, so John Donne’s poems are not in Elizabethan Poetry (discussed later in this section). In the introductions to all three sources, the authors address the question of what is a poem, because there were no rules for verse during that time. Rhyming was an obvious determinant for inclusion, but with unrhymed alliterative verse and the Renaissance invention of blank verse, identification was not always so clear-cut. In his preface May states that he decided to “let the Elizabethans settle this question”: rhyme was still the easiest to identify, but he also let the contextual information accompanying the text indicating that a work was considered a poem, guide him. May took his clues from the Elizabethan printers, who indented verse and used a different font to set it apart (although this last was not an option available to Ringler because this was not a standard Tudor printing practice). Definitions of verse range from

Genre

245

complete poems, to songs, to poems in plays, to extracts, to epitaphs from funeral monuments. It is important to read the introductions from all three books carefully, for each offers an explanation for inclusion and exclusion, as well as invaluable statistical analysis of the results. The volumes follow the same basic arrangement: an introduction, sample entries to illustrate how to interpret the details of the bibliography and index, a bibliography of books (arranged by STC number) or manuscripts (arranged by holding institution) containing verse, followed by the core of the publication devoted to the “First-Line Index of Verse Printed.” Each entry is assigned a poem number combined with an abbreviation indicating the source: TP1 for the first poem in Ringler’s volume of printed verse (the T stands for Tudor), TM1 for the first poem in the Tudor manuscript volume, and EV1 for Elizabethan Verse 1. These poem numbers are also used by the authors to cross-index the reference tools, so that entries found in more than one title are identified as such: in Elizabethan Poetry, Sir Thomas Wyatt’s “A spending hand that alway poureth out” is entry EV847, with cross references to TP45 and TM39. The entries themselves generally comprise the poem number, first line, source, date, author, title of poem, length and rhyme scheme of poem, and subjects. The first lines in the index are arranged alphabetically by the first word, including articles: the first line in TP1 is “A Baylife there was, in the west contry,” and in EV1 it is “A and B taking a prisoner in wars,” both beginning with the article “a.” To decipher the highly abbreviated details in each entry, refer to the sample entries at the beginning of each publication. Following the list of first lines and their sources, concluding indexes are organized as “Refrains,” “Burdens,” “Verse Forms and Rhyme Schemes,” “English Poets,” and “Historical Persons and Events,” and, with some variation to Ringler’s original arrangement, indexes of literary kinds, religion, subjects, titles, fictional names, and translations and adaptations. The “Verse Forms and Rhyme Schemes” index is a key feature in these sources, so that poems can be found by type, number of lines in the stanza, the order of rhymes, and line length; Ringler and his followers identified a poem by its parts to illustrate the wide variety of forms used during the Tudor and Elizabethan eras, and to allow scholars to retrieve pieces with like characteristics. Using the Wyatt example above, EV847, the entire entry reads: EV847 A spending hand that alway poureth out. STC13863-68(8), 1559–85, F7v-G1. Sir Thomas Wyatt, ‘How to vse the court and him selfe therin, written to syr Fraunces Bryan.’ 91: TR10. TP47. TM39. Comp. –1542. Verse letter, sat., moral. ARUND: Harrington, Temp. Eliz., c. 1550–93, 2nd ff.99–100.

246

Chapter Nine

The first line is from the poem “How to vse the court and him selfe therin, written to syr Fraunces Bryan.” On the fourth line, the 91 refers to the number of lines, and TR10 refers to the rhyme scheme and meter; TR10, after referring to the abbreviation table, translates into terza rima: ababcb10, where “terza rima” is the rhyme scheme of three lines and ababcb10 refers to meter. To locate all EV entries with this verse form, use the index, look under the section “Three-Line” and then the scheme ababcb10, and you will find other poems indexed in this set with the same scheme and form. In “Kinds” (later “Literary Kinds” in Elizabethan Poetry), the index provides access to present-day classifications of type and genre (e.g., calendar verse, commendatory verse, elegy, epitaph, narrative, prophecy, satire, verse drama, and verse letter) as well as Renaissance terms from contemporary contexts (e.g., answer, complaint, jest, musical setting, question). The “Translations” index contains Greek, Latin, Italian, German, and French translations, as well as (in Elizabethan Poetry) Turkish, Welsh, and English dialects (e.g., Anglo-Saxon, Cornish, Cotswold, Irish, and Scots). Bibliography and Index of English Verse Printed 1476–1558 is divided into two sections: 1476–1500, indexing 148 poems, and 1501–1558, indexing 2,785 poems. Ringler analyzes the results of his compilation in his introduction. He notes a shift from religious to secular poetry in the first half of the sixteenth century, but attributes this to the literate public expanding to include lay people, and to the fact that religious expression could be found in prose rather than verse, for 43 percent of the printed books between 1501 and 1558 were religious in content. About 60 percent of the lines published were by contemporary poets. Translations of poetry into English accounted for a significant number of the lines printed, and Ringler indicates translations, when appropriate, in the first-line index entries; he also includes a valuable index to translations, arranged by language and then by author (or “anonymous”). He concludes that, throughout the sixteenth century, printers were not looking back too far into the past of English literature for material, and therefore The early printers, by what they chose to print, and reprint, determined the contours of earlier English literature for the general reading public, until antiquarians and scholars of the late eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries searched what remained of the older manuscripts and published their findings. The selections made by the early printers shaped and circumscribed Englishmen’s knowledge of their literary past for the following three centuries.18

Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate were printed and reprinted, but Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight were not. Very few Anglo-Saxon verses are found within the pages of this series of reference tools.

Genre

247

In Bibliography and Index of English Verse in Manuscript 1501–1558, Ringler, his work completed by Michael Rudick and Susan Ringler, turned from print to manuscripts in search of transcribed poems; these could comprise long poems or snippets jotted in margins of older books. While poems in print are somewhat stable, those in manuscripts are more volatile for they could be changed at the whim of the transcriber. The 2,045 poems from manuscripts, printed books, and funeral monuments fall into three major categories: older books with verse added to them by their owners or borrowers; manuscripts of single works; and miscellanies of verse, or of verse and prose. Other types include musical manuscripts and prose works with poems attached. In the introduction to the Manuscript volume, the authors find that transcribers supplemented the poetry in print with other, older poems and subjects not of interest to printers, such as alchemy, political prophesies, and pre-1501 religious verse. They also found manuscript copies of contemporary poetry preceding the print version, such as Wyatt’s verse. In manuscripts, two-thirds of the poems are anonymous, as opposed to the one-fifth of printed poems. In print, four poets are identified as women, while in manuscript the authors claim that eight are women, with no overlap between the two. In the end, Ringler, Rudick and Ringler conclude that manuscripts preserve the old and contemporary poetry of the time, which was not of interest to printers. The highly praised final publication that completed Ringler’s vision, Elizabethan Poetry: A Bibliography and First-Line Index of English Verse, 1559–1603, was published long after his death. Steven May, a student of Ringler’s, agreed to take over the project in 1982. In the resulting three volumes May, combining the print and manuscript sources as well as poems from paintings and epitaphs from funeral monuments, identified 32,500 poems. This large number illustrates the growth of this genre in the latter half of the sixteenth century; the number of poems in the Middle English volumes by Brown, Robbins, and Cutler, as well as in Ringler’s earlier two volumes, comprised twelve thousand poems in all. As a result, May expanded and reconfigured Ringler’s subject categories to allow for more precise descriptions, and added subheadings for popular topics such as hunting, love, marriage, medicine, religion, and politics. In the introduction we find that nontranscribed manuscripts of poetry were excluded (all of John Donne and most of Shakespeare’s sonnets), but May does incorporate poems found in plays, including Shakespeare’s, as well as translations and transcriptions of Anglo-Saxon and Middle English poems. Overall the work includes twelve thousand poems from manuscripts housed in ninety-three archives; although May is confident that he has done a thorough job with print sources, he acknowledges that there are many manuscripts in archives that have yet to be searched. In his analysis of the results, May points to the

248

Chapter Nine

interdisciplinary nature of this resource by stating that there are 335 poems under the heading for medicine, with subheadings for plague, receipts (prescriptions), surgery, phlebotomy, and veterinary medicine. He found poems embedded in larger works (3,588 printed and 800 nonprinted sources), and therefore notes that the subject indexes can be used to find prose on topics as well as poetry. Philemon Holland had the most entries (1,400), and Virgil (483) and Ovid (470) were the most popular poets translated by Elizabethans. Friendship was the moral issue most poeticized, with nearly three hundred poems. The “Illustrations” index does not have emblems, but the “Literary Kind” index does encompass “emblem verse,” and under the Italian section of “Translations” one can find references to the English versions of Andrea Alciato’s emblem books. The success of this venture was not the work of one man, but by his leadership and his clear vision, William Ringler made this project a success, even beyond his death. Ringler began by involving graduate students in the project, and then by finding funding through grant applications and institutional support. With this support he, and later May, had the time to conduct research and to hire assistants to help with the work. Ringler compiled the Printed volume “by hand, typewriter, and pocket calculator.”19 Susan Ringler and Michael Rudick, and later Steven May and Susan Ringler, employed a computer to compile and sort the data, thus transforming the content of the work into a format that has a future as an online database. In his introduction to the Printed volume, Ringler reflects on the impact technology had on poetry, how it provided “wider distribution, and therefore a greater chance of survival for individual poems, and to discourage the making of handwritten copies which produced a proliferation of textual variants.”20 We may yet see if technology will allow even greater access to the work begun by Ringler. As we have learned, Ringler’s vision was finished by those who valued his vision and extended it, all the while keeping his concept before them. The genres from the Renaissance and early modern period, with the help of strong advocates such as we have described in reference to prose fiction (Harner and Salzman), emblems (Daly and his colleagues), and now poetry, have resulted in the scholarly apparatus necessary to sustain and promote scholarly research.

CONCLUSION We focused on one specific source in the poetry section of this chapter, but there are dozens of other print and electronic sources of all types available for that specific genre, such as Roman Dubinski’s English Religious Poetry Printed 1477–1640: A Chronological Bibliography with Indexes; Arthur

Genre

249

Case’s A Bibliography of English Poetical Miscellanies: 1521–1750; Herbert S. Donow’s A Concordance to the Sonnet Sequences of Daniel, Drayton, Shakespeare, Sidney, and Spenser; and Chadwyck-Healey’s Renaissance English Poetry: 1500–1660 full-text database, available via LION. In this chapter, our purpose was not to be exhaustive, but to introduce the types of scholarly apparatus available, and strategies to help you find more resources using library catalogs, bibliographic databases, digital and full-text collections, dictionaries, encyclopedias, and handbooks geared toward a specific field of study. As we have seen, genre research in the Renaissance and early modern era can be complicated because writing styles were fluid, without established rules and definitions. It is also a rich area of study to pursue, for even without bibliographies and modern editions, Web-based subscription resources and digital collections allow access to the text of printed books, while projects to digitize manuscripts are growing. The Web has also allowed scholars to communicate with each other and with institutions to collaborate on digital collections. In this chapter we have introduced a number of scholarly reference tools, some decades in the making, that benefit literary scholars of the Renaissance and early modern era. Because of the Web, in the future such monumental compilations—whether it is the day-by-day stage history of the Restoration era or an index to the first line of poems—may cease to be published in book form, but instead become online databases, easily updated and expanded. There is still work to be done to provide the academic community as a whole with the tools to conduct research in specific genres.

NOTES 1. James L. Harner, English Renaissance Prose Fiction, 1500–1660: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1978): xi. 2. Marjorie Donker and George M. Muldrow, Dictionary of Literary Rhetorical Conventions of the English Renaissance (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982), ix. 3. Gerald Eades Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, vol. 7 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941–1968), 16. 4. E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, vol. 3 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 201. 5. James L. Harner, Literary Research Guide: An Annotated Listing of Reference Sources in English Literary Studies, 5th ed. (New York: Modern Language Association, 2008), 196–97. 6. Rob Jordan, “An Addendum to The London Stage 1660–1700,” Theatre Notebook 43, no. 2 (1993): 62–75. 7. Peter M. Daly, Literature in the Light of the Emblem: Structural Parallels between the Emblem and Literature in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, 2nd

250

Chapter Nine

ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 66. “The interpretation of older literary texts is almost invariably based on historical-critical editions. There are no historical-critical editions of emblem books at all. What we have are a few facsimile reprints with introductory notes of essays of differing degrees of usefulness. The new series published by Scolar Press, Olms, AMS, and Brepols preface their editions with substantial introductions.” 8. Daly, 63. 9. Rosemary Freeman, English Emblem Books (1948; repr., New York: Octagon Books, 1966), 37. 10. Freeman, 4. 11. John Manning, The Emblem (London: Reaktion Books, 2002), 16. 12. Manning, 26. 13. Huston Diehl, An Index of Icons in English Emblem Books, 1500–1700 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986), 3. 14. D. H. Woodward, review of An Index of Icons in English Emblem Books, 1500–1700, by Huston Diehl, Choice 24 (December 1986): 604. 15. Daly, 64. 16. Jerome S. Dees, “Recent Studies in the English Emblem,” English Literary Renaissance 16, no. 2 (Spring 1986): 415. 17. William A. Ringler, Jr., Bibliography and Index of English Verse Printed 1476–1558 (New York: Mansell, 1988), vii. 18. Ringler (1988), 14. 19. William A. Ringler, Jr., Bibliography and Index of English Verse in Manuscript 1501–1558. Prepared and completed by Michael Rudick and Susan J. Ringler (London: Mansell, 1992), viii. 20. Ringler (1988), 8.

Chapter Ten

Translations and Lexicons

At the beginning of the sixteenth century, English was characterized by its own citizens, William Caxton and John Skelton, as rude and simple. In Europe, speakers of French, German, and Italian were more common than speakers of English, and Latin was the international language.1 In 1516, Sir Thomas More wrote and published Utopia in Latin rather than English; the work wasn’t translated into English until 1551 by Ralph Robinson. By the end of the century, however, the English had begun to develop a nationalistic pride in their language; as Jürgen Schäfer notes in his introduction, Some three generations later, however, Raphael Holinshed could write, “There is no one speache vnder the sun spoken in our time, that hath or can haue more variety of words and copie of phrases,” and Richard Carew entitled his famous essay “The Excellencie of the English Tongue.”2

This pride manifested itself in two ways: first, a demand for English-language books, not only by English authors but also English translations of both classical and contemporary foreign-language materials, and, second, the introduction of new words and the need to define those words. Translations of the Bible into English were controversial and potentially dangerous, but otherwise no rules existed to govern how literary and classical works were translated. At the end of the sixteenth century, translations ranged from word-by-word, literal translations to translation taking so much license that the text bore no resemblance to the original. In the seventeenth century the literary figures of the day, who considered translation an art in itself, began to develop theories about the practice. Abraham Cowley, in his preface to Pindarique Odes, Written in Imitation of the Style and Manner of the Odes of Pindar, expressed his views on translation, stating that “if a Man should undertake to translate Pindar word for word, it would be thought that one 251

252

Chapter Ten

mad-man had translated another.”3 In the preface to his translation of Ovid’s Epistles in 1680, Dryden identified three methods of translation: First, that of Metaphrase, or turning an Authour word by word, and Line by Line, from one Language into another. Thus, or near this manner, was Horace his Art of Poetry translated by Ben Johnson. The second way is that of Paraphrase, or Translation with Latitude, where the Authour is kept in view by the Translator, so as never to be lost, but his words are not so strictly follow’d as his sense, and that too is admitted to be amplified, but not alter’d. Such is Mr. Wallers Translation of Virgils Fourth Æneid. The Third way is that of Imitation, where the Translator (if now he has not lost that Name) assumes the liberty not only to vary from the words and sence, but to forsake them both as he sees occasion: and taking only some general hints from the Original, to run division on the ground-work, as he pleases. Such is Mr. Cowleys practice in turning two Odes of Pindar, and one of Horace into English.4

According to George Steiner, imitation has “a long, intricate, often chequered history.”5 He continues with Jonson, who in Timbers called imitation “‘one of the four requisites in a true poet . . . not to imitate servilely.’ . . . For Jonson creative ingestion is the very path of letters . . . It is Dryden, who is so deeply and successfully implicated in the same descent through appropriation, who gives the word a negative twist.”6 John Dryden considered himself a paraphrase translator, and lamented that earlier in the century important translators such as Denham and Cowley advocated imitation. Katherine Philips calls unpardonable the liberty such translators as Edmund Waller took in their translation of Corneille’s Pompée, while Aphra Behn advocated the need for idiomatic translation, for the flourishes of French prose don’t translate well into English.7 Whatever the practices and theories behind translation in general, translations of the Bible in particular, and the developing definitions of words entering the English language, scholars of Renaissance and early modern translated texts face challenges. In this chapter we will discuss sources and strategies to help scholars identify translated texts, identify classical and contemporary foreign influences on English literary works, and find contemporary definitions of words. Some of the research tools presented here have been discussed elsewhere in the book, but here we will describe their relevance to translations and lexicons; for best practices using these sources, consult the index to locate the main entry for the title. TRANSLATIONS Translations played a vital role in helping to establish English as the language of literary England, and to help form the canon for English literature. They

Translations and Lexicons

253

existed in print and manuscript form, and can be found in letters, diaries, commonplace books, and other types of personal recordings of the era. From 1560 through 1603, translations accounted for about 10 percent of English language publications.8 It has been noted that during the first part of Elizabeth I’s reign, there were four times as many translations as were produced in the previous fifty years, when the books would have been published in the original language.9 John Barnard, in his introduction to volume 4 of The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, notes, “Other kinds of recreational literature in the vernacular were in circulation throughout these years. The 1550s and 1560s saw a continuing demand for the medieval romances, many in translation, a vogue which Caxton and de Worde had initiated in the previous century.”10 During the seventeenth century, translation was an admired literary form practiced by the foremost authors of the day,11 and an English literary canon, based upon translations of Latin, Greek, and even medieval English texts, began to take shape at the end of the century. Women had a role in translation because this literary form was viewed as an acceptable activity for their gender.12 Until Henry VIII reversed his standing, biblical translations into English were fraught with danger, and even after the break with Rome translations of the Bible were risky political ventures. William Tyndale was strangled and burned in Antwerp in 1535 for his heretical translation and publication of an English version of the New Testament. Soon after Tyndale’s death, “Henry embraced the Reformation and with great historical irony encouraged the first of a succession of English versions which all built on Tyndale’s work.”13 The Geneva Bible, published in 1560 during Elizabeth’s reign, was widely read and treasured until the end of the seventeenth century, with an estimated half-million copies sold in the sixteenth century and multiple editions into the 1640s. James I attempted to replace the Geneva Bible, which he considered seditious, with the publication of the King James version in 1611, but only after the Restoration when the Geneva Bible ceased publication did the King James version become the accepted Bible for the next three centuries.14 In the following sections we will focus on strategies to identify translations and translators who were active during the Renaissance and early modern period, and the sources available to help define words found in the works published in English during this era. For secondary sources about these topics, we recommend you use the sources and strategies covered in chapters 3 and 4. Classe, Olive, ed. Encyclopedia of Literary Translation into English. 2 vols. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 2000. Cummings, Robert. “Recent Studies in English Translation, c. 1520–c. 1590.” English Literary Renaissance 37, no. 2 (Spring 2007): 274–316. Early English Books Online. ProQuest/Chadwyck Healey. eebo.chadwyck.com.

254

Chapter Ten

Early Modern Englishwoman Printed Writings, 1500–1640. Series I. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 1996–. Early Modern Englishwoman Printed Writings, 1641–1700. Series II. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2000–. Early Modern Englishwoman: A Facsimile Library of Essential Works—Essential Works for the Study of Early Modern Women, Series III. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 1996–. English Short Title Catalogue, 1473–1800. estc.bl.uk. France, Peter, and Stuart Gillespie, general eds. The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English. 5 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005–. At present, only volume 1 (To 1500), volume 3 (1660–1790), and volume 4 (1790–1900) have been published. Gillespie, Stuart. Shakespeare’s Books: A Dictionary of Shakespeare Sources. New York: Continuum, 2004 (originally published in 2001 by Athlone Press). Gillespie, Stuart, and Robert Cummings, “A Bibliography of Ovidian Translations and Imitations in English.” Translation and Literature 13 (2004): 207–18. Hornsby, Samuel G., Jr. “Recent Studies in the 1611 ‘Authorized Version’ of the Bible.” English Literary Renaissance 13, no. 3 (Autumn 1983): 345–53. Ostovich, Helen, and Elizabeth Sauer, eds. “Translations/Alterations,” in Reading Early Modern Women: An Anthology of Texts in Manuscript and Print, 1550– 1700. New York: Routledge, 2004. Renaissance Women Online. Part of Women Writers Online, Brown University. www.wwp.brown.edu/index.html. Ringler, William A., Jr. Bibliography and Index of English Verse Printed 1476–1558. London: Mansell, 1988. Watson, George, ed. The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature. 2nd ed. Vol. 1: 600–1660. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974. ———, ed. The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature. 2nd ed. Vol. 2: 1660–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971. Weissbort, Daniel and Astradur Eysteinson, eds. Translation—Theory and Practice: A Historical Reader. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Because translation permeated the literature and writings of the Renaissance and early modern period, the scattered and incomplete reference tools available to help identify both primary and secondary sources means research may be challenging. A vital new series edited by Peter France and Stuart Gillespie, The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, will be an essential historical survey of the topic; the anticipated five volumes will cover English translation up to 2000; at present the relevant volumes 1 (before 1550) and 3 (1660–1790) have been published, but 2 (1550–1660) has not. Volume 1 considers translation in the medieval English literary culture, from 597 to 1550, and, as acknowledged in the preface, will overlap with the Renaissance context of volume 2 concerning translators such as Wyatt, Surrey, Tyndale,

Translations and Lexicons

255

and Coverdale. The book has five parts: context of translation (the languages of medieval England; manuscript culture; and nation, region, class, and gender), theories of translation, the translator (from King Alfred to William Caxton), the developing corpus of literary translation, and subjects of translation (the Bible, religious writing, women translators of religious texts, romance, chronicles and historical narratives, classical authors, writers of the Italian Renaissance, and scientific and medical writing). In the chapter “The Bible,” David Lawton traces the translation of the Bible into English from 1380 to 1550. Here, he proffers a different perspective on the development of the English Bible, and argues that although “Tyndale deserves all the honour he has received . . . Coverdale is the major figure in the history of English Bible translation in the crucial years from 1530s to the 1560s,” including the fact that he translated the psalms found in the Book of Common Prayer.15 Volume 3 looks from the Restoration forward through the eighteenth century, and is organized into nine parts: the place of translation in the literary and cultural field; theories; the translator; the developing corpus; and essays on translations from the classics and French, modern European, Middle Eastern and Oriental, and postclassical Latin literature. The two-volume Encyclopedia of Literary Translation into English, edited by Olive Classe, offers introductory entries with helpful bibliographies on translators and translations into English since Gilgamesh. Entries of interest to the scholar of Renaissance and early modern literature encompass such topics as the Bible, the influence of translations on Shakespeare, John Dryden, definitions of translation in the Renaissance, and women’s literary activities in translation. The resource is not exhaustive, for example lacking references to Katherine Philips or emblems, but it functions well as a place to start or for a quick overview of the theories of translation espoused and practiced during this era. Use of the “General Index” is required to find passages on translators such as Aphra Behn, who does not have her own discrete entry. Robert Cummings, in “Recent Studies in English Translation, c. 1520– c. 1590,” gathers together in one bibliographic essay the important tools and recent studies (primarily after 1980) that contribute to the body of work done on translations into English: general studies (bibliographies, encyclopedias, collections, studies of theory and practice, women); Latin and Greek (general studies, classical writer studies from Aesop to Virgil, postclassical Latin writers from d’Angheria to Vives); and modern vernaculars (general studies and individual authors translated from French, Italian, and Spanish). Cummings does not cover biblical translation, and he refers those interested in psalm translation to John Ottenhoff’s “Recent Studies in Metrical Psalms” (English Literary Renaissance 33, no. 2 [2003]: 252–75). Another English Literary Renaissance essay, Samuel Hornsby’s “Recent Studies in the 1611 ‘Authorized

256

Chapter Ten

Version’ of the Bible,” provides a bibliographic overview of this single work, with a section on translation listing studies on principles and problems, Bibles published prior to 1611, and the authorized version. Until the revised volume of the third edition of The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature is published, The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (NCBEL) remains an important source for both classical and contemporary translations. Volume 1 (600–1600) has relevant sections listing primary and secondary sources including literary relations with the continent, the English Bible, the prayer book, prose fiction translations into English, and translations into English (Greek and Latin classics, medieval and contemporary authors). In Volume 2 (1660–1800), the chapter “Translations into English” is divided into translations from the classics (bibliographies, theory of translation, classical Greek literature, classical Latin literature) and translations from French, German, and Italian. The translations are arranged by the original author and then in chronological order. As has been stated elsewhere in this book, to ensure all references to relevant items are found, consult the index in volume 5 of the NCBEL. There are various approaches to identifying translated printed and manuscript sources from the Renaissance and early modern era. Although neither Early English Books Online (EEBO) nor English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) have subject headings to identify works as translations, searching by the truncated word translat* and limiting to the years 1500–1700 will retrieve books that state in the frontispiece that the work is translated. Both databases can be sorted by year to arrange the results in chronological order. EEBO has 1,243 records that meet the search criteria, and ESTC has 1,612 records. These include reprints and multiple versions of the same printing. Gillespie and Cummings’s “A Bibliography of Ovidian Translations and Imitations in English” is representative of specialized bibliographies published in the periodical literature, listing eleven translations between 1500 and 1599, twentythree between 1600 and 1649, and twenty-five between 1650 and 1699; reprint years are listed with the relevant titles. Combining the results for searches conducted in EEBO and ESTC (by the author Ovid, and limited to the English language and years 1500–1600), we found all the titles and reprints listed in the Gillespie and Cummings bibliography; although we can’t guarantee that the strategies described for searching EEBO and ESTC will always be this successful, we do recommend searching both and using the above techniques as an excellent means of starting your own list of translations and reprints. In “Recent Studies in English Translation: c. 1520–c. 1590” Cummings recommends consulting the collections of translations titled The Tudor Translations by W. E. Henley (44 vols., 1902–1909, reprinted by AMS Press in 1967) and Charles Whibley (2nd series: 12 vols., 1924–1927, also reprinted

Translations and Lexicons

257

by AMS Press in 1967), as well as the translated literature found in reprint series available in The English Experience: Its Record in Early Printed Books, or early modern translations in the Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints series.16 Anthologies such as Weissbort and Eysteinsson’s Translation—Theory and Practice: A Historical Reader and the chapter “Translations/Alterations” in Reading Early Modern Women: An Anthology of Texts in Manuscript and Print, 1550–1700 are good sources for names and texts relevant to the practice and theories of translation from the era. Sections from Weissbort and Eysteinsson of interest to the scholar of Renaissance and early modern literature include background and writings on translation by Tyndale, Denham, Cowley, and Dryden, and sections on “Late Tudor and Early Jacobean Translation,” “Renaissance Latin Translation in England,” “The Catholic Bible in England,” and “Women Translators from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century.” In “Translations/Alterations” from Reading Early Modern Women, we find commentary about and sample translations by women, such as the Devonshire Manuscript; Lady Lumley’s translation of Euripides’s Iphigenia at Aulis; work by Anne Cooke, Margaret Tyler, and Mary Sidney Herbert; and commonplace book translations of Sir Walter Raleigh’s “The Lie” by Lady Anne Southwell and Ann Bowyer. Translations by women can also be found in The Early Modern Englishwoman series (see chapter 11) and Renaissance Women Online. Once you have selected a translator of interest, you can search for bibliographies as well as articles and books about the individual to find primary and secondary literature associated with that author. For locations of manuscripts and archives of authors, consult chapter 8. Potentially useful microform collections, facsimiles, and websites are discussed in chapters 11 and 12. For translations of poetry, consult Ringler’s Bibliography and Index of English Verse Printed 1476–1558, described in chapter 9, which has an index of “Translations and Adaptations.” For translations and Shakespeare, Gillespie’s Shakespeare’s Books: A Dictionary of Shakespeare Sources identifies the author’s sources, including translations. Entries comprise a biographical sketch, discussion about the sources within the works of Shakespeare, and a bibliography. Cummings calls Shakespeare’s Books “a good guide to secular literature in translation.”17 This source can be used to discover what the general availability and important translations were, as well as the status of a translated author, at the end of the sixteenth century.

LEXICONS As more and more books were written and published in English and new words introduced, lexicons (at first as glossaries within a book, and then,

258

Chapter Ten

beginning with Robert Cawdrey’s hard word Table Alphabeticall in 1604, as independent publications) helped the reading public define and understand the unfamiliar words they encountered. These glossaries were forerunners to the dictionary, and are generally referred to as “hard word” dictionaries, for they defined the difficult, unknown terms used. In 1623, Henry Cockeram’s The English Dictionarie, or, An Interpreter of Hard Words emerged from the glossary tradition as a dictionary in the modern sense. Today we refer to these lists of words as lexicons. In 1859, the Philological Society in England proposed the publication of a new English dictionary that ultimately became the Oxford English Dictionary, still under revision today as lexicographers continue to identify words and meanings throughout the history of the English language. In this section we have selected sources of interest to researchers, including modern lexicons that serve as specialized guides to the vocabulary from the Renaissance and early modern era. Coye, Dale. Pronouncing Shakespeare’s Words: A Guide from A to Zounds. New York: Routledge, 2002. Crystal, David, and Ben Crystal. Shakespeare’s Words: A Glossary and Language Companion. New York: Penguin, 2002. Fischer, Sandra K. Econolingua: A Glossary of Coins and Economic Language in Renaissance Drama. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985. Hassel, R. Chris, Jr. Shakespeare’s Religious Language: A Dictionary. Athlone Shakespeare Dictionary Series. New York: Thoemmes Continuum, 2005. Lancashire, Ian. Lexicons of Early Modern English (LEME). leme.library.utoronto .ca/. Onions, C. T. A Shakespeare Glossary. Enlarged and revised by Robert D. Eagleson. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986. Partridge, Eric. Shakespeare’s Bawdy: A Literary and Psychological Essay and a Comprehensive Glossary. Revised and enlarged. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968. Schäfer, Jürgen. Early Modern English Lexicography. 2 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Schmidt, Alexander. Shakespeare Lexicon: A Complete Dictionary of all the English Words, Phrases, and Constructions in the Words of the Poet. 3rd ed. Revised and enlarged by Gregor Sarrazin. New York: B. Blom, 1968. Simpson, J. A., and E. S. C. Weiner. The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 20 vols. with additions. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Also available by subscription online at www.oed.com. Skeat, Walter W. A Glossary of Tudor and Stuart Works, Especially from the Dramatists. New York: Burt Franklin, 1968. Wilson, Christopher R., and Michela Calore. Music in Shakespeare: A Dictionary. Athlone Shakespeare Dictionary Series. New York: Thoemmes Continuum, 2005.

Translations and Lexicons

259

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the most authoritative source for the etymology of English words, is still recording the history and evolution of the English language from around the world. The first edition, mostly edited by James A. H. Murray and published between 1884 and 1928, was followed by a Supplement and then, in 1989, the second edition, which incorporated the first edition and supplements. This resource defines and describes (using quotations) English words over time from a word’s first appearance up to the present, using as sources books, manuscripts, diaries, collections of letters, newspapers, magazines, government documents, and so forth. Words obsolete prior to 1150 are excluded, while words obsolete after that year are included. In the print version, entries are arranged by headword, with information relevant to the entire entry, and then by the “sense” section to explain the word’s meaning across time through the use of illustrative quotations.18 In the online version, the parts of the entry are made available via a series of buttons (pronunciation, spellings, etymology, quotations, and date chart). The OED is a very rich resource, made even more invaluable in its electronic form; in the advanced search mode, scholars can explore the language by searching full text or by searching fields within the entry, such as the first cited date, author, work, or quotation. For example, to locate all words that, according to the OED, first appeared in either the Eikon Basilike or Milton’s Eikonoklastes, you can conduct an advanced search on eikon in the “first cited work” field to discover forty-one occurrences. Although no distinction is made between the two texts, the words without an author are from Eikon Basilike, while Milton is identified with the others. We find the word “demagogue” from Eikon Basilike, here used in a “bad sense” in that the individual seeks to incite a mob—“Who were the chief demagogues and patrons of tumults, to send for them, to flatter and embolden them”—and Milton, indignant at this neologism, countered—“Setting aside the affrightment of this Goblin word [demagogue]; for the King by his leave cannot coine English as he could mony, to be current . . . those Demagogues . . . saving his Greek, were good patriots.”19 Ironically, many English words were coined during this era, even by Milton himself, who created the noun “overtalking” from the verb “over-talk” to describe King Charles I’s behavior in Hull in part 8 of Eikonoklastes. Of course, such a massive undertaking as the OED does have its drawbacks. Most importantly for the Renaissance and early modern era researcher, the first recorded uses in the print version may be incorrect. The OED has in the past been criticized for “its casual and often misleading use of secondary sources (glossaries, early dictionaries, etc.).”20 In her review of the

260

Chapter Ten

OED2, Charlotte Brewer describes the murky history of the original OED1, made so by the lack of stated editorial policies and processes, the unknown reliability of the readers, and the reliance on literary and canonical works. The Supplement (1972–1986), edited by R. W. Burchfield, had more clearly stated editorial policies, but still did not address the issue of reader reliability. The printed second edition from 1989 is a composite dictionary, and did not attempt to review or correct the content from the earlier editions. Brewer laments the fact that none of the print editions “offer any direction to the user as to how such fallibility may be identified, measured, or circumvented.”21 We recommend you refer to Harner for a list of compilation and editorial practices that had and have an impact on the scope of the work, publications which provide corrections and antedatings, critical reviews, recommended readings about the history of and use of the OED, and important complementary works.22 As this book goes to press the OED3 is under way in an attempt to completely revise the dictionary. The OED Online is updated with these revisions on a regular basis, and as of December 2009 updated entries, some still in draft form, covered major terms across the main alphabetic sequence, with M through reputeless completed at this time.23 For those entries that have been updated in the online version, a link in the upper right corner to the earlier edition allows the scholar to see the previous content. The OED3 lexicographers are revisiting words to identify the earliest uses, and updating the meaning of terms through the twentieth century. Thus Milton’s use of “overtalking” as a noun, and its next use in the twentieth century, were added to the dictionary as part of the OED3 revision, breaking out the word from the verb “overtalk” and adding modern quotes to illustrate usage. Scholars of the Renaissance and early modern era may want to consult volume 2 of Jürgen Schäfer’s Early Modern English Lexicography, in which he lists additions and corrections to the OED. It has been noted that, because the original editors of the OED focused on canonical, literary works, words from other disciplines were not included. Schäfer systematically checked pre-1640 books within the Early English Books microfilm collection to compile a list of words published in 134 monolingual glossaries between 1480 and 1640. Schäfer’s volume 1 is a computer-generated list of the words found in these glossaries. As stated previously, volume 2 contains the additions and corrections to the OED, plus words Schäfer checked from works by Donne, Malory, Milton, Nashe, Shakespeare, Spenser, and Wyatt, and in books on herbs, geometry, medicine, geography, glossaries, and law. If you are interested in examining these glossaries, Schäfer describes them in chronological order at the beginning of volume 1; entries contain the STC number, the number of lemmas (or headwords), range of lemmas, arrangement of the glossary, a typical entry, OED documentation, later and modern editions, and bibliog-

Translations and Lexicons

261

raphies. As the OED3 progresses, it is possible that all the words found in Schäfer’s volumes will be available in the revised, online source. While Schäfer focuses on words not included or used earlier than noted by the OED, another source to early lexicons, the database Lexicons of Early Modern English (LEME), offers online searching of all words in the texts covered. Here scholars can search a word to find its location within the lexicons and how it was defined or quoted in context, thus illustrating contemporary usage of terms. The subscription database provides access to the bibliographic information on 1,214 monolingual, bilingual, and polyglot dictionaries, lexical encyclopedias, grammars, “hard word” glossaries, and spelling lists, with more than 160 of these searchable by full text and an option available to link to digital versions of the texts in EEBO. Modern headwords have been assigned to words so that texts with the term can be retrieved and words in context compared over time. Lexicons are arranged by date, title, author, subject, and genre, with symbols indicating if the words are searchable. The subscription version also offers searching by “Quick Lexicon,” “Modern Headwords,” or “Advanced Lexicon.” The advanced mode has searching by word or character, and limiting by date, language, author, text, genre, subject, and STC/Wing number. A “Quick Lexicon” search on “poison” will find the word both in all searchable lexicons, in both English and French, with the latter a reference to “fish.” In the “Modern Headwords” search, references to the assigned headword (verb or noun) “poison” are to the English word, and references can be retrieved and usage over time compared. The public version of LEME is more restricted, with advanced searches confined to word, character, date, author, and text, and lists of searchable lexicons arranged only by date and title. There is some overlap with Schäfer, but there are unique books as well. In Schäfer we find Philip Barrough’s The Methode of Phisicke (1583). LEME contains a dictionary of words the early settlers of Virginia noted in William Strachey’s The History of Travel into Virginia Britannia (1612) and John Smith’s A Map of Virginia (1612). Although his work was generated by computer, Schäfer has not been updated since 1989 and is not electronically available. As an online, ongoing entity, LEME is not constrained by number of pages nor the static nature of print. At present, even with the OED3 under progress, LEME is a valuable resource with its direct access to the lexicons from the Renaissance and early modern era that facilitate understanding of a word’s meaning in context. Modern glossaries, dictionaries, and lexicons have been compiled to define words from the Renaissance and early modern era. In 1914, with later reprints, Walter Skeat published a list of about seven thousand words in A Glossary of Tudor and Stuart Words, Especially from the Dramatists, with definitions and locations within the texts. C. T. Onions’s A Shakespeare Glossary,

262

Chapter Ten

enlarged and revised by Robert D. Eagleson, and Alexander Schmidt’s Shakespeare Lexicon, revised and expanded by Gregor Sarrazin, are two classic guides to the language of Shakespeare, containing definitions and quotations for context. The most recent contribution to Shakespearean glossaries, David Crystal and Ben Crystal’s Shakespeare’s Words: A Glossary and Language Companion, builds upon the tradition of Onions and Schmidt, and provides twenty-first century scholars with a completely new glossary of terms to define and illustrate Shakespeare’s language. Modern dictionaries and glossaries for the Renaissance and early modern era can be very specialized, such as the well-respected, in-depth Athlone Shakespeare Dictionaries series with volumes on Shakespeare’s Religious Language: A Dictionary, in which R. Chris Hassel explores and explicates religious terminology, and Christopher R. Wilson and Michela Calore’s Music in Shakespeare: A Dictionary. Eric Partridge’s Shakespeare’s Bawdy: A Literary and Psychological Essay and a Comprehensive Glossary was an early attempt to examine Shakespeare’s sexual terminology, but ignores the homoerotic nature of his work; Stanley Wells’s “Foreword” in the 2001 reprint gives some perspective on the limitations of Partridge’s still-valuable source. In Econolingua: A Glossary of Coins and Economic Language in Renaissance Drama, Sandra K. Fischer uses plays from 1582 to 1632 to illustrate references to coins, sexual allusions, mercantile puns, related legal terms, and economic language to reveal the significance of economics in drama from this time period. For those in need of such help, Dale Coye’s Pronouncing Shakespeare’s Words: A Guide from A to Zounds provides guidance to pronunciation scene by scene within twenty-one of Shakespeare’s plays. As we have recommended as a best practice, read the preface and introductory front matter to understand the scope of the source and the decision-making process.

CONCLUSION As English became more acceptable as the language of literature, the output of classic and foreign-language translations grew to meet the reading needs of the population. Over the course of the Renaissance and early modern era, various styles for translation developed and were described by Dryden late in the seventeenth century. With the influx of these translations, new words were introduced into the language, and definitions for these new words became necessary. For the scholar of this era, there are research tools available to identify which works were translated into the English of the time, including those from Anglo-Saxon and Middle English, as well as from classic and con-

Translations and Lexicons

263

temporary foreign languages. Lexicons provided definitions of vocabulary new to the reading public. We hope the sources described in this chapter will aid you in your understanding of both vocabulary and translation during the Renaissance and early modern era.

NOTES 1. Jürgen Schäfer, Early Modern English Lexicography, vol. 1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 1. Latin continued to have a presence in England throughout the Renaissance. Latin is called the “lingua franca of European intellectual life” up into the seventeenth century, in Daniel Weissbort and Astradur Eysteinsson, eds., Translation—Theory and Practice: A Historical Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 100. J. W. Binns states in his introduction, “About one in ten of the items printed in England between c. 1550–1640 is in Latin. This may not seem a large percentage, but the importance of this forgotten tenth is greater than the proportion might suggest, because far more vernacular than Latin items were ephemeral and of slight intellectual interest . . . whereas Latin writings were usually serious in purpose and often intended for posterity,” in Intellectual Culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England: The Latin Writings of the Age (Leeds, UK: Francis Cairns, 1990), 1–2. 2. Schäfer, 1. 3. Abraham Cowley, The Complete Works in Verse and Prose of Abraham Cowley, vol. 1 (New York: AMS Press, 1967), 4. 4. John Dryden, Ovid’s Epistles Translated by Several Hands (London: Jacob Tonson, 1680), Wing 76:07, in Early English Books Online, gateway.proquest.com/ openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2003&res_id=xri:eebo&rft_id=xri:eebo:citation:12087338. 5. George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language & Translation, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 268. 6. Steiner, 269. 7. David Hopkins, “Dryden and His Contemporaries,” in The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, vol. 3, 1660–1790, ed. Stuart Gillespie and David Hopkins (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 56–58. 8. John Barnard and D. F. McKenzie, eds., Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 4, 1557–1695 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 789. This table, a corrected version of J. G. Ebel’s “A Numerical Survey of Elizabethan Translations” (Library, 5th ser., 22, no. 2 [1967], 104-27) shows that 1,043 translations were published, out of 10,646 books produced. 9. Roger Ellis and Liz Oakley-Brown, “British Tradition,” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, ed. Mona Baker (1998; repr., New York: Routledge, 2006), 337. 10. John Barnard, “Introduction,” in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 4, 1557–1695, ed. John Barnard and D. F. McKenzie (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 21.

264

Chapter Ten

11. Stuart Gillespie, “Translation and Canon-Formation,” in The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, vol. 3, 1660–1790, ed. Stuart Gillespie and David Hopkins (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 7. 12. Jane Stevenson, “Women Translators from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century,” in Translation—Theory and Practice: A Historical Reader, ed. Daniel Weissbort and Astradur Eysteinsson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 128. 13. Gerald Hammond, “Translations of the Bible,” in A Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture, ed. Michael Hattaway (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 169. 14. Hammond, 165–75. 15. David Lawton, “The Bible,” in The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, vol. 1, To 1550, ed. Roger Ellis (New York, Oxford University Press, 2008), 228–29. 16. Robert Cummings, “Recent Studies in English Translation, c. 1520–c. 1590,” English Literary Renaissance 37, no. 2 (Spring 2007): 277. 17. Cummings, 277. 18. Donna Lee Berg, A Guide to the Oxford English Dictionary (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 3–5. 19. “demagogue, n.2,” The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (1989), at OED Online, Oxford University Press, dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50060328. 20. Noel Osselton, “Unsuccessful Saywhats,” Times Literary Supplement (November 9–15, 1990): 1201. 21. Charlotte Brewer, “The Second Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary,” in The Review of English Studies, New Series, 44, no. 175 (August 1993): 324. 22. James L. Harner, Literary Research Guide: An Annotated Listing of Reference Sources in English Literary Studies, 5th ed. (New York: Modern Language Association, 2002), 179–83. 23. Charlotte Brewer, Examining the OED: OED Editions, oed.hertford.ox.ac .uk/main/.

Chapter Eleven

Microforms and Digital Collections

Materials from rare book collections and archives possess a certain allure and an aura of romance. Early printed books, manuscripts written by authors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, firsthand travel accounts, periodicals, Shakespeare’s First Folio—these kinds of works, where they survive, can act as symbolic keys into the Renaissance and early modern world. To study primary materials in their original form can be an exhilarating experience for literary scholars. Many of these early sources, however, are protected in special collections under restricted access due to their fragility, scarcity, or importance. It is possible for researchers to review these materials under certain conditions, and we outline procedures and resources for doing so in chapter 8 on manuscripts and archives. Most researchers, however, will access primary early modern documents through microfilm, microfiche, or increasingly, through digital reproductions. Print facsimiles can also reproduce the appearance and feel of an original text. These media resolve many of the dilemmas of preservation of and access to primary documents, and enable scholars to work with a wide range of early texts and manuscripts for which the originals are dispersed among various libraries and archives throughout the world. Microform technology developed commercially in the twentieth century as a means of preserving older and especially fragile materials. Once the text or manuscript was converted to a microformat, scholars could review the reproduction instead, thereby saving the original from wear or damage due to frequent use. These microform versions of primary source materials were developed and sold by commercial vendors, often working in partnership with major libraries, resulting not only in preserving rare materials but also effectively increasing distribution of these resources to the wider academic community. One of the earliest microform projects for literature of the early modern period was Early English Books, which began reproducing 265

266

Chapter Eleven

works from Pollard and Redgrave’s Short-Title Catalogue in the late 1930s. Microformats also served and continue to serve a space-saving function, since many books and newspaper or journal issues will fit on a small reel of microfilm or a microfiche card. Moreover, microforms are relatively inexpensive and durable; consequently, they are still a viable format and many microform projects continue to be produced and purchased by libraries in the twenty-first century. The most common microformats that researchers are likely to encounter are microfilm and microfiche. Microfilm, as the name suggests, reproduces text or manuscript images on 16 mm or 35 mm film, which is then stored on reels. A catalog record for a title on microfilm will state the exact reel number as a means of noting its position within the microfilm collection. Microfiche reproduces the images on a small, 4-by-5-inch flat sheet of film. Older formats that are no longer being produced are the ultra-fiche, which holds more images per card at an even smaller scale, and micro-opaque, which prints reduced page images onto white cards. Both microfilm and microfiche can be viewed by using a microform reader, often on the same machine, with the microfilm loaded by reel and the microfiche put under a glass slide to hold it in place for viewing. Since microforms and the readers can sometimes be intimidating to use at first, don’t hesitate to ask either a librarian or designated staff for help. Digitizing microform readers now allow scholars to use scanning software to create digital documents from the microform in PDF, GIF, JPEG, and TIF files. The ability to convert microforms into digital formats gives new life to the medium and is significantly transforming how the source documents are accessed and used, not only at the individual level, but also in the production of major conversion-to-digital projects. At the close of the twentieth century commercial publishers, along with individual libraries, universities, and cultural institutions, began efforts to convert microform collections to a digital environment. The digitizing movement continues to flourish in the twenty-first century, with remarkable collections being constantly released. Some of these projects scan primary source materials directly, but many, especially those available by subscription, are founded on existing microform collections. Delivered over the Web and usually characterized by multiple access points, including in some cases the ability to search the full text, these digital collections are bringing literary, historical, and cultural primary source materials of the early modern period to a much wider audience and changing the nature of literary scholarship. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software enables scanned digital images to be converted into machine-readable ASCII text, so that the converted text can be imported into a word processing program in order to be searched. Although scanning and conversion works with a certain degree of

Microforms and Digital Collections

267

success, early modern texts pose particular problems for OCR conversion. In the article “Early Modern Culture in a Comprehensive Digital Library,” Wolfgang Schibel and Jeffrey A. Rydberg-Cox discuss OCR technology’s inability to understand the range of early modern typefaces, in addition to other period-specific challenges engendered by the “linguistic, typographical and structural complexity of many early printed books.”1 Microform and digital collections are typically cataloged in one of two ways. Libraries may have only a single catalog record for an entire collection; this is known as a “collection-level” record. Such collection records may be searched in the library catalog by title or subject heading, but do not provide a list of the individual items that comprise the collection. In order to identify the titles contained in the collection, you will need to consult a print or electronic finding aid that typically indicates the title, author, and sometimes subject access to the contents. In fact, many commercial publishers now offer online finding aids to their microform collections that in some cases may be linked to the library catalog. The second cataloging practice is for libraries to purchase separate records for each of the individual items in the collection. These “item-level” records enable researchers to discover the distinct titles that make up a microform or digital collection through author, title, subject, or keyword searches of the catalog. An author search in the catalog for philips katherine, for example, retrieves separate item records for her poems and letters that are part of the microfilm collection Early English Books 1641–1700 (also known as Early English Books II and available digitally through Early English Books Online), as well as her translations of two French plays reproduced on microfiche in Three Centuries of English and American Plays, 1500–1830, in addition to a collection-level record for her literary manuscripts, entitled Orinda: The Literary Manuscripts of Katherine Philips, 1632–64 (described later in this chapter). Note that in this case, even the item-level record does not describe each individual poem or letter, but rather is a collected record for these literary works. If the individual item is part of a digital collection, either a subscription database or one offered freely on the Web, the library catalog usually features a direct link to the full-text source. If your library catalog doesn’t feature individual records for microform collections, you can use WorldCat to identify relevant titles, since it contains records from numerous libraries and therefore is likely to have records for specific items. Apart from the library catalog environment, a digital collection’s contents can usually be browsed by title or other arrangement (chronological, author, subject), or searched by keyword and other fields. In this chapter we introduce you to particular reference sources and strategies for identifying pertinent microform and digital collections for literary research of the Renaissance and early modern period. We then discuss selected

268

Chapter Eleven

collections, as well as give an overview of the major commercial producers active in both microform and digital conversion projects. Since many libraries and cultural institutions are actively digitizing special materials from their collections, this chapter will also present several current projects being developed at some of these institutions. Finally, facsimiles will be discussed as an alternative format for primary source materials, with attention paid to a few notable facsimile projects covering literature of the period. The complete transition to a digital world may not occur for many years, if ever. In the meantime, scholars will need to be comfortable working with microform, digital, and possibly facsimile surrogate formats as a means to explore original literary texts and manuscripts, as well as historical and cultural materials, of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

IDENTIFYING MICROFORM AND DIGITAL COLLECTIONS Adam Matthew Publications. www.adam-matthew-publications.co.uk/. Bibliographies and Guides. Library of Congress Humanities and Social Sciences Division, Microform Reading Room. www.loc.gov/rr/microform/bibguide.html. Dodson, Suzanne Cates, ed. Microform Research Collections: A Guide. 2nd ed. Westport, CT: Meckler Publishing, 1984. Frazier, Patrick, ed. A Guide to the Microform Collections in the Humanities and Social Sciences Division of the Library of Congress. Library of Congress Humanities and Social Sciences Division, Microform Reading Room, 1996. www.loc.gov/rr/ microform/guide/. Guide to Microforms in Print: Author, Title. K. G. Saur, updated annually. Guide to Microforms in Print: Subject. K. G. Saur, updated annually. Microform Research Collections. British Library. www.bl.uk/services/document/ microrescoll/microrescoll.html. Primary Source Media. Gale Cengage. www.gale.cengage.com/psm/. WorldCat. OCLC. www.oclc.org/firstsearch.

Although this chapter is concerned primarily with collections of early printed and manuscript materials, microform and digital collections can comprise a wide range of primary documents and objects. There are collections of paintings, photographs, cultural artifacts, sound recordings, plant species, and Parliamentary proceedings, to name just a few examples, in addition to collections of books, pamphlets, newspapers, periodicals, letters, diaries, and manuscripts. Depending on your particular project, you may want to consider collections of materials beyond the strictly literary. A good place to begin identifying relevant microform collections is to consult reference sources such as the Guide to Microforms in Print, or Microform

Microforms and Digital Collections

269

Research Collections: A Guide. Issued each year with six-month supplements, the Guide to Microforms in Print: Author, Title lists books, periodicals, archival material, and collections available from publishers internationally, but excludes dissertations and theses. The separately published Guide to Microforms in Print: Subject features titles under an adapted Dewey Decimal Classification arrangement. Entries provide author, title, volume, date, price, publisher, type of microform, and a concise description of collections. Even though Dodson’s Microform Research Collections: A Guide was published more than twenty years ago, it still offers valuable, general guidance to the major microform collections of the twentieth century. Arranged alphabetically by title, the guide describes many special collections, with notes on each collection’s scope, arrangement, and relevant bibliographies or indexes. The index heading for early modern English literature leads to profiles for eight collections: Early English Books, Series I and II; Library of English Literature; Library of the Inner Temple: Manuscripts and Early Printed Works; Lincoln Cathedral Library’s Medieval Manuscript and Seventeenth Century Pamphlet collections; Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Manuscripts from the Rawlinson Collection of Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, Oxford; and Winchester College: The Collection of 17th and 18th Century Manuscripts, in addition to the periodical collections described in chapter 6. Other collections that may be of interest include Witchcraft in Europe and America from the libraries at Cornell, University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard; English Cartoons and Satirical Prints 1320–1832 in the British Museum that features more than one thousand prints from the seventeenth century; and Politics and Administration of Tudor and Stuart England, among others that can be identified with the index heading, Great Britain— History—16th century or —17th century. As Dodson notes in her preface to the second edition, the titles of these microform collections are not always standardized, so be prepared to encounter variations when looking them up in your own library catalog or via WorldCat. If you need help, check with a reference librarian to make sure that you are finding the correct collection. The Microform Reading Room at the Library of Congress states on its Web page that the library has been collecting microforms since the 1940s, and since that time has acquired hundreds of titles across a broad range of subjects. The Bibliographies and Guides page presents links to online finding aids for the collections, both general and thematic, such as guides for British government documents, religion and theology, and women’s studies. The general guide, A Guide to the Microform Collections in the Humanities and Social Sciences Division of the Library of Congress, updates the original print guide published in 1996 on an ongoing basis. Subject access to this large collection is provided by an alphabetical index divided into two parts, “Index A–J” and

270

Chapter Eleven

“Index K–Z,” with individual titles grouped under entries for format (books, pamphlets, periodicals) and simplified Library of Congress subject headings. The English literature heading presents familiar titles, such as Three Centuries of Drama: American and English, 1500–1800, but exploring related headings, such as Archival Records—Great Britain; Great Britain—History; Ireland—Politics and government; Publishers and publishing—England; and Women’s periodicals, English reveals some interesting collections, such as Unpublished State Papers of the English Civil War and Interregnum, Records of the Worshipful Company of Stationers, 1554–1920, and Women Advising Women. Brief descriptions of the collections are then retrieved by title under a separate alphabetical listing, and indicate the publisher, number of reels, relevant finding aid or guide, and full Library of Congress subject headings. Thus from the entry for Women Advising Women, published by Adam Matthew beginning in 1992, you can determine that part 2 of the collection is devoted to advice books, manuals, almanacs, and journals from 1635 to 1837; to identify specific contents you will need to consult the finding aid, Women Advising Women: A Listing and Guide to the Microfilm Collection, and a related subject heading you may want to pursue for additional materials is Women—Great Britain—History—Modern period, 1600—Sources. Since the Library of Congress actively collects microform collections and reflects those titles likely to be held by other American libraries, checking this online guide is one strategy for identifying collections in your area of research. Another important source to consult is the Microform Research Collections page of the British Library. Although not easy to access by subject, the British Library’s microform holdings of more than two hundred titles, not searchable in the library’s Integrated Catalogue, can be browsed alphabetically by title either in HTML or PDF documents. The collection is especially rich in British historical materials. Some titles here that may be of interest include Early Quaker Writings: From the Society of Friends, 1650–1750; several collections from the Lambeth Palace Library, such as Elizabethan Ireland and the Settlement of Ulster: The Carew Papers; Papers of Anthony Bacon, 1567–1603; Talbot Papers, 1500–1616; and Records of the Church of England During the Commonwealth Period (1643–61); Star Chamber and English Society in the Reign of James I; and Tudor and Stuart Manuscripts from the Harleian Collection. The collections are accorded succinct descriptions and may be available to be borrowed through interlibrary loan. Once you have identified potentially relevant microform collections, the next step is to search your library catalog to determine if they are available at your institution, or to search in either your regional union catalog or WorldCat if they are not. You will also want to be sure to acquire the finding aids or guides associated with these collections, if they exist, to provide you with

Microforms and Digital Collections

271

accurate details regarding their contents. If your institution does not have the microforms you need in the library’s collection, then you can usually request these materials through interlibrary loan. A title search is the most effective way to find either microform collections or their finding aids. In addition to searching for known microform collection titles in a library catalog, you can also search for individual titles that comprise a collection, most successfully in WorldCat. As previously mentioned, since WorldCat reflects the catalog records of numerous libraries, it is most likely to have item-level records for titles within a microform collection. For example, a title search for tottels miscellany, limited to the material type “microforms,” retrieves several records for the original title, Songes and Sonettes, written by the right honorable Lorde Henry Haward late Earle of Surrey, and other, which became known more commonly as Tottel’s Miscellany. Figure 11.1 illustrates the WorldCat record for one of these microfilm surrogates. The series field reveals that this title is part of Early English Books, 1475–1640, located on reel 346, number 3, and the notes field indicates that this particular version is from the original at the Huntington Library and that it is available digitally on the World Wide Web, as well as from the UMI Early English Books, 1475–1640 microfilm collection. The “Other Titles” field gives clues to the digital version, in this case in Early English Books Online, and also shows that the work is alternatively known as Tottel’s Miscellany. Other important information to be gleaned from this record is the list of primary authors (Henry Howard, Sir Thomas Wyatt, Nicholas Grimald), the compiler Richard Tottel, the original publication details, including a description of the first edition’s contents, and the references to the Short-Title Catalogue and Poetical Miscellanies entry numbers. Next, searching on the microfilm collection title Early English Books, 1475–1640 as a title phrase, retrieves the collection-level record illustrated in figure 11.2. This record shows the enormous size of the collection by

Figure 11.1. Modified WorldCat record for Songes and Sonettes, written by the right honorable Lorde Henry Haward late Earle of Surrey, and other, with specific fields highlighted. Source: WorldCat, OCLC, via FirstSearch.

272

Chapter Eleven

Figure 11.2. Modified WorldCat record for Early English Books, 1475–1640, with description and notes fields highlighted. Source: WorldCat, OCLC, via FirstSearch.

the number of microfilm reels, indicates that it is based on Pollard and Redgrave’s Short-Title Catalogue, and notes that there are printed collection and reel-specific guides. An alternative method of looking for microform collections, particularly useful for reviewing recently released products, is to check the Web pages of the principal publishers. Gale’s Primary Source Media website enables searching by keyword or browsing the collections by subject, and includes fifty-nine titles in the literature category (some are subsets), several that are of interest for the Renaissance and early modern period. The “Online Guides” section (microformguides.gale.com/) provides finding aids to the collections. Adam Matthew Publications also features subject access to its collections; be sure to check both “English Literature” and “Medieval and Renaissance” categories, as well as detailed digital guides to contents, at www .adam-matthew-publications.co.uk/digital_guides/a.aspx. Although neither Readex (www.readex.com/readex/index.cfm) nor ProQuest (www.proquest .com/), which includes University Microforms International and ChadwyckHealey, offer online finding aids at this time, they do feature collection descriptions. Again, once you identify potential collections that seem pertinent for your research, check your library catalog for availability or request the appropriate reels through interlibrary loan. Identifying digital collections is not as straightforward as finding those in microformats. Many of the publishers listed above have already or are in the process of converting their microform collections to a digital environment, which they describe and promote on their Web pages and print catalogs. Since many of these digital collections are available by subscription only, you will need to check your library’s catalog or list of electronic resources to determine if your institution provides access. Your library’s research guides or pathfinders frequently will describe available digital collections, as well as print resources, for exploring particular subjects. Sometimes a library will feature its digital or microform collections on a separate Web page. Whether looking for primary source materials in a digital format or a microformat,

Microforms and Digital Collections

273

be sure to consult a reference librarian who specializes in either literature or other subjects pertinent to your research, since she or he likely will know the collections at your institution or will be able to recommend other microform collections that can be borrowed through interlibrary loan or those digital collections that are freely available on the Web.

SELECTED MICROFORM AND DIGITAL COLLECTIONS Bergquist, G. William. Three Centuries of English and American Plays, 1500–1830: Microfiche Collection Checklist. New Canaan, CT: Readex, 1991. ———. Three Centuries of English and American Plays, A Checklist: England 1500– 1800; United States 1714–1830. New York: Readex Microprint, 1963. British Literary Manuscripts from the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Series One: The English Renaissance c. 1500–1700. 41 reels. Primary Source Microfilm. British Literary Manuscripts from the British Library, London. 201 reels. Primary Source Microfilm. British Literary Manuscripts from the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C. 30 reels. Primary Source Microfilm. British Literary Manuscripts from the National Library of Scotland. 70 reels. Primary Source Microfilm. Early English Books, 1475–1640. Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms, 1938–. Early English Books, 1475–1640, Selected from Pollard and Redgrave’s Short-Title Catalogue: A Guide to the Microfilm Collection. Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms International, 1966–. Early English Books, 1475–1640, Selected from Pollard and Redgrave’s Short-Title Catalogue: A Cross Index to the Microfilm Collection. Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms International, 1982–. Early English Books, 1641–1700. Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms, 1957–. Early English Books, 1641–1700: A Cumulative Index to Units 1–60 of the Microfilm Collection. Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms International, 1990. Early English Books, 1641–1700, Selected from Donald Wing’s Short-Title Catalog: A Guide to the Microfilm Collection. Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms International, 1961–. Early English Books, 1641–1700, Selected from Donald Wing’s Short-Title Catalog: A Cross Index to the Microfilm Collection. Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms International, 1974–. Early English Books Online. ProQuest/Chadwyck-Healey. eebo.chadwyck.com. Editions and Adaptations of Shakespeare. ProQuest. www.proquest.com; also available through Literature Online. English Drama. ProQuest/Chadwyck-Healey. collections.chadwyck.com/. English Poetry, Second Edition. ProQuest/Chadwyck-Healey. collections.chadwyck .com/.

274

Chapter Eleven

Literary Manuscripts: 17th and 18th Century Poetry from the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds. Adam Matthew. www.literarymanuscriptsleeds.amdigital .co.uk. Orinda: The Literary Manuscripts of Katherine Philips (1631–1664). 4 reels. Adam Matthew. Perdita Manuscripts. Adam Matthew. www.perditamanuscripts.amdigital.co.uk. Renaissance Commonplace Books from the British Library. 15 reels. Adam Matthew. Renaissance Commonplace Books from the Huntington Library. 4 reels. Adam Matthew. Renaissance Commonplace Books from the Sloane Collection at the British Library. 21 reels. Adam Matthew. The Thomason Tracts. 256 microfilm reels. Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms International, 1977–1980. The Thomason Tracts, 1640–1661: An Index to the Microfilm Edition of the Thomason Collection of the British Library. 2 vols. Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms International, 1977–. Three Centuries of English and American Plays, 1500–1830. Readex. Description available at www.readex.com.

The Renaissance and early modern period is rich in primary source material. Scholars are fortunate in that an incredible range of literary, cultural, and historical texts, manuscripts, and images are available in microform and, increasingly, digital reproductions. This section will describe some of the principal collections for literary research of the period, as well as provide a selection of more specialized resources. Microform and digital collections of seventeenth-century periodicals are addressed at length in chapter 6, and so will not be covered here. Likewise, apart from selected projects at various national libraries, freely available digital collections are presented in the following chapter on Web resources. Be sure to employ the strategies previously outlined to identify all of the potentially relevant collections for your research beyond those described here. The foundation for literary research of the early modern period is, of course, the microfilm collections Early English Books, 1475–1640 and Early English Books, 1641–1700, also referred to as Early English Books Series I (EEBI) and Series II (EEBII) or STCI and STCII. These two collections reproduce numerous titles from Pollard and Redgrave’s A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475–1640 and Wing’s Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and British America, and of English Books Printed in Other Countries, 1641–1700 respectively, which together provide a fairly comprehensive selection of printed works

Microforms and Digital Collections

275

published during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Both microfilm projects are ongoing, with new titles being added every year. University Microfilms International (UMI) estimates that the filming of all titles in both Short-Title Catalogues will be completed in another five to ten years, due to the “rare nature of the remaining material.”2 Early English Books I, currently at 83 units of microfilm, comprises almost all of the 26,500 titles listed in Pollard and Redgrave’s STC and the revised edition (1976–1991), which added another ten thousand entries to the original, for a total of 30,854 volumes filmed to date. Both canonical and lesserknown figures are represented, including John Skelton, Sir Thomas Wyatt, Lady Elizabeth Cary, Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, Isabella Whitney, Aemilia Lanyer, William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Sir Francis Bacon, Ben Jonson, John Donne, Thomas Campion, Lady Mary Wroth, Robert Burton, and George Herbert, among many others. Early English Books I contains Shakespeare’s quarto editions, as well as the First Folio of 1623; these are indispensable for textual studies, such as for comparing versions of Richard II with and without the deposition scene. Continuing where EEBI ends in 1640, Early English Books II, currently at 132 units, contains more than seventy thousand titles from Wing’s Short-Title Catalogue and incorporates the titles from the Thomason Tracts collection. The microfilm collection does not cover separate printings of the Bible; separate statutes and proclamations; American imprints found in Early American Imprints: First Series 1639–1800, also known as Evans; books in Welsh; and selected almanacs, sermons, liturgical works, Quaker tracts, and Irish and Scottish official publications, as advised by Wing himself.3 Covering the Civil War, Interregnum, and Restoration, EEBII offers surrogate works by Robert Herrick, Richard Lovelace, Henry Vaughan, Andrew Marvell, Katherine Philips, Aphra Behn, John Milton, John Dryden, Anna Trapnel, John Bunyan, Anne Killigrew, Bathsua Makin, Thomas Hobbes, and William Congreve, to name just a few authors. The Thomason Tracts component features more than 22,000 books, pamphlets, and newspapers published between 1640 and 1661 and serves to document the political, religious, and social upheaval of the Civil War and Interregnum (the Thomason periodicals are discussed in chapter 6). Items from the Thomason Tracts collection are assigned a Thomason number and include some material not listed in Wing’s STC. Valuable not only for literary research but also for scholars in the fields of history, political science, music, linguistics, classics, science, and print culture, both EEBI and EEBII can provide an extraordinarily rich body of texts for many different kinds of investigations. In addition to using Pollard and Redgrave and Wing’s Short-Title Catalogues (see chapter 4), several print finding aids help determine the contents

276

Chapter Eleven

of the microfilm collections: Early English Books, 1475–1640, Selected from Pollard and Redgrave’s Short-Title Catalogue: A Guide to the Microfilm Collection; Early English Books, 1475–1640, Selected from Pollard and Redgrave’s Short-Title Catalogue: A Cross Index to the Microfilm Collection; Early English Books, 1641–1700: A Cumulative Index to Units 1–60 of the Microfilm Collection; Early English Books, 1641–1700, Selected from Donald Wing’s Short-Title Catalog: A Guide to the Microfilm Collection; Early English Books, 1641–1700, Selected from Donald Wing’s Short-Title Catalog: A Cross Index to the Microfilm Collection; and The Thomason Tracts, 1640–1661: An Index to the Microfilm Edition of the Thomason Collection of the British Library. UMI also issues ongoing print guides with the microfilm sets. The online English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) or WorldCat are alternative sources for identifying titles and their corresponding EEBI or EEBII microfilm reel number and position. Since the ESTC includes all of the titles from EEBI and EEBII, an advanced search on the exact phrase early english books 1475–1640, or early english books 1641–1700, limited to the “Notes” field, will retrieve items from the microfilm collections and can be combined with author, title, genre, or keyword searches, or specific date limits, to refine your search results. A similar strategy applies to WorldCat, where you can type “early english books 1475–1640” or “early english books 1641–1700” (which must be in quotations for the exact phrase to be searched) and limit the search either to the “Series Title” (a subset of “Title”) or the “Notes/Comments” field. This search can also be combined with author, title, or subject keywords, or limited by date for more precise searches. In either database, it is important to check the notes or surrogates (ESTC) field for each record to verify that the title is part of the Early English Books microfilm collection and also to identify the correct reel number and position. Digitized from the microfilm collections and available by subscription from ProQuest/Chadwyck-Healey, Early English Books Online (EEBO) reflects the remarkable depth and diversity of Early English Books print materials. Not only does EEBO reproduce most of the contents of Pollard and Redgrave and Wing’s Short-Title Catalogues, it contains the complete Thomason Tracts collection and is in the process of adding broadsides and pamphlets from the Early English Books Tract Supplement, which includes royal proclamations, letters, ballads, Church of England pamphlets and sermons, almanacs, auction catalogs (with their prints and drawings), and scientific treatises. With such a broad scope, literary scholars whose institutions subscribe to the database have unparalleled access to literature of the early modern period available directly from their computer. This vast archive of literary, historical, and cultural material can be searched by keywords in the

Microforms and Digital Collections

277

author, title, subject fields, or within all the fields of a record. The “Advanced Search” screen also permits searching by bibliographic number, imprint, reel position, and fourteen different illustration types (e.g., coat of arms, genealogical tables, portrait, map, printer’s mark, and title-page borders), in addition to limiting by date, language, source library, country of origin (e.g., England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales), and specific collection. Also be sure to check the typographical variants box at the top of the search page, since the titles, authors, and imprints are transcribed exactly from the originals in the collection and thus frequently use several characters interchangeably. Although the works in EEBO cannot be searched full text (unless your institution subscribes to Text Creation Partnership), you still can have successful results by searching for keywords in the typically descriptive titles, or by using the Library of Congress subject headings, which can be searched or browsed to identify headings relevant for your topic. For example, a keyword search of (confession or speech or words) and (scaffold or execution), limited to 1600–1700, retrieves several accounts of scaffold speeches, such as the broadsides, An Account of the behaviour, dying speeches, and execution of Mr. John Murphey, for high treason, and William May, John Sparcks, William Bishop, James Lewis, and Adam Foresith for robbery, piracy and felony, at the execution-dock on Wednesday the 25th of November, 1696 and A looking-glass for vvanton women by the example and expiation of Mary Higgs who was executed on Wednesday the 18th of July 1677 for committing the edious sin of burgery with her dog who was hanged on a tree the same day neer the place of execution shewing her penitent behaviour and last speech at the gallows, tune of In summer time. Reviewing the subject headings for these and other retrieved records leads to the identification of potentially relevant headings for examining works of this genre, like Last words, Criminals—England; Execution and executioners—England—17th century or —Early works to 1800; and Speeches, addresses, etc., English—Early works to 1800. Although periodicals are integrated into the database, they can also be searched or browsed on their own. It is also possible to browse the complete Thomason Tracts collection by tract volume and number, with broadsides and manuscripts listed separately. Texts retrieved in EEBO can be viewed by image, downloaded to a TIFF file for enlarging or rotating within an image viewer, or downloaded to a PDF file for printing or saving. As one of the larger digital projects, and certainly of significance to scholars of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature, EEBO represents the transformative power that digital texts can have on scholarship of the Renaissance and early modern period. For research centered on early modern dramatic works, the microform collection Three Centuries of English and American Plays, 1500–1830 covers

278

Chapter Eleven

more than five thousand plays, a portion of which were published in England from 1516 to 1800. The first two sections are of importance for scholars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: “1516–1641 Elizabethan, Shakespearean and Jacobean” and “1642–1700 Restoration.” Attempting to be as comprehensive as possible, the collection includes early editions and variants. Some sample titles are Francis Beaumont’s The Scornful Ladie, Aphra Behn’s Sir Patient Fancy, Richard Brome’s The Sparagus Garden, George Chapman’s Al Fooles, William Davenant’s The Platonick Lovers, John Fletcher’s Bonduca: or, The British Heroine, Nathaniel Lee’s Sophonisba, or Hannibal’s Overthrow, Thomas Middleton’s The Roaring Girle, or Moll Cut-Purse, and Thomas Shadwell’s The Amorous Bigotte, as well as works by well-known and less-familiar authors. Most of the plays in this collection are available in Early English Books microfilm collections or online in EEBO. The finding aid to the microfiche collection is Three Centuries of English and American Plays 1500–1830: Microfiche Collection Checklist, or you can consult the earlier guide to its first incarnation on micro-opaque, Three Centuries of English and American Plays, A Checklist: England 1500–1800; United States 1714–1830. Both the publisher’s website and Microform Research Collections: A Guide list the bibliographies on which the collection is based. Broader in scope, the database English Drama features full-text transcriptions of almost four thousand plays in verse and prose spanning the thirteenth through early twentieth centuries (1280–1915). The collection comprises “works acted on or intended for the stage” and covers multiple genres, including masques, pastorals, folk dramas, histories, and comedies. The principal authors are well represented, with works by Shakespeare, Jonson, Behn, and Dekker as to be expected, but there are also plays by lesser-known figures such as Lady Elizabeth Brackley, William Allen, Thomas Otway, Mary Pix, and Catharine Trotter, in addition to several Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline anonymous works like The Wit of a Woman (1604). A powerful search interface permits searching not only by title, playwright, or keywords in the full text of the play, but also by speaker, date of performance or publication, genre, the playwright’s gender, literary period (e.g., Tudor Period, 1500–1603; Elizabethan Period, 1558–1603; Jacobean and Caroline Period, 1603–1660; Commonwealth Interregnum Period, 1642–1660; and Restoration, 1660–1700), or parts of the play such as cast lists, prologues, epilogues, dedications, songs, and stage directions. The indexes for the primary fields can also be browsed. Selecting the “Complete Contents” link will retrieve an alphabetical list of all included authors and their works. Titles for English Drama were drawn from the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature. The multiple field and full-text searching capabilities of this data-

Microforms and Digital Collections

279

base potentially open up dramatic works of the early modern period to new avenues of exploration and discovery. Also part of the Chadwyck-Healey suite of literature databases, English Poetry, Second Edition provides the broadest coverage, spanning British poetic output from the eighth century up to the early twentieth century and comprising approximately more than 180,000 poems. Although the complete contents can be browsed, scholars wishing to review just early modern authors can restrict a search to a specific literary period (arranged alphabetically, not chronologically, with choices such as “Elizabethan Period, 1558–1603,” “Jacobean and Caroline Period, 1603–1660,” “Renaissance Period, 1500–1660,” “Restoration Period, 1660–1700,” and “Tudor Period, 1500–1603”) or by genre, including “Emblems, Epigrams, Formal Satires 1500–1700” and “Songbooks 1500–1700.” Searches can also be limited to poets living within a specific set of years, in addition to defining the search by gender or nationality. The poems are transcribed in full, with modern typeface. English Drama and English Poetry are part of and are cross-searchable through Chadwyck-Healey’s Literature Online, along with Early English Prose Fiction (discussed in chapter 9). Three separate microfilm collections from Adam Matthew provide access to a different genre of the period, the commonplace book. Commonplace books were personalized collections of an individual’s reading history, with text excerpts and commentary, organized under specific headings known as loci communes. As discussed in the contemporary reception chapter, scholars can examine commonplace books to learn more about early modern reading habits and the connections that early modern readers made between texts and their immediate and broader world. Renaissance Commonplace Books from the British Library (fifteen reels) features almost fifty commonplace books compiled between 1550 and 1700, including those by John Milton, Sir Walter Raleigh (written while he was imprisoned in the Tower), John Locke, Lord Burghley, Sir Julius Caesar, and Thomas Harriot (whose commonplace book contains the earliest known quotation from Henry IV, Part 1). This particular collection covers commonplace books not only of literary interest, but also those representing the fields of law, theology, politics, history, music, and cookery, to name a few examples. A much smaller collection, Renaissance Commonplace Books from the Huntington Library (only four reels) reproduces commonplace books by Thomas Egerton, Sir Nicholas Bacon, Elizabeth Hastings, and Sir Edward Dering, among others, and poetical miscellanies from the Tudor and Stuart periods. Renaissance Commonplace Books from the Sloane Collection at the British Library complements the first British Library collection by presenting an additional ninety volumes

280

Chapter Eleven

(on twenty-one reels) of commonplace books and miscellanies, also covering a broad range of interests, with examples from natural history, alchemy, gardening, religion, and trade in addition to literature and other disciplines. Detailed descriptions of these individual collections, with contents listed by reel, are available at the Adam Matthew website, www.adam-matthew -publications.co.uk/digital_guides/a.aspx. Commonplace books and verse miscellanies comprise a significant part of the database Literary Manuscripts: 17th and 18th Century Poetry from the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds. Originally compiled in the early twentieth century as a private library by Edward Allen Brotherton (Lord Brotherton) and his nephew’s wife, Dorothy Una Ratcliffe, the collection was given to the University of Leeds in 1930 and has been expanded since that time. Currently 190 manuscripts have been digitized by Adam Matthew, providing access to 6,600 poems in the collection. The Brotherton Collection Manuscript Verse (BCMSV) index enables complex searching by first and last line, attribution, verse length and form, manuscript type, and subject, as well as by author, title, and date. The “Contents” page features browsing by manuscript classification number (Lt and Ltq series), manuscript type (including anthologies, correspondence, flyleaves, translations, loose sheets, and “poems written on the back of a map,” among others), select color images, author, verse title, verse form, and first lines (from “A begger once as chanced to betide Beg’d of a parson as he by did ride” to “Zacheus, run to climb the tree so tall As Jesus passeth by to him he call”). Once the desired verses or manuscripts have been selected, they can be viewed by image, or downloaded as a PDF, with options to enlarge and also move the image around the screen for easier reading. Links to the next or previous image, as well as to the next or previous verse, let the reader virtually browse through the original manuscript, or the “Go to Image” feature can be used to move directly to a particular page. Each verse and manuscript has its own catalog record, which includes a brief summary of the content, assigned subject headings, a description of the physical item, and owners or bibliographical references, if known. From the manuscript record, all verses contained within that manuscript are listed in their textual order. The Brotherton collection offers a wide selection of seventeenth-century poetry from well-known figures such as Aphra Behn, Katherine Philips, Thomas Carew, Samuel Colvil, and William Davenant, but also reproduces many poems by anonymous writers or those whose names are not so familiar. Chris Sheppard writes in the introduction that the collection includes “manuscript verses of all kinds, the stumbling, derivative and disregarded beside the eloquent, innovative and celebrated.” No matter how skilled or rough the verse, however, what remains particularly valuable about this collection is the

Microforms and Digital Collections

281

way it serves as a snapshot of seventeenth-century verse, and how the manuscripts, especially the miscellanies, anthologies, and commonplace books, illustrate so clearly the context for how manuscript poetry of the period was read, copied, and exchanged. Many extra features underscore this aim of placing the collection in context. Four essays by the editorial board address seventeenth-century material in the collection, clandestine satire, critical reading, and two eighteenth-century verse miscellanies, in addition to the introduction. A “Biographies” section presents brief profiles of the named authors, some, tantalizingly, who are “not otherwise known.” For those scholars who are new to reading seventeenth-century manuscripts, the “Paleography” tutorial uses six verses written at different times within the century as examples of different handwriting styles, and provides transcriptions and a handwriting alphabet for each source; these can be viewed side-by-side to assist with interpretation. In all, Literary Manuscripts is an outstanding resource for investigating the wide range of manuscript poetry of the Renaissance and early modern period. Focused exclusively on women’s writing, Perdita Manuscripts features digital facsimiles of 230 manuscripts composed in Britain during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These manuscripts represent a selection from the freely available Perdita Project database at University of Warwick and Nottingham Trent University (www.warwick.ac.uk/english/perdita/html/), which describes but doesn’t offer digital reproductions of more than five hundred early modern women’s manuscripts held in libraries and archives worldwide. Based on the symbolism of Perdita, the lost woman, the project aims to recover women’s writings that have received little attention since these exist in manuscript form rather than print. Together the Perdita Project and Adam Matthew have created a valuable resource, similar to the Literary Manuscripts database, for discovering and reading early modern manuscripts. After reviewing the introduction to Renaissance women’s manuscripts by Jonathon Gibson, you may want to explore the browsing indexes in the “Searching Aid” section, where manuscripts can be accessed by author’s name (with links to biographical sketches), by names found within or associated with the manuscripts (e.g., Virgil, Hugh Latimer, Anne Boleyn), places (Arabia, Herefordshire, Tay River, Westminster), and genre found within the sections of the manuscripts (from accounts to dreams, from parody to travel writing), as well as by first lines from either poetry or prose sections. The manuscripts can also be browsed under the “Documents” tab alphabetically by title, genre, repository, date, and language. The Advanced Search screen permits searching the collection by these facets, by genre within the document, or by keyword. Records for each manuscript provide detailed information about the contents and sometimes context, physical properties of the work, bibliographic

282

Chapter Eleven

references, and access, including a link to the holding library. As an example, the note for Anne Clifford’s account book describes the purpose of the accounts, Anne’s age and who she was living with at the time, and the account book’s role in her education as a woman of privilege. Individual manuscripts can be viewed, magnified, downloaded into PDF files, and manipulated in the same way as in the Literary Manuscripts database, described previously. Finally, be sure to explore the “Bibliographic Sources” section that demonstrates the range of sources used to identify and compile the manuscripts in this online collection, and may prove useful to your own research. Beyond digital collections, scholars interested in early manuscripts will want to consult the British Literary Manuscripts microfilm collections featuring works from the British Library, the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, Cambridge University Library, the National Library of Scotland, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and Princeton University Library. One of these collections, British Literary Manuscripts from the British Library, London, is organized in three series. The first, “Series One: The English Renaissance—Literature from the Tudor Period to the Restoration, c. 1500–c. 1700,” comprises manuscripts of poetry, drama, and prose, with letters, diaries, tracts, and travel writing generally excluded unless they are literary in style or deemed important. Some highlights from the collection are poems by Sir Thomas Wyatt, Sir Philip Sidney, Ben Jonson, Thomas Carew, Abraham Cowley, John Donne, Andrew Marvell, Sir Walter Raleigh, and Sir John Suckling; dramatic manuscripts by Christopher Marlowe, Francis Beaumont, John Fletcher, and George Gascoigne; and court masques. The collection also includes royal manuscripts belonging to monarchs of the period, such as verses composed for Elizabeth I while on progress. The manuscripts in this series are from the Sloane, Arundel, Burney, Cotton, Egerton, Hargrave, Lansdowne, Royal, Kings’, Stowe, and Harleian collections. British Literary Manuscripts from the Bodleian Library, Oxford also covers the period from 1500 to 1700, comprising texts by Elkanah Settle, Sir Philip Sidney, William Killigrew, Ben Jonson, George Herbert, John Donne, Thomas Traherne, Henry King, and Robert Southwell. This collection includes the poem “Shall I Dye I Flye,” recently attributed to Shakespeare, in a miscellany from the Rawlinson Poetry Manuscripts. British Literary Manuscripts from the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C. is particularly strong in dramatic works from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and contains works by Middleton, Marlowe, Fletcher, and Beaumont, as well as poetry and commonplace books. This collection is also notable for its rare manuscripts by women authors, including Aphra Behn, Katherine Philips, Esther Inglis, Anne Wharton, Anne Campbell, Countess of Argyll, Lady Mary Wroth, and Anne, Countess of Winchilsea. Covering the Medieval and Renaissance periods from 1300 to 1700, British Literary Manuscripts from the National Library

Microforms and Digital Collections

283

of Scotland features the manuscripts of William Drummond of Hawthornden, known for his writings in support of the Royalist cause; elegies, hymns, and a history of Scotland; and works by Andrew Melville, George Lauder, and John Donne. All of these British Literary Manuscripts microfilm collections are accompanied by print guides that list the contents, with a description of each manuscript in both the guide and at the beginning of each reel. Orinda: The Literary Manuscripts of Katherine Philips (1631–1664) serves as a representative example of a microfilm collection devoted to the works of a single author. Drawn from libraries in Wales, England, and the United States, this collection reproduces twenty-seven manuscripts and two printed works by Katherine Philips (and a later printed anthology of her verse), covering both her poetic and dramatic works, in addition to period verse miscellanies and songbooks in which her lyrics were set to music. Multiple versions of the texts are provided in some cases, to facilitate textual comparisons. A detailed description of the reel contents is available on the Adam Matthew “Digital Guides” website, as previously mentioned. Shakespeare has an entire database devoted to his works, as might be expected. Illustrating the prolific literary response to the Bard, Editions and Adaptations of Shakespeare presents not only Shakespeare’s own works, but also more than one hundred adaptations, sequels, and burlesques created from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. Scholars can use this database to search across eleven different editions of Shakespeare’s works, including the First Folio of 1623, as well as selected quarto printings of individual plays, poems, apocrypha, and related material. Searches can be conducted by edition, genre, title, author, speaker, and publication date, and limited to specific parts of the text, such as stage instructions or cast lists. Editions and Adaptations of Shakespeare is available online and as a CD-ROM, via ProQuest/Chadwyck-Healey. This selection of core and specialized microform and digital collections is intended to serve as a catalyst for investigating primary source material of the Renaissance and early modern period. Be sure to check the recommended guides to microform collections and major vendor websites to identify pertinent collections and to keep up-to-date about new microform and digital projects relevant to your area of research.

SELECTED LIBRARY DIGITAL PROJECTS American Memory. Library of Congress. memory.loc.gov/ammem/index.html. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Yale University. www.library.yale .edu/beinecke/. Bodleian Library. Oxford University. www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/.

284

Chapter Eleven

British Library. www.bl.uk. Cambridge University Library. www.lib.cam.ac.uk/. European Digital Library. www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/portal/index.html. Folger Shakespeare Library. www.folger.edu. Harry Ransom Center. University of Texas at Austin. www.hrc.utexas.edu/. Huntington Library. www.huntington.org/. National Library of Ireland. www.nli.ie/en/homepage.aspx. National Library of Scotland. www.nls.uk/. National Library of Wales. www.llgc.org.uk.

As mentioned previously in the introduction, many national, university, and special libraries are actively converting their special collections and archival materials to digital format and, fortunately, many of these projects are being made freely available to the public on the Web. Since new projects are being developed all of the time, you will want to check the library webpages periodically to keep abreast of relevant collections. The British Library has been at the forefront of the digital movement. The library has many early modern literary riches in its collections to share, and yet scholars may wish for even more than is currently available in digital form. As of this writing, the “Treasures in Full” section of the British Library’s site (www.bl.uk/treasures/treasuresinfull.html) features two excellent collections for our time period, Shakespeare in Quarto (www.bl.uk/ treasures/shakespeare/homepage.html) and Renaissance Festival Books (www.bl.uk/treasures/festivalbooks/homepage.html). For the Shakespeare scholar, Shakespeare in Quarto provides fully scanned versions of ninetythree copies of twenty-one plays that were published before the theaters were closed at the onset of the Civil Wars in 1642. A special display feature lets you view an individual play, or select two plays that can be retrieved by play, quarto, and copy (e.g., Garrick, Halliwell-Phillipps, Huth) for comparative analysis (side-by-side on the screen). Contextual material presents an introduction to Shakespeare’s life, works, the quartos specifically, plays not in quarto, print culture, and the contemporary theater, as well as an overview of Shakespeare on stage from the Restoration to the present time. The site also includes three essays by scholars; a concise timeline of key dates from 1564 to 2003; a list of references to biographical information, scholarly editions, bibliographical guides, and further reading; links to Web resources; and a glossary. To better understand court or civic culture of early modern Europe, the Renaissance Festival Books collection offers 253 books of this genre from Tudor and Stuart England and from other Western European countries. Festival books are the printed records describing marriages, funerals, birth of heirs, coronations, entries into cities, meetings between rulers, and religious festivals, and other occasions. The books can be searched by keyword and

Microforms and Digital Collections

285

more specifically by festival details, including type of event (e.g., carnival, procession, regatta, wedding), place, participant, dynasty, and role (e.g., actor, author, dramatist, poet, set designer, sugar confectioner); book details such as title, person, function, and language; and page details like performance element (e.g., animal-baiting, ballet, dance, feast, masque, water spectacle), illustration, textual part (e.g., inscription, marginalia), and architectural element. Like the Shakespeare in Quarto site, Renaissance Festival Books contains background contextual material, scholarly essays, a bibliography, and recommended Web resources. You can also check the “Online Gallery” section of the British Library website for featured collections, although most of these works are not presented in full. The British Library’s Collect Britain (www.collectbritain.co.uk/collections/) has digitized thematic exhibitions. Although most of the current exhibitions are later than the early modern period, there are maps and images of London and Britain, and selected images from the manuscripts collection that can be retrieved by date, with many manuscripts created between 1500 and 1700 (the majority also presented in the “Unveiling of Britain” collection). Even though full-text digital works are limited at this time, the British Library is certainly a source to watch for future early modern digital projects. The National Library of Scotland “Digital Library” presents several special collections. The Word on the Street (www.nls.uk/broadsides/index .html) features almost 1,800 broadsides printed between 1650 and 1910 that offer valuable insights to Scottish popular culture. The broadsides can be searched by keyword and year, or browsed by nearly fifty subjects, ranging from accidents, body-snatching, courtship, crime, humor, last words, royalty, transvestites, and war, with murder being the most heavily represented at 240 broadsides. A transcription is provided for most texts in addition to a digital image and PDF facsimile, as well as commentary to place the broadside in its historical and cultural context. Brief overviews give background information about the rise of broadsides, their illustrations, and distribution, and a list of print and electronic resources directs the scholar to additional materials. Other collections that may be of interest include digitized copies of the nine “Chepman and Myllar Prints” that are the earliest surviving printed books in Scotland (1508); scanned images, an English translation, and French transcription of Mary Queen of Scot’s last letter written to her brother-in-law; document images related to James VI and the union of Scotland and England; and period maps. Another significant broadside collection is available at the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford website. Bodleian Library Broadside Ballads (www.rsl.ox.ac.uk/ballads/) showcases more than 30,000 broadsides from the library’s collections, with each ballad presented as a scanned image. A

286

Chapter Eleven

few of the ballads containing music notation also have digital sound files. The collection may be browsed or searched by sheet or ballad title, first line, tune, subject, author or performer, publisher or printer, date, shelfmark, and iconclass, a classification scheme that indexes items or themes in the illustrations (you can use the “Help” browser to identify relevant codes). Since most of the ballads are illustrated with woodcuts, this latter feature is an important component for exploring the visual as well as textual importance of this collection. Scholars can also compare different versions of a ballad, since each record lists all copies with the same title. Searching for ballads by the subject, civil war, 1642–1649 retrieves titles like “Ryot upon ryot: or A chant upon the arresting of the loyal L. mayor & sheriffs” and “Good admonition. Or Keep thy head on thy shoulders, and I will keepe mine.” The Oxford Digital Library (www.odl.ox.ac.uk/) serves as the gateway to the university’s online collections. Other university collections of potential interest to scholars of the early modern period include the Tradescant Collection, the John Johnson Collection of printed ephemera (some from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), and the Oxford Text Archive, which is discussed in chapter 12. The National Library of Wales presents their robust digital collections in the section entitled “Digital Mirror.” Here you will find digital facsimiles of Yny lhyvyr hwnn, the first book to be printed in Welsh in 1546; Y Drych Cristianogawl, the first book printed in Wales (1585); the first Welsh translation of the Bible (1588); and an early seventeenth-century pamphlet describing the sighting of a mermaid off the Pendine coast in 1603. Other resources relevant to the Renaissance and early modern period include selected testimony given in seventeenth-century witchcraft cases in Flintshire, a population survey of St. Asaph diocese in the 1680s, selected seventeenth-century manuscripts regarding a serving girl, a family history, and a document thought to be the work of author Morgan Llwyd. The Welsh Biography Online (yba.llgc.org .uk/en/index.html) enables scholars to retrieve biographical sketches and concise bibliographies of prominent Welsh figures who died before 1971; the database can be searched by subject or by keywords in the full text. Since there is no date limit feature, a keyword search for sixteenth or seventeenth or early modern is one preliminary strategy that can be employed to identify figures from the time period, such as the poet Henry Vaughan or the publisher Rowland Heylin. Be sure to examine the “Exhibitions” and “Digitisation Projects” pages for additional sources in the future. The Library of Congress’s vast and notable American Memory project aims to “document the American experience” with more than nine million digital text, sound, and image files pertaining to American history and culture. Arranged in thematic collections, the scholar of early modern British

Microforms and Digital Collections

287

literature will find collections about the early colonies, American Indians, women, music, and witchcraft, for example. The collections may be browsed by topic, place, format, or time period, and at this time seven collections pertain to the time period 1400–1699. The European Digital Library enables you to search across the digital collections of national libraries from forty-five European countries, including the Vatican City. Collections can be browsed by subject or country and limited to specific countries or type of source, such as manuscripts, books, periodicals, portraits, maps and atlases, music, religious sources, and images. The site presents descriptions and links to national catalogs and their collections. This is an excellent portal to digital collections that can be used for comparative research and for investigating topics in a broader, European context. On the National Library of Ireland website, the “Digital Library” section arranges its resources by printed, manuscript, and visual categories, only some of which are available to the public. The library does not have specific collections for the early modern period at this time, but digitized materials are integrated into the catalog, which can be searched online. Scholars might also want to check for digital projects at the Folger Shakespeare Library (including a facsimile of Shakespeare’s First Folio), the Cambridge University Library (with a collection of Sir Isaac Newton’s letters and manuscripts), the Huntington Library (no digital projects at the time of this writing), the Beinecke, the Harry Ransom Center, or other libraries that possess strong print or archival collections in your research area. Due to the widespread interest in digitizing primary source materials and libraries’ efforts to promote and make their collections accessible, it is likely that more early modern resources will become available to scholars via the Web in the near future.

FACSIMILES Augustan Reprint Society. Published for the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library at the University of California, Los Angeles, by AMS Press, 1946–1990. The Early Modern Englishwoman: Series I: Printed Writings, 1500–1640. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 1996–. The Early Modern Englishwoman: Series II: Printed Writings, 1641–1700. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2000–. The Early Modern Englishwoman: A Facsimile Library of Essential Works: Series III: Essential Works for the Study of Early Modern Women. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 1996–. Facsimile Text Society. Columbia University Press. Shakespeare, William. The First Folio of Shakespeare. 1st ed. Prepared by Charlton Hinman. New York: W. W. Norton, 1968.

288

Chapter Eleven

Shakespeare, William. The First Folio of Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Prepared by Charlton Hinman, with a new introduction by Peter W. M. Blayney. New York: W. W. Norton, 1996. The Stoughton Manuscript: A Manuscript Miscellany of Poems by Henry King and His Circle, circa 1636. A facsimile edition with introduction and indexes by Mary Hobbs. Aldershot, Hants, England: Scolar Press, 1990.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a facsimile is “An exact copy or likeness; an exact counterpart or representation”4; the term was first used in 1691. An earlier definition (and now obsolete use), however, suggests a facsimile to be the “making a copy of anything, esp. writing; imitation,” which is equally applicable to this section, for as stated by Thomas Fuller in his work, The History of the Worthies of England (1662), “He, though a quick Scribe, is but a dull one, who is good only at fac simile, to transcribe out of an original.”5 Both definitions capture something of the flavor of the facsimile—it is an exact copy, and yet the facsimile is less than the original and leaves something to be desired. Nevertheless, this “lesser form,” whether in microformat or digital presentation, still gives the scholar approximate access to the original primary source. The last type of reproduction to be discussed in this chapter is the print facsimile. Even with all the wonderful digital projects available on the Internet or stored on rolls of microfilm, the scholar of early modern literature will encounter and to some extent likely rely on printed versions of manuscripts and early books. This section will describe a selection of facsimile series and individual examples. To identify print facsimiles that pertain to your research, search your local library catalog, union catalog, or WorldCat. The general Library of Congress subject heading, English literature—Early modern, 1500–1700—Facsimiles or English literature—Early modern, 1500–1700— Manuscripts—Facsimiles will retrieve some items, but you can also combine topic or author keywords with the term facsimile* to pick up these types of resources from the series, notes, and sometimes publisher fields, even when the subject heading doesn’t contain the term facsimile itself; for example, the search dryden and facsimile* retrieves three facsimile responses to Dryden’s poem “Absalom and Achitophel” as illustrated in figure 11.3. Author and standard period bibliographies, such as the Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, may also lead you to facsimile editions. One of the newer print facsimile projects of note is the Early Modern Englishwoman: A Facsimile Library of Essential Works series from Ashgate. This remarkable project provides reproductions of published writings by women of the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Currently available in separate series that all fall under the general series title, three are concerned specifically with the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: Early Modern Englishwoman Printed Writings, 1500–1640; Early Modern Englishwoman Printed Writ-

Microforms and Digital Collections

289

Figure 11.3. Modified library catalog record for Anti-Achitophel (1682): Three Verse Replies to “Absalom and Achitophel” by John Dryden. Source: University of Denver Penrose Library catalog.

ings, 1641–1700; and Early Modern Englishwoman: A Facsimile Library of Essential Works: Essential Works for the Study of Early Modern Women. The first series features texts by Alice Sutcliffe, Anne Askew, Mary Sidney Herbert, Lady Mary Wroth, Elizabeth Cary, and Elizabeth Evelinge, among many others, as well as themed collections such as poetry by Isabella Whitney, Aemilia Lanyer, Rachel Speght, and Diane Primrose; mother’s advice books; translations; and confessional writings. Series II, which addresses the second half of the seventeenth century, covers writings by Alicia D’Anvers, Anne Killigrew, An Collins, Elizabeth Major, Anna Weamys, Elinor James, Anna Hume, Delarivier Manley, Katherine Philips, and others, in addition to collected fiction of unknown attribution, life writings, miscellaneous plays, almanacs, educational or vocational books, and writings on medicine. The third series, Essential Works for the Study of Early Modern Women, branches out into legal treatises, a compilation of prayers and meditations, a selection of news pamphlets and broadside ballads concerned with women and murder, early modern jest books, and popular literature representations of women and witchcraft, as a few examples. Each volume begins with an introduction to the author or authors, with brief biographical information, lists of various editions, and a selection of relevant scholarship. The main body of the volume is devoted to recreating images and text from the original work. The quality of the reproduction is generally good, although reading the typeface can be challenging. A fourth series, 1500–1750 Contemporary Editions, presents works by and about women but with modern typography. Be sure to check the Ashgate series website (www.ashgate.com) or search WorldCat or other library catalogs by series title for a list of pertinent volumes. The Augustan Reprint Society (ARS) is a long-standing series affiliated with the UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies and originally published by the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library at the University of California, Los Angeles from 1946 until 1990; the series is now published by AMS Press. Focusing on the Restoration and eighteenth century, the series features photographic facsimiles of important literary and other works from the period, each including a scholarly introduction. Many of the facsimiles are created from titles in the Clark Memorial Library collection,

290

Chapter Eleven

and an editorial board of UCLA faculty continues to provide oversight for the series. Try searching augustan reprint society in either the series title field or by keyword to identify ARS facsimiles at your institution. Initiated by Frank A. Patterson, a professor of English at Columbia University and well-known editor of Milton’s works, the Facsimile Text Society flourished in the 1930s and 1940s. The society produced facsimile versions of primarily seventeenth- and eighteenth-century printed books, organized into the following series: literature and language, history, philosophy, history of science, economics, and political and social science. Membership in the Society cost $5 and was open to the public. An early mention of the series in the Review of English Studies called the facsimiles “a delight to the eye and the affections of true book lovers.”6 To further illustrate the excitement generated by facsimiles of these rare, original works and to capture the tenor of academia at the time, it is worth quoting from George Shuster’s article, “Facsimiles for Everybody,” published in The Commonweal a few years after the society was founded. The existing catalogue of the Society lists many an item calculated to make a bibliophilic mouth water. To be sure, this is eminently a “scholar’s library,” so that a few titles cannot be recommended without further ado to young ladies accustomed to chaperons. Yet even they, if they were so minded, could find suitable works. As for the burrower, no literary sod could be more to his taste.7

The digital environment now makes “facsimiles for everybody” true for a modern audience in a distinct but equally exhilarating manner. Anyone who works with Shakespeare is probably familiar with Charlton Hinman’s 1968 Norton facsimile of the 1623 First Folio, The First Folio of Shakespeare, published as a second edition in 1996. This facsimile creates an “ideal” First Folio, by reproducing the cleanest, most readable, and most “fully corrected” pages from thirty First Folio copies in the Folger Shakespeare Library’s collection, rather than reproducing one extant publication. Titled Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, the facsimile contains thirty-six of Shakespeare’s canonical plays, apart from Pericles, Prince of Tyre, and the well-known prefatory material, and includes Ben Jonson’s address to the reader and poem as well as the Droeshout engraving. The facsimile adopts “through line numbering” in which each typographical line is assigned a number and then printed in the outside margin to facilitate finding specific passages or lines in the text, along with the 1864 Globe edition’s act, scene, and line designators given immediately below the facsimile page. Two appendixes illustrate samples of uncorrected and corrected pages of the Folio text, and also list each specific Folger copy used for each page in this ideal First Folio. Peter Blayney’s introduction in

Microforms and Digital Collections

291

the second edition updates Hinman’s earlier work with a more modern critical assessment, particularly in regard to the First Folio’s publishers and the printing and proofreading process. Although there are many facsimiles based on early modern printed texts, facsimiles of manuscripts from this period can be especially valuable to the scholar, since they are less likely to be available in digital form. The Stoughton Manuscript: A Manuscript Miscellany of Poems by Henry King and His Circle, circa 1636 is a representative example of the latter type of facsimile. Described as a verse miscellany, this manuscript brings together poetry by Henry King and his contemporaries Philip King, Thomas Carew, Ben Jonson, Robert Herrick, Henry Reynolds, Henry Blount, George Morley, William Davenant, and others. Altogether there are fifty-five poems by King and seventy-eight in a miscellaneous verse section that range from song lyrics to elegies, epigrams, and answer poems. The manuscript is believed to have been copied by two scribes whom King used to record his work. A transcription follows the facsimile manuscript to aid in reading the poems, especially in cases where the ink showed through and made the text illegible. Mary Hobbs also provides an introduction to the text and related manuscripts, as well as three indexes of authors (with biographical notes), titles, and first lines. The Stoughton Manuscript is part of the English Verse Miscellanies of the 17th Century series.

CONCLUSION This chapter aimed to illustrate the rich variety of digital, microform, and print facsimile resources available for studying works of the Renaissance and early modern period. Indeed, this period seems to be the focus of many recent digital projects, whether microform conversion efforts or entirely new endeavors. Although facsimiles in any format will never replace working with the original sources, digital collections in particular are expanding our access to printed texts, manuscripts, and other forms of primary source material that should only serve to enrich literary scholarship. Not only are the works of long-standing canonical figures now widely available, but access to the work of other writers and expanded representations of literary output create a fuller picture of writing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. What has been documented before, in special collections, archives, libraries, and museums, will increasingly reach a wider audience, to be searched, explored, examined, and considered. These works will allow scholars of this generation to make their own discoveries and to foster a more intimate, if still approximate, connection between the scholar and the original text.

292

Chapter Eleven

NOTES 1. Wolfgang Schibel and Jeffrey A. Rydberg-Cox, “Early Modern Culture in a Comprehensive Digital Library,” D-Lib Magazine 12:3 (March 2006), www.dlib .org/dlib/march06/schibel/03schibel.html. 2. “Status of the Microfilm Project,” Early English Books Online, eebo.chadwyck .com/about/about.htm#micro. 3. Suzanne Cates Dodson, ed., Microform Research Collections: A Guide, 2nd ed. (Westport, CT: Meckler Publishing, 1984), 187. 4. “facsimile, n.2,” The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (1989), at OED Online. Oxford University Press, dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50081497. 5. “facsimile, n.1,” Oxford English Dictionary. 6. Denis Saurat, “Review [untitled],” Review of English Studies 7, no. 28 (October 1931): 472–73. 7. George N. Shuster, “Facsimiles for Everybody,” The Commonweal: A Weekly Review of Literature, The Arts and Public Affairs 17, no. 18 (March 1, 1933): 494.

Chapter Twelve

Web Resources

The World Wide Web is such an integral part of our lives, including our literary research. We identify scholarly articles through online databases, openaccess journals, and Google Scholar; search through online catalogs from individual libraries and consortia around the world; obtain bibliographies and background information through websites and subscription reference sources; read digitized manuscripts and books online; correspond with colleagues by email and listservs; and peruse the Web for relevant conferences to attend. Our work incorporates a seamless mixture of both online subscription sources and those freely available on the Web from universities, institutions, museums, governments, associations, and interested individuals. The Web becomes richer and more crowded every day; the key is to know how to navigate your way through the many available options to find the best sources for your specific needs. Scholarly resources for studying Renaissance and early modern British literature and culture abound, but there are many websites that will not provide useful information about the period or contribute to your research. Nothing demonstrates both the pleasures and the frustrations of the open Web so clearly as conducting a Google search on Shakespeare. This simple, straightforward search retrieves more than 63.5 million hits (as of August 26, 2009), beginning of course with the top-ranked Wikipedia entry for the author and followed by websites such as Complete Works (at MIT) and Shakespeare Online, books on Shakespeare from Google Books, and even Shakespeare Fishing Tackle, as just a sample of first-page results. The Web offers an amazing array of sources for the literary scholar: background material, full-text digital reproductions, annotated bibliographies, images, and criticism, to name a few. Some of the previous chapters have discussed specific Web resources for studying early modern British literature, within the context of each chapter’s 293

294

Chapter Twelve

particular focus. Rather than attempting to be a comprehensive survey, this chapter presents additional recommended sources representing the range of Renaissance and early modern websites available for your research, including scholarly gateways, electronic text archives, author sites, reference tools, current awareness resources, and sources for historical and cultural context. Use these sources to begin your investigation of the Web, and consult gateway sites or use well-defined Google searches to identify other resources that are especially suited to your research project. The Shakespeare search described above shows how an open Web search can retrieve a mix of scholarly, commercial, and personal resources. Even among the scholarly websites, not all will be equally pertinent to your interests. You will need to employ the same evaluation criteria that you use when reviewing the results of a catalog or database search, not only determining if the content is a good match but also paying attention to the qualifications and reputation of the author/s and publisher, as well as the date of publication (or last update for websites) and the accuracy of the information presented. Keep in mind that searching the open Web is very different from searching in a controlled environment, like that of a library catalog or an index and abstracting database. There is no authoritative oversight (in terms of deciding what is included and what is excluded), and no one has preselected the websites for you, although Google definitely ranks sites to display at the top of the list. When you search in MLA International Bibliography, for example, you can be fairly certain that your results will be drawn from scholarly journals, but an open Web search can retrieve virtually anything. Moreover with general Web searching you will be relying primarily on keywords to find sources and won’t be able to take advantage of subject headings and descriptors in order to be both more comprehensive (to retrieve more sources on your topic) and more specific (to limit your results to those most closely fitting your topic), although some gateway sites do use subject headings internally and you can rely on Google Scholar, Google Books, or limited domain searches for more targeted results. Despite these challenges, the Web remains an incredibly fertile environment for literary scholars, one which should certainly be explored. To get the most from the Web, be sure to review the tips on effective Google searching in chapter 1, as well as the following suggestions for evaluating websites. Authority. Is the site based at an academic or government institution? Is it authored or edited by someone with expertise in the field? What does the domain tell you about the site (e.g., .edu, .gov, .org, .com)? Is there an “About” section, so you can determine the author’s or publisher’s credentials and the website’s purpose?

Web Resources

295

Currency. When was the site last updated and how frequently is it maintained? Does the site state when it was last updated? Is the information time sensitive? Are links to outside sources still active or are they broken? Scope. What is the subject matter and range of coverage? Who is the intended audience for the website? Objectivity. What, if any, particular bias does the author (or contributors) possess? How does that affect the website’s content? Accuracy. How accurate is the material presented? Can the information be verified in other sources? Context. Which other websites are linked to the site and what do they indicate about the authority or place of this website within a particular community? Many librarians and faculty members have created online guides to evaluating Web resources that you can consult for more detailed information. Search for the phrase “evaluating web resources” and limit your results with site:.edu to find these guides on university websites.

SCHOLARLY GATEWAYS Centre for Early Modern Studies. Oxford University. www.cems.ox.ac.uk/index .shtml. Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies. University of Toronto. www .crrs.ca/. CERES, Cambridge English Renaissance Electronic Service. Cambridge University. www.english.cam.ac.uk/ceres/. Early Modern Women Database. University Libraries, University of Maryland. www .lib.umd.edu/ETC/LOCAL/emw/emw.php3. Howard, Sharon. Early Modern Resources. www.earlymodernweb.org.uk/emr/. Liu, Alan. Voice of the Shuttle: Literature (In English). Department of English, University of California, Santa Barbara. vos.ucsb.edu/browse.asp?id=3. See in particular “Renaissance and 17th Century,” vos.ucsb.edu/browse.asp?id=2749 and “Restoration and 18th Century,” vos.ucsb.edu/browse.asp?id=2738. Lynch, Jack. Eighteenth-Century Resources. andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/18th/. ———. Literary Resources—Renaissance. andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Lit/ren.html.

If you want to get a good feel for the types of scholarly Web resources available for Renaissance and early modern British literature, creators of the following gateway sites have culled the Web to bring together recommended websites organized for thematic access. The gateways range from general literary hubs, like Voice of the Shuttle and Literary Resources, to those

296

Chapter Twelve

created by early modern research centers, such as at Cambridge, Oxford, and University of Toronto, or by university librarians, or sites showcasing an individual scholar’s collection. You will discover some overlap among these sites despite their slightly different focus, and these gateways also vary in terms of keeping up-to-date by maintaining their links. Regardless of any drawbacks, literature and interdisciplinary gateways remain valuable portals for heading your investigation of the Web in the right direction. Probably still one of the best known gateway sites for literature, the Voice of the Shuttle: Literature (in English) (VOS) offers selected scholarly websites arranged by literary period and other related categories, such as “History of the Book” and “English Literature by Genre.” The “Renaissance & 17th Century” and “Restoration & 18th Century” sections both address the early modern period and feature links to general literary sites, as well as to those for specific authors or works, cultural and historical contexts, criticism, scholarly journals, course syllabi, listservs, and conferences (with very little overlap). Many but not all of the sites listed have a very brief description or note the author and/or sponsoring institution, and some of the major sites are also represented by their individual components. The “Renaissance and 17th Century” author list begins with anonymous works and ballads and continues alphabetically through primarily canonical but also some lesser-known authors. As to be expected, William Shakespeare has many sites, including those for the authorship issue, criticism, organizations, festivals, visual resources, and writings, although John Milton, John Donne, and Edmund Spenser also have fairly robust selections. The historical and cultural sources listed cover Tudor and Elizabethan portraits, emblem books, the East India Company, and the Virginia colony, among other topics. Maintained by Jack Lynch at Rutgers University, Literary Resources— Renaissance plays a similar role to that of Voice of the Shuttle. With a slightly more European rather than British focus, Lynch’s Renaissance links are organized into general sites, and then by sites for drama, poetry and ballads, centers and institutes, journals, and authors, with separate links for Shakespeare’s individual plays and the authorship question. Some unique sources to be found here include author sites for Margaret Cavendish, Miguel de Cervantes, Desiderius Erasmus, Michel de Montaigne, and Lady Mary Wroth. Although there is some overlap between the gateways, it is worthwhile to check both VOS and Lynch. If your area of focus is on the later seventeenth century, then you will also want to review Lynch’s EighteenthCentury Resources, which covers the long eighteenth century from Milton to Keats. The eighteenth-century collection is more interdisciplinary and provides links for the following: art, architecture, and landscape gardening history; music; philosophy; religion and theology; science and mathemat-

Web Resources

297

ics; and a general category for other fields, in addition to literature. Within the “Literature” section, there are French, German, and Italian literature resources if your project is comparative in nature. Although most of the author sites focus on eighteenth-century figures, many seventeenth-century writers are also represented, including Aphra Behn; Sir Thomas Browne; Abraham Cowley; William Cowper; Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea; Anne Killigrew; John Milton; Katherine Philips; and John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. Electronic texts for the long eighteenth century are grouped together on a separate page and can be accessed by an alphabetical author index, with a category for anonymous authors. Neither Eighteenth-Century Resources nor Literary Resources—Renaissance appears to have been updated since January 2006, but many of the links remain current. Several universities have centers devoted to Renaissance and/or early modern studies that provide selected websites on their home pages. The Centre for Early Modern Studies at Oxford University, for example, features collected resources for the following thematic areas: America; archival resources; history of the book; history, genealogy and local history; journals; online texts; manuscripts; music; neo-Latin writing; religion; rhetoric; Scotland; Shakespeare and the drama; visual arts; and women’s writing. The “Online Texts” section leads to such sources as Hamlet on the Ramparts, which focuses on texts, images, and film related to Hamlet’s first encounter with his father’s ghost; an online version of John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments; and the Archimedes Project that presents digitized versions of early modern scientific, literary, and philosophical texts. Although the emphasis is primarily on Oxford sources, there are several interesting links to outside websites, including Chez La Veuve: Women Printers in Great Britain 1475–1700 (an exhibition mounted at the University of Illinois Library in 1998), Blogging the Renaissance, and the Glasgow University Emblem Website, among others. In addition to the resource links, the Centre for Early Modern Studies also presents valuable overviews and tutorials in the “Research Techniques” section, including those for examining literary manuscripts (which is described in chapter 8), Renaissance texts, and biographical research. Lastly, an image collection features digitized print and manuscript texts from sources held at Oxford, such as copies of Paradise Lost, Milton’s ode to the Bodleian librarian Joun Rous, and a verse letter sent by Donne to Lady Carey and Mistress Essex Rich. Cambridge University has its own center for period research, CERES, Cambridge English Renaissance Electronic Service. The “CERES Links” section organizes resources into general, author, journal, library, database, reference, and electronic text categories, with some sites available only to affiliated subscribers but many freely available on the Web. The “General”

298

Chapter Twelve

section links to gateways described in this section but also to sites like HoBo, for history of the book events and resources; the Glossary of Poetic Terms; and Electronic Resources for Classicists. Although fairly selective, the “Author” section gives resources for William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, John Milton, Aemilia Lanyer, Sir Thomas Browne, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Middleton, and Margaret Cavendish. Be sure to review the list of journal and electronic text links that address not only early modern literature but also theater, music, and Renaissance culture. In addition to serving as a gateway, CERES also sponsors COPIA, CERES Online Publications Interactive, which currently features three projects: “Aeneas and Isabella” (two poems attributed to Isabella Whitney); “Sidneiana” (a multimedia archive of materials related to Sidney and his family, including a musical reconstruction of some sonnets, a letter, and an online edition); and “Hap Hazard” (a scholarly edition of MS188/221, A vewe of the present state of Ireland, transcriptions of Spenser’s diplomatic letters and papers regarding Ireland, and other manuscript materials). COPIA is also where you will find English Handwriting: 1500–1700, an online tutorial described in chapter 8. The Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, based at the University of Toronto, maintains a robust selection of websites in its “Resources for Electronic Research” section. With a more continental perspective, the links are grouped into the following broad categories: general resources; general classical, medieval, and Renaissance sites and authors; religion; institutions and societies; women in history; book history; history of witches; history of exploration and cartography; libraries; journals; and miscellaneous (e.g., conferences, exhibitions, and images). This gateway will be particularly valuable for projects investigating classical and medieval foundations, as well as for those examining ties with religious movements and comparative literature. The “Renaissance Authors” section, with a very traditional approach, covers Christopher Marlowe, John Milton, William Shakespeare, Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and John Webster to represent British authors, whereas links for women writers of the period are found in the “Women in History” section, with such general sites as the Perdita Project, the Orlando Project, and Seventeenth Century Women Poets. To identify additional university Renaissance or early modern center websites, be sure to review the “Societies and Institutes” section for links to research centers in Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, France, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Japan, and the United States, since it is likely these organizations will also offer period Web resource collections. The more general Early Modern Resources features resources for studying the early modern period from historical and other perspectives, defined here as spanning the years from 1500 to 1800. This gateway arranges sites

Web Resources

299

by the following categories: reference (bibliographies, e-journals, weblogs, and reviews, among others), sources (e-prints and primary sources); regions (Africa, Americas, Asia, Australasia, Europe), themes (arts, cultures, gender, law and order, learning, material worlds, new worlds, and politics), and special topics such as “Wales and the Law,” and “Women’s lives in the Civil Wars.” There is much to discover here, and fortunately the site offers an advanced search interface as well as the ability to browse by category. New additions are highlighted on the home page and those currently showcased—such as Coin and Conscience: Popular Views of Money, Credit and Speculation, Scottish Economic History Database, 1550-1780; English Broadside Ballad Archive; Primary Sources on Copyright (1450-1900); and John Strype’s Survey of London Online—demonstrate the diversity of sites included. Each link contains a brief annotation in addition to assigned subject headings. The Aphra Behn Page site, for example, is assigned the headings “Britain,” “Drama,” “Women,” and “Writing.” Early Modern Resources is maintained by Sharon Howard, who also manages two digital primary source projects at the University of Sheffield, Proceedings of the Central Criminal Court 1834–1913 and Plebian Lives and the Making of Modern London 1690–1800. Early Modern Women Database, developed and maintained by librarians at the University of Maryland, serves as a gateway to Web resources concerned primarily with sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century women from Europe and the Americas, although there are also resources about women from the medieval period and the nineteenth century. Most of the listed sites are freely available on the Web, although some are subscription databases. Each resource has a brief description noting the site’s sponsor, resource type, geographic area, time period, language, assigned subject headings, access, and URL. The Early Modern Women Database can be searched by keyword or browsed by numerous categories, including title, subject (e.g., literature, philosophy and religion, history, multidisciplinary), resource type (e.g., primary sources, journals, reference works, gateways), time period, language, and geographic area. The “16th Century” category contains sites ranging from Early Modern Women’s Poetry to Housewife’s Rich Cabinet: Remedies, Recipes, & Helpful Hints to Music of the Renaissance, as just a few examples. Several sites devoted to early modern women writers are listed in the “Literature” category, such as those for Anne Killigrew; Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea; Anne Murray, Lady Halkett; Dorothy Osborne; Katherine Philips; Lady Mary Wroth; Margaret Cavendish; and Mary Sidney Herbert. With its broad disciplinary approach and particular emphasis on women, this is an excellent collection for scholars focusing on literature or seeking contextual resources about the lives of women during the period.

300

Chapter Twelve

GENERAL ELECTRONIC TEXT ARCHIVES Bear, Risa, ed. Renascence Editions. www.luminarium.org/renascence-editions/ ren.htm. Digital Scriptorium. Columbia University Libraries. www.scriptorium.columbia.edu/. Google Books. books.google.com/. Horace Howard Furness Shakespeare Library. University of Pennsylvania Libraries. dewey.library.upenn.edu/sceti/furness/. Jokinen, Anniina. Luminarium: Anthology of English Literature. www.luminarium .org/. Lancashire, Ian, general ed. Representative Poetry Online. University of Toronto Libraries. rpo.library.utoronto.ca/display/. Modern English Collection. Electronic Text Center. University of Virginia Library. etext.virginia.edu/modeng/. Oxford Text Archive. University of Oxford. ota.ahds.ac.uk/. Project Gutenberg. www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page. Renaissance Materials. Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University. www.perseus.tufts .edu/hopper/collection?collection=Perseus:collection:Renaissance. Steggle, Matthew, ed. Early Modern Literary Studies Electronic Texts. extra.shu .ac.uk/emls/emlsetxt.html.

There is no shortage of Renaissance and early modern texts available on the Web. The literary scholar will find not only poetry, prose, and dramatic works by period authors but also many primary historical and cultural documents such as letters, maps, and the Calendar of State Papers, Foreign. Some text collections feature works by authors spanning multiple literary periods, while others focus on the early modern period (or Renaissance, Restoration, or long eighteenth century), a specific genre, or a single author’s work. This section is concerned primarily with Renaissance and early modern literary text collections, with selected examples from general text archives. Shakespeare websites are treated in this section, as well as in the “Specialized Electronic Text Archives” and the “Author Sites” sections. You should peruse “Specialized Electronic Text Archives” for emblem books, libels, broadsides, and images collections, or the “Cultural and Historical Sources” section for other types of primary textual materials. The Oxford Text Archive, hosted at Oxford University, has a mission to collect, preserve, and provide access to “high-quality digital resources for research and teaching,” with an emphasis on texts for literary and linguistic research. You can search or browse the catalog for more than two thousand texts from ancient Greece to the twentieth century by author, title, language, or availability. Early modern authors include well-known figures such as William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, Edmund Spenser,

Web Resources

301

John Webster, Andrew Marvell, Aphra Behn, John Milton, Sir Philip Sidney, Sir Thomas More, Thomas Dekker, John Fletcher, John Skelton, Sir William Davenant, Francis Beaumont, Lady Mary Wroth, and Thomas Middleton, and those less familiar like George Bannatyne, Samuel Daniel, George Chapman, Robert Greene, Thomas Randolph, George Wilkins, and Thomas Wilson. Although many of the texts are freely available, some require permission to use from the depositor, based on different licensing agreements. Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish tragedie (1592), for example, is a Scholar Press facsimile and so requires filling out a request form. Be sure to allow anywhere from a few days to several weeks to access restricted texts. If the texts you wish to consult are not restricted, you will still need to submit your email address in order to download the complete text. Edited by Ian Lancashire and based at the University of Toronto, Representative Poetry Online (RPO) presents more than three thousand English-language poems by five hundred poets, spanning all time periods. Two indexes facilitate accessing the poetry; the “Poet Index” displays entries by name or date, and the “Poem Index” sorts alphabetically by title, first line, or last line. The chronological display shows over one hundred poets from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, from Henry VIII and Sir Thomas Wyatt to Anne Killigrew and Thomas Browne. The complete collection may be searched by keyword, or you can use the concordance search to find all occurrences of a word or part of a word within the poems. A concordance search on grief, for example, finds 454 matching lines, and the keyword search identifies the word within 265 poems, including works by Spenser, Milton, Donne, Shakespeare, Sidney, Wyatt, Dryden, Philips, Killigrew, Behn, and Marvell. Each poem is annotated with general and line-specific notes, and the original text is recorded, along with original publication date, poetic form, and RPO editing history. Biographical profiles introduce each poet and address his or her life and works, with the amount of information varying greatly depending on what is known. For Isabella Whitney, for example, her family, published works, occupation, and place of residence are outlined, but for Ben Jonson details such as his languages, education, religion, residences, and illnesses are also noted. The poetry collection is enhanced with several additional features, such as a timeline of poets and selected historical events, a glossary of poetic terms, and poetry criticism in verse and prose, including George Puttenham’s The Arte of Poesie, Sidney’s The Defense of Poesie, and Dryden’s Of Dramatic Poesie, as well as contemporary responses to poems by several early modern authors. Finally, an extensive bibliography points to anthologies and websites, such as those for English, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh poetry, in addition to sources for biography, criticism, histories, verse forms, and other Web poetry collections.

302

Chapter Twelve

Renascence Editions features 222 public-domain texts printed in English between 1477 and 1799. Transcriptions are available both in HTML and PDF for many literary works but also for texts like Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester’s Lawes and Ordinances Militarie; proclamations by Elizabeth I; and James I’s A Counterblaste to Tobacco. Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, and Robert Greene are served by several works, but this collection will also be valuable for single works by less well-represented authors, such as Anne Locke’s A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner. A note preceding each text records the editor responsible for the transcription and the original source from which it was derived. Although the texts are not peer-reviewed, scholarly editions, the publisher suggests that they can be used instead as teaching editions, suitable for reading and casual text references. Renascence Editions was created by Risa Bear and originally hosted at the University of Oregon. No longer updated, the PDF collection will be available at the University of Oregon’s Scholars’ Bank, while the HTML version will remain posted on the mirror sites at Early Modern Literary Studies, Luminarium, and Project Gutenberg. Part of the Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text & Image (SCETI) at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries, the Horace Howard Furness Shakespeare Library was originally compiled by the Furness father and son while editing a Variorum edition of Shakespeare’s works. The digital collection contains not only poetry and plays by Shakespeare but also primary and secondary sources related to Shakespeare’s literary, theatrical, and critical heritage. These sources can be browsed by author or title, and include many sixteenth- and seventeenth-century authors such as Aphra Behn, Helkiah Crooke, John Donne, John Dryden, John Gerard, Stephen Gosson, Edward Hall, Samuel Harsnett, Raphael Holinshed, Ben Jonson, Le Sylvain, Christopher Marlowe, Shackerly Marmion, John Milton, Miles Mosse, Richard Niccols, Nicholas Rowe, and Edward Topsell. The collection can also be searched by keyword in the author or title fields, and limited by century. In addition to the Furness Shakespeare Library, students and teachers will also be interested in English Renaissance in Context (ERIC), a complementary project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities that is part of the Furness website. English Renaissance in Context uses digitized texts from the Furness collection to explore period historical and literary issues through multimedia tutorials. Four tutorials on Romeo and Juliet, Merchant of Venice, Richard III, and King Lear place these plays in context, and four others (“Looking at Older Books,” “Making Books,” “Folios, Quartos & Publishing,” and “Editing and ‘Unediting’”) examine issues of the material text and early modern book production. The University of Virginia’s Electronic Text Center, now the Scholars’ Lab, hosts the Modern English Collection. This collection comprises a wide

Web Resources

303

selection of fiction, poetry, drama, manuscripts, nonfiction, letters, newspapers, and illustrations from the sixteenth century to the present that may be browsed by author or by thematic subjects (e.g., women writers, African Americans). Many of the texts are freely available to the public, although some are restricted just to affiliated users. Representative early modern British authors include Roger Ascham, Francis Bacon, Aphra Behn, John Calvin, Abraham Cowley, Lord De-La-Warre, Richard Hakluyt, Edward Heart, Thomas Hobbes, Ben Jonson (most texts restricted), John Locke, Martin Luther, Andrew Marvell, John Milton, George Percy, George Puttenham, William Shakespeare, Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Michael Wigglesworth, and Lady Mary Wroth, as well as a few anonymous works from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. You will typically have the option to download an entire work or to access separate sections, and the source text is noted in the bibliographic header. The Renaissance Materials collection, one of several collections in the well-known Perseus Digital Library at Tufts, features transcribed primary and secondary sources from the early modern period or those related to the study of period literature. Literature is defined broadly and sources such as Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Ireland, and Scotland; Hakluyt’s The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of the English Nation; and James I’s Basilikon Doron and other political works are included. Christopher Marlowe, Sir Philip Sidney, Sir Francis Bacon, Aemilia Lanyer, William Shakespeare, and Henry Peachum are a few of the authors represented. Secondary works, like E. A. Abbot’s A Shakespearean Grammar, other Shakespeare glossaries, and a lexicon and quotation dictionary round out the collection. Although not affiliated with a university or institution, Luminarium: Anthology of English Literature has an extensive collection of electronic literary texts for the medieval and early modern periods, continuing well into the eighteenth century. The “16th Century Renaissance English Literature (1485–1603)” section links to a contextual essay from the Norton Anthology of English Literature and offers subsections for thirty-eight authors, ranging from Henry VIII to Aemilia Lanyer. These author subsections typically feature a biographical profile, full-text versions of selected works either hosted by Luminarium or linked to an outside resource, essays about the figure (some linked to Early Modern Literary Studies articles), and additional related biographical, image, and miscellaneous Web resources. It should be noted, however, that the Shakespeare subsection leads directly to the website Mr. William Shakespeare and the Internet (shakespeare.palomar .edu/). Similar information is presented in the “English Literature: Early 17th Century (1603–1660)” and “English Literature: Restoration and 18th

304

Chapter Twelve

Century (1660–1785)” sections. Luminarium also has special categories for English Renaissance drama, Metaphysical poets, Cavalier poets, and religious writers, some with their own introduction, that group together writers by genre from the various period sections. In conjunction with the Luminarium anthology, creator and editor Anniina Jokinen is developing a companion encyclopedia to provide historical context for the authors represented, with entries so far primarily for people, but also for events and places (e.g., Court of Star Chamber, Swan Theatre, Oath of Supremacy, Babington plot). If you are interested in purchasing books by and about the early modern authors covered, the Luminarium bookstore offers relevant publications. Despite the Google sidebar ads (which can easily be ignored), Luminarium is a worthwhile resource and complements the text archive collections held by more scholarly institutions. Acting as a gateway to full-text collections rather than hosting the texts themselves, Early Modern Literary Studies Electronic Texts features links to selected fifteenth-, sixteenth-, and seventeenth-century texts that are freely available on the Web. More than 150 major and minor authors are represented and arranged alphabetically from anonymous to Wyatt. Although many of the links point to poems at Representative Poetry Online, there are also texts from the Oxford Text Archive, University of Virginia, University of Michigan, Luminarium, Christian Classics Ethereal Library, Renascence Editions, Carnegie Mellon, Tufts, and other online collections. Links to related classical and medieval texts are also given. Early Modern Literary Studies Electronic Texts is part of the Early Modern Literary Studies journal website, which is described in chapter 5. The Digital Scriptorium likewise serves as a portal to digital images of 5,300 medieval and Renaissance manuscripts. Even though there are manuscripts for few Renaissance authors, apart from Elizabeth I and John Sackville, this collection will be especially useful for scholars wishing to consult earlier source texts for literature of the period. Both Project Gutenberg and Google Books are two other useful collections for obtaining full-text access to early modern texts. Project Gutenberg, for example, presents more than twenty-eight thousand books that can be searched by author, title, subject, or other fields, or even the full text. Despite the impressive number of books, however, this site doesn’t include texts by all early modern authors. An author search for Aemilia Lanyer or Margaret Cavendish, for example, returns no hits but a search for Spenser retrieves the Faerie Queene, Booke I and one for John Milton retrieves Comus, Paradise Lost, Areopagitica, and Poetical Works, reinforcing the notion that this site is most productive for canonical figures. Google Books lets you search the full text of out-ofcopyright books and those titles for which the publisher has authorized a

Web Resources

305

preview. Searching Google Books for Aemilia Lanyer identifies her work Salve Deus Rex Judæorum (which cannot be previewed), but the rest of the titles retrieved are critical works about her and other contemporary figures, or modern editions of her work—with restricted access. Far down in the list of results are a few older editions, such as Select Poetry: Chiefly Sacred, of the Reign of King James the First (1847) collected by Edward Farr, which contains Lanyer’s Daughter of Jerusalem, as well as poetry by many welland lesser-known seventeenth-century authors. Although you may have to hunt through the results, Google Books can lead you to nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century editions of early modern texts that you may be unable to access elsewhere online for free.

SPECIALIZED ELECTRONIC TEXT ARCHIVES Barker, William, Mark Feltham, and Jean Guthrie, eds. Alciato’s Book of Emblems: The Memorial Web Edition in Latin and English. Memorial University of Newfoundland. www.mun.ca/alciato/index.html. Bellany, Alastair, and Andrew McRae, eds. Early Stuart Libels: An Edition of Poetry from Manuscript Sources. Early Modern Literary Studies Text Series I. purl.oclc .org/emls/texts/libels/. Bodleian Library Broadside Ballads. Oxford University. www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/ ballads/. Digital Renaissance Editions: Early Modern Drama Online. www.digital-renais sance.info/. English Emblem Book Project. Penn State University Libraries. emblem.libraries.psu .edu/home.htm. Folger Shakespeare Library. Digital Image Collection. www.folger.edu/template .cfm?cid=3077. French Emblems at Glasgow. Glasgow University. www.emblems.arts.gla.ac.uk/ french/index.php. Fumerton, Patricia, director. English Broadside Ballad Archive. University of California, Santa Barbara. www.english.ucsb.edu/emc/ballad_project/. Hylton, Jeremy. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology. shakespeare.mit.edu/. Internet Shakespeare Editions. University of Victoria. internetshakespeare.uvic. ca/index.html. OpenEmblem Portal. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. media.library.uiuc .edu/projects/oebp/. Treasures in Full: Shakespeare in Quarto. British Library. www.bl.uk/treasures/ shakespeare/homepage.html. The Word on the Street. National Library of Scotland. www.nls.uk/broadsides/index .html.

306

Chapter Twelve

Designed to meet the needs of scholars, students, actors, and the general public, Internet Shakespeare Edition features scholarly, edited editions of Shakespeare’s plays and poetry, with original spelling and punctuation, as well as selected modern editions (currently eight titles). The site presents digital facsimiles of the first, second, third, and fourth folios, as well as quartos of Henry IV, Part 1, Hamlet, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Othello, Pericles, Richard II, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, the Sonnets, Two Noble Kinsmen, Troilus and Cressida, and Venus and Adonis. Plays published in the Third Folio and attributed to Shakespeare but not by him are also provided: History of Thomas, Lord Cromwell; London Prodigal; Puritan Widow; Sir John Oldcastle; Tragedy of Locrine; and A Yorkshire Tragedy. Each play and poem has its own page containing links to the various text editions and facsimiles, sometimes information about modern performances from the “Shakespeare in Performance” database, links to contextual materials from the “Shakespeare’s Life and Times” section, and a list of relevant resources on the Web. These individual sections can also be explored separately. The “Shakespeare in Performance” database, for example, facilitates browsing or searching performance materials from more than one thousand stage and film productions, including such sources as director’s notes, reviews, press releases, interviews, costume sketches, performance stills, actor’s lists, and audio files. The “Shakespeare’s Life and Times” section gives a biographical overview, contextual essays about theater history, Elizabethan politics, history, and society, and culture, and reference materials such as chronologies, maps, and bibliographies for further reading. Rounding out this multifaceted site is a searchable collection of more than seven hundred links to additional Shakespeare and Renaissance Web resources, ranging from course and study materials, criticism, theater companies and festivals, to more general sites about period architecture, art, dance, history, music, religion, and reference materials. Started in 1996 by Michael Best at the University of Victoria, Internet Shakespeare Editions has been a nonprofit organization since 1999. If you are interested specifically in Shakespeare’s quartos or printing history, the British Library’s Treasures in Full: Shakespeare in Quarto offers 107 copies of the 21 plays that were printed in that format. What makes this site especially valuable is the ability to view two texts side-by-side for comparison and textual analysis, whether they are variant copies of the same play or different editions. For example, you could compare the Rodd and Malone copies of the 1608 Richard II quartos, or you could examine the first (1597) and second (1598) quartos, or even compare quartos between plays. A separate comparison table lets you sort all 107 quartos by play title, quarto date, provenance, or location. Each of the digitized plays has an introductory essay that covers the date of creation and first performance, lists all editions

Web Resources

307

in quarto and folio, and gives selected source texts and a synopsis of the play. A “Background” section addresses Shakespeare’s life, works, the playhouses, companies, and actors, the London book trade, and a list of the plays not in quarto. If your work focuses on tracing the performance history and print legacy of Shakespeare’s plays, be sure to consult the “Afterlife” section. Although this section currently consists of just a chronology spanning the Restoration up to the present time, the British Library plans to develop the content in the future. Additional features enhancing the website include essays by scholars in the field about Hamlet, King Lear, and the Taming of the Shrew quartos; a list of recommended scholarly editions and other sources for studying Shakespeare; a glossary that defines terms such as folio, octavo, quire, promptbook, and foul papers; and selected links to Web resources. Claiming the title of the “Web’s first edition of the Complete Works of William Shakespeare,” Complete Works of William Shakespeare, founded at MIT in 1993, features all of Shakespeare’s plays and poetry in a transcribed edition. The site has no frills or extra contextual material, just HTML versions of the works arranged by comedy, history, tragedy, and poetry categories. Promising to be a worthwhile site once completed, Digital Renaissance Editions: Early Modern Drama Online aims to provide open-access, annotated, critical editions of non-Shakespearean drama from the Tudor period through the seventeenth century. At this point in time preparation of several editions is under way, including Thomas Dekker’s The Whore of Babylon, George Chapman’s A Humorous Day’s Mirth, William Haughton’s Grim the Collier of Croyden, Philip Massinger’s The Roman Actor, Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (The B-Text), and an anonymous work, Arden of Faversham. All of these texts are being edited by scholars in the field and the annotations and additional critical materials will be subjected to peer review. Other plans for the project are contextual materials that trace a play’s reception, search capabilities and concordances, and tools for textual and stylistic analysis. The project also plans to create a performance database with multimedia content related to the plays. More than 350 seventeenth-century political poems comprise Early Stuart Libels: An Edition of Poetry from Manuscript Sources. Presented as an online text published by Early Modern Literary Studies and edited by Alastair Bellany and Andrew McRae, Early Stuart Libels brings together not only satirical and invective poems but also the “orthodox panegyric” poetic response. The full text of a poem can be downloaded as a PDF for reading, or you can access the chronologically arranged sections in HTML, beginning with “Essex, Ralegh, and late-Elizabethan Politics (1590–1603)” to the “Castlehaven Scandal (1631)” and ending with “Miscellaneous (1628–1640).” Other sections address the Parliament Fart, Robert Cecil’s death, the Addled

308

Chapter Twelve

Parliament, the Overbury murder scandal, Raleigh’s execution, Buckingham and the Villiers clan, and the Spanish match crisis, to name a few. The “Attack on the Scots” section, for example, contains seven poems, such as “They beg our goods, our lands, our lives” and “When Scotland was Scotland and England it selfe.” Each poem has an introductory note, hyperlinked footnotes, and references to similar poems within the collection. Readers can also access the contents by a first-line index, manuscript index, or name index, or search by last and/or first name and source document name and/or number. An introduction to the collection discusses the practice of libeling both in a literary and historical context, and a bibliography provides a list of recommended primary and secondary critical sources. Scholars whose work concerns literature and the political climate during the years leading up to the Civil War will find this a very useful compilation. The Digital Image Collection is just one of the many wonderful resources presented at the Folger Shakespeare Library website. Featuring more than twenty-five thousand high-resolution images from the library’s collection, this source enables scholars to view digital manuscripts, books, theater programs, costume sketches, and production photographs, among other sources, related to Shakespeare’s life, works, and legacy. The images can be accessed through a Web browser, or by downloading the Luna Insight software needed to access the Folger’s 218 digitized pre-1640s quartos collection. All images load as thumbnails at one time for browsing, and then can be searched by keyword, shelfmark, creator, title, publication or creation date, image type, event title or date, or data field. A keyword search for Cordelia, for example, retrieves nine images including an eighteenth-century print of Miss Brunton as Cordelia, as well as paintings, sculpture, and photographs. By selecting individual images, you can zoom in for details, obtain the metadata descriptions if available (from the Hamnet catalog record), or simultaneously compare different images. Scholars interested in Renaissance and early modern manuscripts can use this collection to access some period resources, such as a manuscript letter by Elizabeth I, if they don’t have access to the subscription manuscript databases discussed in chapter 8. Three excellent digital broadside ballad collections bring these ephemeral forms of early modern popular culture to the researcher’s desktop. The Bodleian Library Broadside Ballads site contains more than thirty thousand ballads drawn from across the library’s holdings, including the Ashmole, Wood, Rawlinson, Douce, Curzon, Johnson, Harding, and Firth collections. As stated on the website, these ballads can be used to study not only a literary form popular from the sixteenth through the early twentieth century but also to explore social history, art history, music history, and printing history of those periods. The individual ballads and broadsheets (sometimes more

Web Resources

309

than one ballad was printed on a single sheet) can be searched by keywords in the title, first line, or tune indexes; subjects; authors, performers (if noted), or venues; publishers or printers (when known); shelfmark; date; or iconclass. The latter category provides hierarchical subject codes for the ballad illustrations that indicate the themes, people, items, and places depicted. The ballads can also be browsed by the same indexes. Browsing for the subject civil war retrieves thirty-two ballads with the heading “civil war, 1642–1649,” such as “Rebellion given over house-keeping: or A general sale of rebellious househould stuff” and “A turn-coat of the times.” Clicking on the shelfmark loads the digital facsimile, which may be enlarged for easier viewing. The “Help” section not only covers database searching in more detail but also offers a good historical introduction to the ballads. Based at the University of California, Santa Barbara, the English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA) makes available the 1,800 ballads that comprise the Pepys collection from the Pepys Library, Magdalene College at the University of Cambridge. With its emphasis on black-letter broadsides of the seventeenth century, the EBBA offers digital facsimiles and also “facsimile transcriptions” that preserve the original illustration but transcribe the black-letter text into a more easily read roman font. An advanced search permits searching by Pepys ballad number, title, first line, tune, music, refrain, imprint, publisher, printer, author, license, date, keyword in multiple fields, or by Pepys category (e.g., devotion and morality, drinking and good fellowship, history, love—pleasant/unfortunate, marriage, the sea, tragedy). Matching ballads are displayed by title in Pepys number order with a thumbnail image, and include links to the black-letter and transcribed facsimiles, the metadata record, the uncropped version in Pepys’s volumes, and to an a cappella recording of the tune, if available. The archive also contains contextual essays, ranging from ballad measure and music to broader discussions of woodcuts, papermaking, and the chapbook trade, as well as links to other ballad websites. In addition to the Pepys collection, in the future the EBBA plans to digitize the Roxburghe ballads and other early ballads from the British Library. The National Library of Scotland produces The Word on the Street, a digital collection of almost 1,800 Scottish broadside ballads that were distributed between 1650 and 1910. The full text of the ballads may be searched by keyword or specific year, or browsed by title or subject. These subject categories illustrate the common concerns of the times, such as accidents, crime, elegies, murder, politics, royalty, soldiers, and treason. Although most of the ballads are from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, The Word on the Street does feature thirty-seven ballads from the seventeenth century, with the majority dating to the 1680s and 1690s. The earliest of these, “The Gallant Grahames,” reflects the Graham family’s support of Charles I and the Stewart succession. In addition to the original digital

310

Chapter Twelve

facsimile, a brief introduction and a modern transcription also accompany each ballad. A “Resources” section lists selected books for further reading, such as Cowan’s The Ballad in Scottish History (Tuckwell Press, 2000), and other ballad, library, and street literature websites. Emblem books were an important genre during the European Renaissance and are represented on the Web by several digitization projects. These emblem books, discussed more thoroughly in chapter 9 on genre, can be used to investigate “reading practices, printing history, Elizabethan popular culture, the use of allegory, and the relationship of word to image” (English Emblem Book Project), among other topics. The English Emblem Book Project features nine books from the Penn State University Libraries collection, by Philip Ayres, Christopher Harvey, H. G., Herman Hugo, Claude Paradin, Francis Quarles, R. B., Geffrey Whitney, and George Wither. Each book has a bibliographic citation and links to the associated digital images and text, arranged by tables of contents. A simple search interface permits searching the site only, unless your institution has a subscription to Chadwyck-Healey’s English Poetry Database that allows you to search the emblem book texts in the database. Additional scholarly resources include a chronology of events related to English emblem book history from 1569 to 1881 and a bibliography of books and journal articles covering general information and emblem studies, cultural contexts, specific authors, author attribution, catalogs and cataloging, iconography, hypermedia, and emblem books as sources. Links to other emblem websites are also presented. With its narrower focus, Alciato’s Book of Emblems: The Memorial Web Edition in Latin and English, produced by the Memorial University of Newfoundland, provides transcriptions of the 212 Latin emblem poems from the 1621 edition, and their English translations. The text and images can be viewed in sequence either in Latin or English versions, or side-by-side for comparison. First published in 1531 in an unauthorized edition, Alciato added to and organized the collection thematically; these categories from the 1548 edition can be reviewed in “The Order of the Emblems” as follows: virtues, vices, nature, astrology, love, fortune, honor, the prince, the republic, life, death, friendship, enmity, vengeance, peace, knowledge, ignorance, marriage, and trees. The emblems can also be accessed by a numerical table. Complementary information includes commentary on select emblems, a list of the principal early editions, and a bibliography of recommended books and journal articles. The Glasgow Emblem Digitisation Project at the University of Glasgow currently offers digital facsimiles and transcriptions of twenty-seven sixteenth-century French emblem books as part of its French Emblems at Glasgow website. This collection represents works by Alciato, Anneau, Bèze, Boissard, Corrozet, Coustau, Gueroult, Junius, La Perrière, Montenay, Paradin, Sambucus,

Web Resources

311

and Scève, with some texts in Latin as well as the French version. Each text receives an introductory note on the author and publication history and concludes with a few secondary sources for further reading. The emblem books can be searched by a free-text search, iconclass keywords, and proper names, and limited by book or versification. Offering an impressive collection of digital emblem books, the OpenEmblem Portal at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign not only provides the full text of numerous emblem books but also serves as an index to emblem books collected internationally and a gateway to these library collections. Browsing by classification reveals that the site lists 1,480 entries for emblem books, many but not all of which link to the full text, including resources in England, Scotland, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain.

AUTHOR SITES Aphra Behn Society. www.oldroads.org/behn/home.htm. Creamer, Kevin J. T. John Milton: The Milton-L Home Page. johnmilton.org/. Gray, Terry A. Mr. William Shakespeare and the Internet. shakespeare.palomar.edu/. Luxon, Thomas. John Milton Reading Room. www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading _room. McBride, Kari Boyd. Aemilia Lanyer, 1569–1645. www.ic.arizona.edu/ic/mcbride/ lanyer/lanyer.htm. Nestvold, Ruth. Aphra Behn Page. www.lit-arts.net/Behn/. Radcliffe, David Hill, comp. Spenser and the Tradition: English Poetry 1579–1830: A Gathering of Texts, Biography, and Criticism. spenserians.cath.vt.edu/Home page.php. Zurcher, Andrew, ed. Edmund Spenser Home Page. www.english.cam.ac.uk/spenser/ main.htm.

Scholars will discover numerous websites devoted to individual authors, some to major canonical figures and others to lesser-known authors. Some of these websites are full-blown productions with multiple resources, hosted by author societies or universities, that include biographical information, electronic texts, criticism, bibliographies, blogs, and listservs; others may present only a single type of resource and are hosted by an individual scholar. For many authors, their presence is represented primarily on the major text archive websites, such as Representative Poetry Online or Luminarium, rather than having a website dedicated to their life and work. The author websites discussed in this section are selected to represent the range of sources you are likely to encounter and to serve as a sample of what is available. To identify a website or websites for your particular author of interest, check the major

312

Chapter Twelve

gateways discussed above, or conduct a Google search, keeping in mind the criteria for evaluating websites. As previously noted, Shakespeare has a robust online presence. Created by Terry Gray at Palomar College, Mr. William Shakespeare and the Internet is a well-known, central gateway to all things Shakespeare on the Web. Attempting to provide annotations to primarily but not exclusively scholarly websites regarding Shakespeare, this resource is organized by the following categories: works, life and times, theater, criticism, Renaissance contemporaries, sources, educational, other, searching, and reviews. In the “Works” section, for example, you will find resources for both the collected and individual texts in HTML, PDF, and also searchable scanned versions, as well as static facsimile editions. The list includes not only early editions from the quartos and folios but also later editions from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries (e.g., Nicholas Rowe’s 1709 edition, Warburton’s 1747 edition, Chalmers’s 1805 edition, the 1857 Dyce editions, 1903–1907 Rolfe editions). The “Life and Times” section presents a narrative timeline of biographical events, illustrated with facsimile primary documents such as Shakespeare’s baptism record from 1564, his marriage and his children’s baptism records, the record of burial in 1616, and prefatory materials up through Rowe’s preface in the 1709 edition of the Works. Links to outside sources are embedded within the timeline’s text. The separate “Shakespeare Timeline,” a genealogical chart, a timeline summary chart with contextual historical events, and an accompanying bibliography enhance the site. The section also contains links to additional biographical sources and sources about Shakespeare’s appearance, full-text biographical works, the authorship question, influence, and the Elizabethan/Jacobean era. The “Criticism” section covers sites for general criticism and criticism of individual plays, and the “Renaissance Contemporaries” section gives links for more than one hundred figures. In addition to the sources grouped in the major categories, Terry Gray posts updates and other information on his blog, Mr. Shakespeare’s Blog (mrshakespeare.typepad.com/mrshakespeare/), which has an archive back to April 2007. Since there is an overwhelming amount of information about Shakespeare and related to Shakespeare studies on the Web, Mr. Shakespeare and the Internet serves a valuable role in guiding the scholar to the best resources and making them easily accessible in one central place. Stating its purpose as “devoted to the life, literature, and times of the poet,” John Milton: The Milton-L Home Page is designed specifically with scholars in mind. Originally created in conjunction with the Milton-L listserv and maintained by Kevin Creamer at the University of Richmond, this version of the website hosts the listserv and its archives, as well as postings organized by the following categories: book reviews; events; media; projects; recent pub-

Web Resources

313

lications; resources for scholarship, teaching, and learning; teaching Milton; and work. The “Media” section, for example, features contributions about two film versions of Paradise Lost, a link to a National Public Radio story about the four hundredth anniversary of Milton’s birth, audio readings of specific works, and online lectures; the “Recent Publications” section provides announcements of new editions and critical works. The Milton-L section gives information on joining the listserv and accessing the archives (available from November 2003 to the present), with postings from 2000 and 2001 on the old site (facultystaff.richmond.edu/~creamer/milton/archive.html); unfortunately, older postings back to 1991 are unavailable. The archives can be browsed by subject, author, or date, or searched by keyword. The website also has information about the Milton Society of America (founded in 1948 and an allied organization of the Modern Language Association of America) and the International Milton Symposium conferences. Established in 1997 by Thomas Luxon at Dartmouth College and his students, the John Milton Reading Room functions primarily as a text archive for the author and includes his poetry in English, Latin, Italian, and Greek, and selected prose. The Reading Room features edited transcriptions of Milton’s 1645 edition of the Poems and additions to the 1673 edition; Latin poems from Milton’s Commonplace Book; Paradise Lost (1674); Paradise Regain’d (1671), and Samson Agonistes (1671); the prose tracts Areopagitica, Colasterion, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (second edition, 1644), Of Education, and The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates; and not fully edited versions of The Reason of Church Government, Tetrachordon, and A Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes. The texts are annotated and most have an introduction that notes the copy text consulted. A lengthy bibliography of selected criticism from 1987 to 2004 is also presented, which covers books, book chapters, and journal articles, some of which are available on the Web. Finally, a selection of research links to other Milton sites, reference guides and sources (both subscription and freely available), Greek and Latin classical literature, the Bible and Reformation commentary, religion and theology, and miscellaneous websites further enhance the usefulness of this site. Although it hasn’t been updated since November 2000, the Aphra Behn Page still provides useful background information, including a chronology of Behn’s life and works and brief essays written by the site’s author, Ruth Nestvold, on Behn and racism, women in the Restoration theater, and the female narrative voice and the rise of the novel. Links to full-text, online versions of Oroonoko: Or, the Royal Slave; The Rover; The Unfortunate Happy Lady: A True History; The City Heiress; and The Lady’s Looking-Glass, to Dress Herself By, as well as to Behn’s poetry are listed in the “Primary Sources, Articles, and Links” section, along with a few critical sources and related

314

Chapter Twelve

Web resources. Given the amount of scholarly interest in and attention to Behn’s works in recent years, it is disappointing that there isn’t a more welldeveloped and cultivated site devoted solely to her life and work. Aphra Behn is represented on the Luminarium website but only as one of several authors. The Aphra Behn Society posts information about the society’s biannual conference and full contents of the most recent newsletter, but no specific biographical or critical resources apart from selected links to related societies (most concerned with eighteenth-century studies), other Aphra Behn sites, and eighteenth-century studies resources. Slightly more robust in nature and more recently updated, Aemilia Lanyer, 1569–1645 features a biographical overview of Lanyer’s life and an extensive bibliography compiled by Kari Boyd McBride, the site’s editor, at the University of Arizona. This bibliography covers editions of Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum; anthologies in which her work is excerpted or included; reference works and anthologies that contain entries about Lanyer; articles and books examining her life and work (by far the largest section); forthcoming, unpublished, and works in progress; and fictionalized accounts of her life. A complete transcription of Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum is presented, including the prefatory poems, as well as “The Description of Cooke-ham,” and “To the Doubtfull Reader.” The website also provides the means to subscribe to the Early Modern Women listserv (formally the Lanyer listserv); however, an archive of listserv postings is not available. Although this is a no-frills site, it has useful information for the Lanyer scholar. The Edmund Spenser Home Page, hosted at the University of Cambridge, offers multiple resources for the scholar and student. The biographical profile features images of Spenser and his contemporaries, and is followed by a chronology of Spenser’s life until his death in 1599. An annotated census of Spenser’s works lists editions for 1569–1679, 1715–1932, and 1932–present, and the site also presents two specialized bibliographies of Spenser criticism that focus on Spenser and Ireland, as well as a link to the Edmund Spenser World Bibliography (discussed later in the “Reference Tools” section). Although the website doesn’t offer full transcriptions of Spenser’s works, it does give titles posted at the Renascence Editions, Oxford Text Archive, Representative Poetry, and the Modern English Collection at the University of Virginia website. The Edmund Spenser Home Page represents the International Spenser Society on the Web and contains information about the society’s executive committee, history, conferences and events, membership, and the Isabel MacCaffrey award for the best article or book on Spenser. The website is also home to the Sidney-Spenser discussion list, which is concerned with the works of both authors as well as their contemporaries. Article abstracts for Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual and its archives are hosted

Web Resources

315

at the site back to volume 1 in 1980 and currently up to 2003, and includes submission guidelines. A selection of recommended resources points scholars to sites for contemporary authors, journals, libraries and archives, discussion lists, and general early modern literature. Possessing a unique focus, Spenser and the Tradition: English Poetry, 1579–1830: A Gathering of Texts, Biography, and Criticism is primarily a text archive intended to trace the development of English poetry through influence and response. Beginning with Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender and including authors who wrote in Spenserian stanzas or imitations of Gray’s Elegy, Spenser and the Tradition attempts to show “poets as readers—imitators and emulators, critics and biographers—engaged with literary traditions that were complex, dynamic, and embedded in social networks.” The archive contains more than ten thousand poems that can be browsed by author, or searched by the following fields: literary form (including further limiters of imitations, genre, verse form); title and text; author (including birthdate, name, nationality, religion, education, associates); topic (such as despair, literary patronage, Spenserian design); names of prominent figures (Charles I, Elizabeth I, Francis Drake, Lady Mary Wroth) and writers (including classical authors and contemporaries); and bibliographic record (e.g., place of publication, printings, citations in modern secondary literature, reviews). Keyword searches can also be conducted in the texts, the commentary, or the biographies, and limited by date. Each author in the archive has a brief biographical overview, with a list of the texts represented in full, as well as a complete list of his or her publications. The author profile gives assigned terms that may be searched; for example, the profile for Raleigh indicates that he was English and Anglican; educated at Oriel College, Oxford; was known as a courtier, poet, historian, and a soldier (by appointing the term military); and that his associates included Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Churchyard, Richard Carew, and the Earl of Essex. The “Commentary” section will be valuable, especially for those authors not represented by the Critical Heritage series (discussed in chapter 7), since it gives the full text for contemporary through nineteenth-century responses; the Raleigh commentary begins with Churchyard’s “To my honorable Frend Sir Walter Ralegh, Knight” (1588) and ends with Epes Sargent’s entry in the Cyclopaedia of British and American Poetry (1882). The “Biographies” section presents a chronological list of texts that contain biographical material—Raleigh’s begins with History of the Worthies of England (1662)—and a separate “References” section lists all the sources that were consulted in compiling the author overviews. Spenser and the Tradition will be a valuable resource not only for those scholars concerned with Spenser’s work and influence in particular, but also for those studying other Renaissance and early modern authors.

316

Chapter Twelve

REFERENCE TOOLS BibSite: The Bibliographical Society of America. www.bibsocamer.org/BibSite/bib site.htm. British Book Trade Index. University of Birmingham. www.bbti.bham.ac.uk/. Butler, Anthony W., comp., with Tracey Caulfield, Felicity Henderson, and Harold Love. Restoration Theatre Song Archive. Monash University. arts.monash.edu .au/english/resources/restoration-theatre-song-archive/index.php. Farmer, Alan B., and Zachary Lesser. DEEP: Database of Early English Playbooks. deep.sas.upenn.edu/. Leeds Verse Database (BCMSV). University of Leeds. www.leeds.ac.uk/library/ spcoll/bcmsv/intro.htm. Norton Topics Online. W. W. Norton and Company. www.wwnorton.com/college/ english/nael/welcome.htm. Open Source Shakespeare: Concordance of Shakespeare’s Complete Works. George Mason University. www.opensourceshakespeare.com/concordance/. Records of Early English Drama: Patrons and Performances Web Site. University of Toronto. link.library.utoronto.ca/reed/. The Royal Historical Society Bibliography. www.rhs.ac.uk/bibl/bibwel.asp. Scottish Book Trade Index. National Library of Scotland. www.nls.uk/catalogues/ resources/sbti/. Stump, Donald, ed. Sir Philip Sidney World Bibliography. Resources in Renaissance Literature at Saint Louis University. bibs.slu.edu/. Young, Abigail Ann, and Gord Oxley. Records of Early English Drama (REED). University of Toronto. www.reed.utoronto.ca/.

Many different types of reference tools proliferate on the Web. The literary scholar will find catalogs, bibliographies, dictionaries, concordances, indexes, and directories, among other types of sources; many are general in nature but can be used for early modern studies, and others are designed exclusively for study of British literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Some of these sources have been discussed in previous chapters and won’t be covered here, specifically online library and archives catalogs. Consequently, you may want to review chapters 3 and 8 (Library Catalogs and Manuscripts and Archives) for detailed descriptions of freely available Web sources like the Integrated Catalogue and Manuscripts Catalogue at the British Library, ARCHON, the National Register of Archives, the Scottish Archive Network, and the National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections, to name a few. Three Web resources of note that are discussed elsewhere in this book include English Handwriting, 1500–1700 (chapter 8), Index of Poetry in Printed Miscellanies, 1640–1682, and PLRE Folger Database (both in chapter 7). Rather than attempt to be comprehensive, we selected the sources discussed in this

Web Resources

317

section to showcase some of the more interesting sites available for study of the Renaissance and early modern period. Created by Alan B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser, DEEP: Database of Early English Playbooks is a searchable database of all the playbooks produced in England, Scotland, and Ireland through the year 1660 when the theaters reopened. More than two hundred playwrights are covered. Although DEEP does not provide the full text of these playbooks, its highly detailed advanced search interface facilitates identifying playbooks by numerous components, including title; all title-page text, either modern or old spelling; author (modern or playbook attribution); company (modern or playbook attribution); theater; play type (adult professional, boys professional, university, closet); genre (playbook attribution or from the Annals, e.g., allegory, civic pageant, comedy, history, interlude, masque, satire, tragedy); paratextual material (e.g., dedication, commendatory verses, character or actor lists); printer, publisher or bookseller; imprint location; and date of first production or date of first edition. By this abbreviated list, you can get a sense of how valuable DEEP might be for investigating playbooks, which in this database covers individual playbooks, playbook collections, and collections that contain a play among other works. Records for plays published within collections will feature a link to the collection record, and vice versa. Records also link to variant issues and states, with information about the differences between them. Be sure to consult the “How to Use DEEP” section for a full overview of the multiple search fields and the results display. If your institution subscribes to Early English Books Online, you can use DEEP first to search and identify the playbooks and then access the desired texts from the EEBO database. The longstanding print series Records of Early English Drama (REED) has an online presence through the Internet Archive. Initiated in 1975, REED surveys the surviving documentary evidence for records of “drama, secular music, and other communal entertainment and ceremony from the Middle Ages until 1642, when the Puritans closed the London theatres.” This manuscript evidence is collected, transcribed, edited, and published in regionally focused volumes. To date, twenty titles are available, beginning with two volumes on York (1979) to the most recent volume on Lincolnshire (Summer 2009). Two additional volumes in the affiliated series Records of Early Drama cover Scotland and Wales. As noted, the Internet Archive currently hosts twenty-seven volumes in the series (some multiple volumes per title) for the following counties and cities: Dorset/Cornwall, Coventry, Lancashire, Chester, Devon, Bristol, Herefordshire/Worcestershire, Sussex, York, Oxford, Cambridge, Shropshire, Norwich, Cumberland/Westmorland/Gloucestershire,

318

Chapter Twelve

Newcastle upon Tyne, Kent, Somerset, Cheshire, and Wales. Sample records from the Cheshire volume include city treasurers’ accounts, petitions, innkeepers’ accounts, mayors’ books, company books, financial papers, visitation books, and inventories. Arranged in chronological order within each volume, these records offer fascinating insight into the wider context of medieval and early modern drama. The Records in Early English Drama project is based at the Centre for Research in Early English Drama, University of Toronto. See chapter 9 for further discussion of the series. Associated with the REED project, the Patrons and Performances Web Site uses the documentary evidence compiled in the REED volumes to present information about professional performers on tour in the provinces, covering their venues, routes, and patrons. The database may be searched by the following categories: patron, with the ability to specify by associated county; keyword of name, office, or title, rank type, or birth/death dates; event, including troupe name, event type (bequest, court appearance, performance), city, town or county, payment amount, performer type (acrobats, players, performing animals), and date range; venue, including venue type (church, college, marketplace, pleasure gardens, tavern, theater), county, and troupe visited; and troupe, which can be specified by keyword, county, performer type, and date range. To browse for all listings in a particular category, you can click “Search” without filling in any of the fields. A troupe search for all performances after 1500 retrieves the names of 811 groups displayed in alphabetical order. Selecting one of these troupes, such as the Earl of Essex’s Players, with Robert Devereux as patron, brings up the full record for the troupe that provides an alternative name, the associated patron, and a listing of all their performances, in this case from the 1575 performance at St. Mary’s Guildhall, Coventry to the 1594 performance at Smithills Hall, Lancashire. The performance records indicate the troupe, patron, payment, location, venue, performance space, auspices, date, and number of performers, if known, whereas the patron records give birth and death dates, related information in a notes field (e.g., the record for Thomas Howard noting when he was imprisoned in the Tower and that he was beheaded), marriages, other unions, and offspring. The venue records are especially rich in detail, with several current and sometimes historical or aerial photographs, or a ground plan drawing. The narrative portion of the venue record describes the location and architectural features and includes the venue’s performance history, current status of the property, a chronological history of events associated with the venue, a note on the performance spaces, a bibliography of related sources, and the ability to search directly for related events or troupes at the venue. The selected venue may also be located on the wonderful interactive maps that enable you not only to pinpoint specific venues but also to view

Web Resources

319

roads, rivers, county boundaries, and topographical features for England and Wales before 1642. Be sure to review the tutorial to get the most from searching and using these maps. Finally, the bibliography for the project can be consulted in its entirety, or by subject categories for patrons (general, genealogy, offices), events, venues (architecture, history, picture sources), maps (historical geography, roads/history), and general reference. The Patrons and Performances Web Site shows how the Web can bring something innovative to historical literary scholarship. Compiled by Anthony Butler and others at Monash University, the Restoration Theatre Song Archive is a collection of song lyrics that were performed during the later seventeenth century on the London stage (from 1660 to 1702/3). The songs can be accessed by six indexes: authors, composers, play titles, first lines, year, or archive code. Browsing the play titles index, for example, leads to the song beginning, “Why does the idle world mistake” from Elkanah Settle’s play, The Ambitious Slave: or, A Generous Revenge (1694). In addition to the song text, this entry includes the date of first performance, the performer, and a sound file that can be heard after downloading the free NoteWorthy Composer plug-in. Some entries present the dialog or stage directions to place the song in context within the play. Although the collection is described as a “working tool” rather than a complete archive, scholars interested in theater history will find this a very useful site. As we have seen, many author sites feature bibliographies of either primary and/or secondary sources, but there are a few stand-alone author bibliographies that deserve mention. Resources in Renaissance Literature at Saint Louis University hosts both the Sir Philip Sidney World Bibliography and the Edmund Spenser World Bibliography. Claiming to contain more than 30 percent more material than MLAIB on a year-by-year basis, the Sir Philip Sidney World Bibliography covers sources by Sidney as well as works about him from the mid-sixteenth century to the present, including editions, scholarly and critical works, biographies, bibliographies, and even fictional works about his life. Originally based on Sir Philip Sidney: An Annotated Bibliography of Texts and Criticism, 1554–1984 (New York: G. K. Hall, Macmillan, 1994), the World Bibliography updates that material and adds new sources through 2004. The database can be searched by topic (editions, general scholarship, life of Sidney, Arcadia, poetry, Defence of Poetry, minor prose and drama, literary works about Sidney, or all topics) or by keyword; dissertations can also be excluded from the search. Abstracts are provided for most of the sources, but only as supplied by authors after 1985. The bibliography also presents a history of Sidney scholarship written by Donald Stump, the principal author and editor. Although the site doesn’t appear to have been updated since 2005, the bibliography will still be a pertinent resource to identify earlier criticism and

320

Chapter Twelve

resources regarding Sidney, to be used in conjunction with the major subscription bibliographies, MLAIB and ABELL. The Edmund Spenser World Bibliography reproduces the bibliographies, abstracts, and reviews printed originally in the Spenser Newsletter (1975–2001) and its successor, The Spenser Review (2001–2003). Similar to the Sidney bibliography, this database can be searched by topic (editions, general scholarship, the Faerie Queene, shorter poems, prose works and letters, literary works on Spenser, all topics) or by keyword. A search limited to the Faerie Queene topic, for example, retrieves 1,185 records, ranging from books to book chapters and journal articles. The Edmund Spenser World Bibliography is also edited by Donald Stump, and like the Sidney bibliography, has not been updated since 2005. The Bibliographical Society of America produces BibSite, a collection of bibliographies published by and for researchers. The full list of available bibliographies is retrieved through the “List of Resources” link on the right side of the page and includes abstracts. Here you will find the following bibliographies of relevance to the study of early modern literature: “Directory of Institutions in the United States and Canada with Pre-1600 Manuscripts”; “Supplement to Published Volumes of the Index to British Literary Bibliography”; “Appendix to ‘The Authorship of A Lover’s Complaint: A New Approach to the Problem’”; “Recent Studies on Books Printed 1660–1820 as Physical Objects: Including Binding, Paper and Papermaking, Printing, and Typography (1986–2007)”; “Studies of Authorship in the Long Eighteenth-Century, c. 1988–2007”; “English Book Owners in the Seventeenth Century”; and “First-Line Indexes of English Verse, 1650–1800: A Checklist.” We discuss this last bibliography, by James Woolley, at greater length in chapter 8. Although primarily focused on historical literature, the Royal Historical Society Bibliography has much to offer the literary scholar of Renaissance and early modern Britain. The bibliography provides more than four hundred sixty thousand records for books, book chapters/essays, and journal articles that address British or Irish history from the Roman occupation to the present, and incorporates records from Irish History Online and London’s Past Online. The search interface enables you to search the entire collection, or limit to Irish, London, Scottish, or latest additions only; you then select either a simple keyword search with date range limiters for period covered; a full search with options for author, title, journal, subject headings, and date range; or a Boolean search with multiple fields. A search for women during the period 1500–1700, for example, retrieves more than five thousand records, for such recent sources as the article “‘A Language All Nations Understand’: Portraiture and the Politics of Anglo-Spanish Identity in Aphra Behn’s The Rover” (Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies) and the book chap-

Web Resources

321

ters “A Vale of Tears: Early Modern Women’s Writing and the Lamentory Style” (in Renaissance Medievalisms) and “‘And Four Years Space, being Man and Wife, they Loveingly Agreed:’ Balladry and Early Modern Understandings of Marriage” (in Finding the Family in Medieval and Early Modern Scotland). In this same regard, a general search on Shakespeare finds 1,453 records, emphasizing that this bibliography could be a worthwhile and complementary source to the standard literature bibliographies. If you don’t have access to the subscription database Literary Manuscripts: 17th and 18th Century Poetry from the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds, you can still search the collection and identify relevant titles through the freely available Leeds Verse Database (BCMSV). This database covers more than 6,600 poems from over 160 manuscripts held at the Brotherton Library. Both basic and detailed search interfaces are available, with options to search by keywords anywhere or at the start of a work (first three words of the poem in modernized spelling), by first and last lines, attribution, author, title, date, length, verse form, content (e.g., subject field), bibliographical references, and manuscript or record number. A separate list of the manuscripts indexed can also be browsed by manuscript number and includes such sources as “Commonplace book of verse and prose, many leaves either torn out or blank. One hand, 1680s?,” “Five poems written in a single hand c. 1690 on to blank leaves at the end of a printed book, The Speeches of the Lord Digby, 1641,” and “To the Memory of Qeene [sic] Elizabeth, a sequence of three anonymous satires complaining of the condition of England under James I; stitched unbound booklet in a single hand, c. 1624.” Conducting a search on the keyword sorrow, located anywhere in the record, finds sixtyseven matching poems, with many anonymous works but also those by John Pomfret, William Congreve, Sir Thomas Wroth, and Lady Hester Pulter, among others. Even though the full manuscript facsimiles are limited to the subscription database, the website does feature more than 320 facsimile pages from selected manuscripts in order to provide scholars with representative examples of most of the manuscript hands (“every significant contributing hand” in the collection), making this a valuable resource not only for identifying manuscript poetry of the period, but also for practice with reading early modern handwriting. Two Web indexes currently serve the needs of scholars interested in the book trade and print culture during the Renaissance and early modern period. The British Book Trade Index (BBTI), based at the University of Birmingham, features brief biographical details about printers, publishers, and booksellers, as well as the related trades of stationers, papermakers, engravers, auctioneers, ink-makers, and sellers of medicines who worked in England and Wales up to 1851. The information presented in the index is based both

322

Chapter Twelve

on published sources and unpublished research and was designed to point scholars to external sources (in its function as an index) rather than acting as a self-contained biographical dictionary. After reading the search information notice with tips on effectively using the database, you can use the advanced search interface to search by surname, first name, date ranges for being in the book trade or biographical dates, country, county, town, address, book trade occupation, descriptor, non-book trade categories (agriculture/horticulture, food and drink, textiles and clothing), and the notes text. A separate list of book trade descriptors is provided to aid searching, and indicates the number of records assigned to each primary and secondary heading. Sample primary descriptors include librarian, fellmonger, scrivener, rag merchant, author, quill maker, and member or apprentice of the Stationers Company, among many others, with the most records attached to bookseller (26,262 records). The search notes caution that several terms can be used interchangeably and so it is smart to search on as many terms as possible in order not to miss any relevant records. Individual entries give basic information (as indicated by the search fields) and note the sources of information. The entry for John Whiting, a bookseller working in Lavenham, Suffolk in 1686, shows that he also worked as a grocer and lived between 1645 and 1686. His probate inventory listed children’s books, primers, and hornbooks for sale, as derived from Book Distribution and Printing in Suffolk 1534–1850, with a Checklist of Books Printed in the County compiled by Tony Copsey and Henry Hallam (Ipswich, 1994) and Suffolk Writers from the Beginning until 1800 (Book Company, 2000). The bibliography for the entire project can also be consulted on its own and illustrates the wide range of sources used to compile the various records. For studying the book trade further north, the Scottish Book Trade Index (SBTI), at the National Library of Scotland, covers printers, publishers, booksellers, bookbinders, printmakers, stationers, and papermakers active in Scotland until 1850. Described as “very much a work in progress,” the SBTI is not comprehensive and is most representative of figures drawn from eighteenthcentury Scottish imprints and newspapers, but does include people from the seventeenth century. Unlike the BBTI, which can be searched, the Scottish Book Trade Index is presented as a PDF version, with entries arranged alphabetically by surname and then by town. Some entries include biographical information and list the sources consulted. The complete bibliography is also available on the National Library of Scotland’s references Web page (www.nls.uk/catalogues/resources/sbti/refer.html). The entry “John Fennell [Finnell],” for example, shows that he was a bookbinder in Edinburgh between 1610 and 1619, that he married Agnes Stregeith at Edinburgh on July 10, 1610, and that the National Library owns a book with an inscription that

Web Resources

323

states Fennell bound the book in 1619, with reference to a 1989 journal article in The Bibliotheck. Although more difficult to use since it cannot be searched, the SBTI contains gems for those who are willing to scan its contents. Open Source Shakespeare features a concordance to the Bard’s complete works, using the 1864 Globe edition as the source text. The concordance can be searched by either the exact spelling of a word, or by the first or any part of a word form. A search for the exact word form rosemary finds that the word occurs seven times in five different sources, including once each in Hamlet, King Lear, Pericles, and Winter’s Tale, and three times in Romeo and Juliet. Selecting the Romeo and Juliet appearances retrieves the relevant acts and scenes, indicates the characters (nurse and Friar Laurence) and line numbers, and reproduces the matching texts, with the search word highlighted. If we search the first part of the word form sorrow, the concordance shows the variant word forms: sorrow, sorrow’d, sorrow’s, sorrow-wreathen, sorrowed, sorrowest, sorrowful, sorrowing, and sorrows. The concordance can also be browsed alphabetically by letter. Designed as a companion to the Norton Anthology of English Literature, the Norton Topics Online website presents topical, contextual essays for literature from the Middle Ages through the twentieth century. Within the “Sixteenth Century” section, essays by well-known scholars examine Christopher Marlowe; Renaissance exploration and travel; the Reformation; and the “island nations” of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. The “Early Seventeenth Century” section investigates gender, family, and household; Milton’s Paradise Lost in relation to the Bible and classical tradition; the Civil War; and emigration. And the “Restoration and Eighteenth Century” section addresses everyday life in eighteenth-century London, the slave trade, the plurality of worlds, and trade and travel. Each essay is enhanced with links to related text excerpts, suggested prompts for critical reading, Web resources, and images. The seventeenth-century gender essay, for example, provides texts on legal and religious norms, advice books, the Sidney and Sackville families, crossdressing, women’s education, and women and public speaking. An “Online Archive” features public-domain texts taken from the Norton Anthology editions, including annotations from the editors, which are accessible as PDF files through a chronological and author indexes. Together the topical essays and anthologized texts serve as a ready-reference tool to consult for reading period literature online and placing it within its historical and cultural contexts. Furthermore, a publication chronology facilitates identifying when certain texts were included and dropped from the Norton Anthology editions (first through seventh), so that you can trace the general popularity of particular authors and specific works within the university curriculum from 1962 to 2000. Accessed either alphabetically by author or by time period, the publication chronology

324

Chapter Twelve

shows that several of Donne’s works appeared in the first edition but were not anthologized again after the second edition. Finally, an archive of audio readings lets you listen to poems by Marlowe, Wyatt, Spenser, Shakespeare, Elizabeth I, and Donne.

CURRENT AWARENESS SOURCES AND ASSOCIATIONS Blogging the Renaissance. bloggingtherenaissance.blogspot.com/. Booth, Roy. Early Modern Whale. roy25booth.blogspot.com/. British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. Wiley and Sons. www.bsecs.org.uk/. cfp.english.upenn.edu: category: renaissance. Department of English, University of Pennsylvania. call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/category/renaissance. Curran, Kevin, and Megan Trotter. Textual Studies, 1500–1800. textualstudies .blogspot.com/. Cutting, Vickie. American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. asecs.press.jhu .edu/. Howard, W. Scott, ed. Appositions: Studies in Renaissance/Early Modern Literature and Culture. Annual. ISSN: 1946–1992. www.appositions.blogspot. Jones, Miriam. Mrs. Spectator’s Coffeehouse. www.unbsj.ca/arts/english/jones/ 18thc/blogs.php. Leary, Patrick. Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, & Publishing (SHARP). www.sharpweb.org/. Poyntz, Nick. Mercurius Politicus: A Blog about Early Modern Books, History and Culture. mercuriuspoliticus.wordpress.com/. Raiswell, Richard, ed. Ficino. www.crrs.ca/publications/electronic/ficino.htm. Renaissance Society of America. www.rsa.org/. Schwyzer, Philip. A Cuppe of Newes. earlymodern.wordpress.com/. Shakespeare Association of America. Georgetown University. www.shakespeare association.org/. Sixteenth Century Society & Conference. www.sixteenthcentury.org/. Society for Renaissance Studies. www.rensoc.org.uk/. Society for the Study of Early Modern Women. www.ssemw.org/. Werner, Sarah. Wynken de Worde: Books, Early Modern Culture, Post-Modern Readings. wynkendeworde.blogspot.com/.

The Web can be an excellent resource in itself for keeping up-to-date on developments in the field, particularly through society discussion lists, open-access journals, blogs, conference announcements, and calls for papers. In addition to the representative sources here, be sure also to check the open-access journals discussed in chapter 5 in order to review recent tables of contents and articles that reflect current scholarly trends and areas of inquiry in Renaissance and early modern literature. See in addition the

Web Resources

325

descriptions of the Milton-L and Sidney-Spenser listservs in this chapter’s section on author websites. Interdisciplinary in nature, the Renaissance Society of America is concerned with the historical period from 1300 to 1650. In addition to annual conference, membership, and grant information, the society also maintains a database of recommended research and teaching websites that can be searched by keyword or accessed by the following subject categories: archaeology, art and architecture, book/manuscript studies, catalogs, geographic, history, literature, music, philosophy, religion, science, texts and source collections, and women’s studies. Abstracts for past conference proceedings are also available on the website. The British organization Society for Renaissance Studies has a similar mission to bring together scholars from multiple disciplines concerned with the European Renaissance. The society’s Web page features information about membership, its publications including Renaissance Studies journal, conferences, fellowships, an annual prize, and a list of useful links. The Society for the Study of Early Modern Women (SSEMW) also cultivates connections across disciplines and represents scholars who “study women and their contributions to the cultural, political, economic, or social spheres of the early modern period and whose interest in it includes attention to gender and representations of women.” The society grew out of colloquia in the 1980s and was officially inaugurated in 1994. The SSEMW Web page hosts a listserv with searchable, archived postings back to October 1996, and maintains an “Opportunities” section that covers sponsored sessions at professional meetings (e.g., MLA, International Congress on Medieval Studies, American Historical Association, Renaissance Society of America, North American Conference on British Studies), journal calls for papers, edited essay collections such as for two new Ashgate series, graduate student travel grants, and awards for outstanding work in the field. A separate “Awards” page organized by year from 1999 to the present serves as a valuable guide to important books, collaborative works, graduate conference papers, essays/articles, and media concerned with women and gender in the early modern period. Despite its name, Sixteenth Century Society & Conference, this multidisciplinary organization is concerned with the early modern period, understood here as spanning the years 1450 to 1660. The society’s Web page posts information about membership and its annual conference, as well as related conferences and seminars such as the NEH summer seminar for college and university teachers, which in 2009 explored music books in early modern Europe. The “Publications” section links to the Sixteenth Century Journal page, Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies series titles, and the society’s

326

Chapter Twelve

newsletter, available from Winter 2008 to the present. Prize winners for notable scholarship, including books, journal articles, and conference papers, comprise a collection of noteworthy resources; a separate page provides descriptive overviews and links to research libraries with strong sixteenthcentury collections. Scholars working with authors and topics from the later seventeenth century will be interested in two societies that address the longer eighteenth century. The American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) was founded in 1969 and like the other societies discussed so far invites members from a wide range of disciplines. The society’s Web page features programs from past annual meetings, links to affiliated societies, membership information, tables of contents for Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture (volumes 27–37), and the full text of its newsletter from Winter 2007 to the present, in addition to descriptions of prizes and awards (but not a listing of prize winners). The British counterpart, British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (BSECS) takes a global view of the period (rather than being focused strictly on Britain) and is concerned with literature, art, history, economics, education, science, music, philosophy, politics, sociology, and theater—any aspect of culture or society—of the long eighteenth century. With its visually appealing Web page, the society presents an overview of its activities; information about its annual conference and regional specialized conferences, including calls for papers; tables of contents and selected recent reviews from the society’s publication, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies; and a collection of related Web resources. In fact, BSECS awards an annual prize for the most innovative digital resource that supports study of the eighteenth century; the winner for 2009 was the English Broadside Ballad Archive at University of California, Santa Barbara. The Shakespeare Association of America (SAA), based at Georgetown University, describes itself as “devoted to the study of William Shakespeare and his plays and poems, the cultural and theatrical milieu in which he lived and worked, and the various roles he has played in both Anglo-American and world culture ever since.” Like the other society websites described in this section, the SAA Web page contains membership and annual meeting details and hosts an archive of conference programs dating from 1988 to the present. The society also makes available its newsletter SAA Bulletin (published twice a year in January and June), which should be consulted for information about prizes, travel grants, conference seminars and workshops, and calls for papers (January 2002–June 2008). The “Links” section points to a few resources for Shakespeare studies, gateways for early modern studies, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and Internet Shakespeare Editions.

Web Resources

327

Founded in 1991, the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, & Publishing (SHARP) has members interested in all aspects of book history and print culture, including scholars in literature, history, sociology, librarianship, art history, classics, and related fields. The website provides details about membership, the annual conference, and the society’s listserv, SHARP-L: The Electronic Conference of Book Historians. Listserv archives can be searched by keyword, subject, date, or author, and are available from March 1992 to the present; SHARP highlights selected “lively discussions” on such topics as Google Books, digitization and book history, and historical differences in serial readership. The society publishes a scholarly journal, Book History, for which the tables of contents can be browsed for free, and a quarterly newsletter, SHARP News, for which a few selected issues are available to nonmembers. An extensive list of Web resources further enhances this site and is organized into the following categories: “Publishers’ Records: Finding Lists and Special Collections,” “Research Resources Online,” “Book History Projects and Scholarly Societies,” “Online Exhibits,” “Teaching Resources in the History of Print Culture,” “Programs in Book History,” “Notices and Calls for Papers,” “Publishers’ Series in Book History,” and “Selected Journals.” In addition to the listservs associated with various societies discussed so far, scholars should also be aware of Ficino. Based at the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, University of Toronto, Ficino is a listserv for scholars from many disciplines who are interested in the time period from 1350 to 1700. In order to join Ficino, the editors request a brief biographical sketch along with your position and institutional affiliation. The listserv’s archives are not available on the website. If you’re looking for a venue in which to present your work, the cfp .english.upenn.edu: category: renaissance at the University of Pennsylvania is a well-established resource for identifying relevant journals and special journal issues, essay collections, and conferences. This section of the general CFP site defines the Renaissance broadly. Recent postings include a new Oxford University Press publication, Classical Receptions Journal; a thematic issue of ANQ: American Notes and Queries concerned with women devotional writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; conference announcements for the Annual Medieval Studies Workshop, Annual Meeting of the Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies, and the Northeast Modern Language Association; and an essay collection addressing representations of beauty and violence. Besides the Renaissance section, you may also want to investigate other potentially relevant CFP categories; “Bibliography and History of the Book,” “Cultural Studies and Historical Approaches,” “Eighteenth Century,” “Gender Studies and Sexuality,” “Graduate Conferences,” “Poetry,” and “Theater” are

328

Chapter Twelve

a few examples. To really stay current with announcements, you can subscribe to each section of the CFP site as an RSS feed. Serving as an example of the exciting hybrid sources available in the field, Appositions: Studies in Renaissance/Early Modern Literature and Culture is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal that publishes scholarly articles on such topics as translating Medea in the sixteenth century, contrasting views of women in The Changeling, and Erasmus’s and More’s visions of utopia, in addition to interviews and book reviews. Issues are centered on a particular theme; volume 1 focused on “Genres & Cultures” (2008) and volume 2 explored “Dialogues & Exchanges” (2009). Appositions also sponsors an online conference each year, with abstracts posted in October and conference papers presented in full in February and March. What makes this journal innovative, however, are the interactive features that enable scholars to collaboratively annotate Milton’s sonnet “When I consider how my light is spent,” participate in a forum discussion about book reviewing practices in a digital environment (events at the 2009 conference), or add comments to the journal articles. Edited by W. Scott Howard, Appositions is indexed in MLAIB. An alternative means of keeping up-to-date with events in the Renaissance and early modern studies community is to read one or several of the various blogs on the period. A Cuppe of Newes, managed by Dr. Philip Schwyzer and other members of the Renaissance Research Group at the University of Exeter, is more scholarly than others. Recent postings concern conferences, a lectureship in Renaissance literature and culture, and seminars. The postings can be browsed by month (January 2008 to the present) or retrieved by the categories “Calls for Papers,” “Conferences and Events,” “Early Modern Studies around the Southwest of England,” “Exeter Early Modern Studies,” “Medieval Studies,” “Recent Publications,” and “uncategorized.” A Cuppe of Newes also maintains links to other blogs on the early modern period, online journals, and Web resources. Also scholarly in nature, Textual Studies, 1500–1800 aims to “stimulate dialogue amongst scholars working in the traditionally distinct fields of medieval, Renaissance, and eighteenth-century studies.” Recent postings address conferences, a marathon reading of Shakespeare’s sonnets sponsored by the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, research and digital project announcements, and seminar descriptions. Older postings can be accessed by month, and selected postings are highlighted. Textual Studies also has compiled an impressive and useful list of relevant links. In contrast to these sources, Blogging the Renaissance has the tagline, “early modern topics and whatever else we want.” This blog presents live reports from RSA, SAA, and MLA conferences, book discussions, a woodcut caption contest, and discussions of such topics as the Fleet river in London. Early Modern Whale, maintained by Roy Booth, has been around since December 2006 and covers different early modern texts and topics, whereas Sarah

Web Resources

329

Werner’s Wynken de Worde: Books, Early Modern Culture, Post-Modern Readings is concerned with the history of books, reading, and printing. The director of the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Undergraduate Program, Sarah Werner thoughtfully discusses being a reader in rare book libraries. Also focused on print culture, Mercurius Politicus: A Blog about Early Modern Books, History and Culture is written by Nick Poyntz, a postgraduate student at Birkbeck interested specifically in newsbooks, communication, and England in the 1650s. Mrs. Spectator’s Coffeehouse, hosted by Dr. Miriam Jones at the University of New Brunswick, Saint John, serves as a gateway to blogs and personal websites for scholars whose work addresses the long eighteenth century. Although this is just a sample of blogs about the early modern period, you can discover many more by reviewing the links on these blogs. CULTURAL AND HISTORICAL SOURCES British History Online. University of London and History of Parliament Trust. www .british-history.ac.uk/. British Printed Images to 1700. www.bpi1700.org.uk/index.html. Hacken, Richard. EuroDocs: Online Sources for European History. Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University. eudocs.lib.byu.edu/index.php/Main_Page. Halsall, Paul. Internet Modern History Sourcebook. Fordham University. www.ford ham.edu/halsall/mod/modsbook.html. Hanson, Marilee. Primary Sources: Eyewitness Accounts of People and Events in Tudor England; Letters; Journals; etc. EnglishHistory.net. englishhistory.net/tudor/ primary.html. National Portrait Gallery. www.npg.org.uk/.

As indicated by the interdisciplinary emphasis of many Renaissance and early modern professional societies described above, there is an underlying concern for studying early modern literature in its historical and cultural contexts. Literary research can pursue that path in numerous directions and draw upon resources in one or many related disciplines. Rather than try to account for all potentially useful sites, this section will provide a few representative period Web resources from some affiliated disciplinary perspectives. Be sure also to check the gateway sites described earlier in the chapter to identify additional websites that meet the specific disciplinary needs of your project. An excellent resource for historical research, British History Online features digitized primary and secondary sources of relevance to local, regional, and national history. The digital collection can be browsed by place (e.g., London, southeast or southwest, north, midlands, or east of England, Wales, Scotland), period (monarch or century from the eleventh through the nineteenth), or subject (including administrative and legal history, ecclesiastical

330

Chapter Twelve

and religious history, economic history, intellectual, scientific, and cultural history, local history, parliamentary history, and urban and metropolitan history), or a combination of the three fields. Source type is another way to access the collection; these are arranged into primary or secondary sources, guides and calendars, gazetteers and dictionaries, and maps. The entire collection can also be searched by keyword in the full text; popular previous searches are illustrated by a tag cloud for such terms as calendar of state papers, piracy 1604, and witchcraft. Browsing the “Interregnum” period category, as an example, reveals suggested sources for events from the Fifth Monarchy, 1649 (State Papers, 1656) to the Barebones Parliament in 1653 (Journal of the House of Commons), to Edward Sexby’s conspiracy in 1657 (A brief Relation of the late Dangerous Plot for the Destruction of his Highness’s person). Recent acquisitions are noted on the home page, such as the twenty-four volume Calendar of Cecil Papers Preserved in Hatfield House covering the state papers of both William Cecil, Lord Burghley and Robert Cecil. British History Online is a project of the Institute of Historical Research and the History of Parliament Trust. The Internet Modern History Sourcebook contains source texts and links to external documents related to European and American history from the Reformation through the twenty-first century. Following an overview on using primary sources and historiography, the Sourcebook is arranged by chronological and thematic categories. The “Reformation Europe” section covers Luther and Lutheranism, Calvin and Calvinism, radical reforms, the English and Scottish Reformations, Catholic reform, conflict, and women; the “Early Modern World” section covers sources from the European “Age of Discovery” as well as sources from the Americas, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East and those addressing trade and the new economy. Researchers will also want to check “Everyday Life in Pre-Modern Europe,” “Absolutism,” “Constitutional States,” and the “Scientific Revolutions” sections for such sources as a description of the Great Fire of London, James I’s Trew Lawe of Free Monarchies, the Gunpowder Plot trial, and documents on the first English coffee houses. The Internet Modern History Sourcebook is compiled by Paul Halsall at Fordham University. Created by Richard Hacken, European Studies Bibliographer at Brigham Young University, EuroDocs: Online Sources for European History features links to transcribed, translated, or digital facsimile primary documents. Arranged by country, the “United Kingdom” section contains sources for “Britain 1486–1688” and “Britain 1689–1815” that will be of interest for scholars of the Renaissance and early modern period, as well as sources for British legal and government documents, regional and local history, and other collections pertinent to British history. Be sure also to check separate country sections for Scotland and Ireland. Sample primary sources from these sections include The

Web Resources

331

Elizabethan Homilies (1623), records regarding the Spanish Armada, Parliamentary archives related to the British slave trade from 1600 to 1807, Scottish wills and testaments (1500–1901) at Scotland’s People, and Laws in Ireland for the Suppression of Popery, commonly known as the Penal Laws. EuroDocs can also be searched by keyword in addition to browsing by category. Part of the EnglishHistory.net Tudor England website, Primary Sources: Eyewitness Accounts of People and Events in Tudor England; Letters; Journals; etc. offers introductions and transcribed documents from Prince Arthur’s death in 1502 through the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots in 1587. The documents represent such sources as Henry VIII’s lyrics and John Skelton’s poetry, to the last letter of Sir Thomas More and a contemporary description of Mary I. Although the Tudor England website is more of a popular than scholarly website, it does gather portraits of the Tudors, biographical sketches, and the site editor Marilee Hanson’s favorite Tudor books and films. Authors, kings, queens, statesmen, and other notable figures of sixteenthand seventeenth-century Britain are brought to life through the National Portrait Gallery’s marvelous collections. The primary collection comprises more than eleven thousand portraits, with four thousand of these representing paintings, sculptures, and miniatures, and the remaining portraits described as “light sensitive works on paper.” All of the portraits in the primary collection can be searched and viewed on the website through the “Search the Collections” link. The advanced search enables you to access the portraits by either person or portrait interfaces, including the person’s name as either sitter or artist; gender; profession and professional category (e.g., literature and writing, printing and publishing, royalty and society, travel and exploration); group (e.g., artist grouping, countries and counties, profession, sitter grouping); living and/or deceased; portrait title; NPG number; creation date range; medium type; sets of portraits from specific collections; and subjects and themes (e.g., activity, dress, genre, location). Unfortunately, two searches cannot be combined into one; you can search for deceased females in the “Literature and Writing” category but you can’t specify their dates and instead must search through the entire alphabetical list of 523 sitters. This portrait group covers line engravings of Aphra Behn, however, as well as a nineteenth-century engraving of Lucy Hutchinson, a contemporary painting of the printer and political writer Eleanor James, and mezzotints of Anne Killigrew. A broad search for all portraits created between 1500 and 1700 returns almost nine thousand portraits, underscoring the rich nature of the collection for Renaissance and early modern research. Ben Jonson, for example, has fifteen portraits (oil paintings, mezzotints, a pencil drawing, and line and stipple engravings) associated with him and all but three are available on the Web. The National Portrait Gallery also maintains a collection of archival material associated with the primary collection portraits. Selected documents

332

Chapter Twelve

are arranged by time period; currently, the archive on pre-eighteenth century portraits contains only nineteenth- and twentieth-century letters and receipts regarding purchases. The “Research” section has an introduction to researching portraits, and an overview of the gallery’s research project “Making Art in Tudor Britain” that specifically examines the collection’s Elizabethan and Jacobean portraits. The National Portrait Gallery posts updates on which portraits are currently displayed at the museum and which are on loan elsewhere in Britain and at other locations around the world. Since traveling exhibitions frequently come to the United States and Canada, you may want to take advantage of the opportunity to view the portraits in person. British Printed Images to 1700 features more than ten thousand images from the British Museum’s Department of Prints and Drawings, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and other important early modern collections. This image database can be searched by producers (e.g., artists, engravers, printsellers), people, subject, place, date, and printing technique. Designed to be compatible with iconclass, the subject thesaurus offers a hierarchical means of accessing all subjects that appear within the images under the main headings agriculture, industry, and commerce; society; buildings; learning and the arts; nature; human being; military and war; events; politics; religion and belief; the Bible; mythology; and ideas and concepts. Additional features include biographies of engravers, a directory of print dealers, a review of printmaking techniques, an overview of the British printed image to 1700, and search tips. British Printed Images to 1700 promises to be another valuable resource for studying the visual legacy of the early modern period.

CONCLUSION As discussed throughout this volume, the Web serves an active role in contemporary literary research. The open or freely available Web in particular is becoming more central to that endeavor, especially as scholarly journals move toward open access, libraries and other institutions digitize books and special archival material, societies and individual scholars promote their research and activities online, and the Web becomes the primary medium for scholarly communication. Although we are moving away from a print-based society, the transition to a digital environment is far from complete; the main components of literary research remain books, journal articles, and primary sources, and you will likely use a combination of print, manuscript, and digital versions. Keep in mind, however, that each mode of access is valuable for different reasons; each leaves its own impression on and brings its own unique strengths, character, and contribution to the research process.

Chapter Thirteen

Researching a Thorny Problem

Nay, it may be not in this age; but if God favour her, she may attain to it in after-times and if she be slighted now and buried in silence, she may perhaps rise more gloriously hereafter; for her Ground being Sense and Reason, She may meet with an age where she will be more regarded, than she is in this. —from “To the Reader,” Observations upon experimental philosophy to which is added The description of a blazing new world (1666)1 If Cavendish’s literary productivity wasn’t unsettling enough for her contemporaries, her unprecedented philosophical output was truly astounding, and judging by the defensive nature of some of her prefatory epistles (where Cavendish vehemently insists on her authorship against charges of plagiarism) the idea of a woman who produced philosophical treatises was virtually unthinkable. As with her literary works, it is Cavendish’s determined intellectual self-creation which causes problems for contemporary scholars seeking to place her within an intellectual landscape from which she has (until relatively recently) been excluded. —from the introduction to A Princely Brave Woman (2003)2 The Duchess of Newcastle was typically regarded as a lone figure on the margins of serious philosophical discourse in the seventeenth century—an eccentric philosopher without allies or interlocutors. In the past decade . . . this popular conception of Cavendish has started to shift . . . these works show that Cavendish was very much engaged with the philosophical projects of her time, and while she might never have gained complete

333

334

Chapter Thirteen

acceptance among her peers, she was certainly not the wildly eccentric, unintelligible thinker that some critics have represented her to be. —from “Cavendish Redefined,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy (2004)3 Despite her literary and philosophical works being widely ignored and more often rejected as incoherent than relevant when reviewed by her contemporaries, the past three decades have witnessed a revival of interest in her scholarship and the birth of new narratives concerning her intellectual importance. —from “The Legacy of Margaret Cavendish,” Perspectives on Science (2001)4

The paradoxical Margaret Cavendish, mid-seventeenth-century dramatist, poet, author, biographer, and natural philosopher, has suffered a very mixed reputation since she published her first work, Poems and Fancies, in 1653. Determined to be remembered as an original writer and thinker, she actively strove within her lifetime to publish across a range of genres and produced a remarkable output of twenty-three volumes between the years 1653 and 1668. She was particularly concerned that her philosophical works be taken seriously by her contemporaries. As the chapter’s first quotation from Cavendish herself illustrates, however, she seemed resigned that her philosophy (tellingly referred to in the feminine) did not produce the desired impact on the intellectual communities of the time. Although she never received the serious recognition and critical attention that she anticipated during her life, the quotes that follow, from three relatively recent critical sources, demonstrate that Cavendish’s reputation as a philosophical thinker and her contribution to the development of natural philosophy during the seventeenth century is now being recognized and reassessed, not only in literary studies but also in the fields of philosophy, science, and political science. Margaret Cavendish wrote from a position of privilege, in that she was a member of the aristocracy through marriage and therefore had the time and financial means with which to write and publish her work, as well as having the fortuitous support of her husband, William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle. Despite these advantages, however, she also had to operate against the constraints of her gender, especially the notion that women of her status might write poetry or romances but did not write works of natural philosophy, and certainly didn’t publish (and promote) them, if they did. The unconventional nature of her endeavors, ideas, and personality combined to alienate many male and female contemporaries. Though there is some evidence of contemporary reaction to Margaret Cavendish’s philosophical works, is it possible to

Researching a Thorny Problem

335

get a wider assessment of her reception, other than the well-known comments by Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn made in response to her famous visit to the Royal Society? How were her philosophical ideas in particular received by other contemporary female intellectuals? Were her ideas taken seriously, or did her self-promotion and extravagant and “unwomanly” behavior overshadow her work and perhaps unduly influence the way in which her ideas were received? This chapter will attempt to outline a research plan for how you might proceed with building an assessment of contemporary reception, especially in regards to Cavendish’s works of natural philosophy and focusing, if possible, on responses from other females in regard to the new science. As you will discover in your own research, not all research questions can be easily and completely answered by one or more standard reference tools. Sometimes you will need to follow several different avenues of inquiry. The purpose of the research plan discussed here is not necessarily to find conclusive answers (they don’t always exist), but rather to illustrate how you can use the sources and search strategies that we have discussed throughout this volume to assist you in pursuing a particular research topic. Let’s begin with Margaret Cavendish’s visit to the Royal Society, since this event could be construed as a mark of distinction or intellectual acceptance. Margaret Cavendish was the first woman ever to attend a meeting of the Royal Society. In fact, there were no official female fellows elected for membership until 1945, slightly less than three hundred years after Cavendish’s historical visit.5 Was she invited to the Royal Society in recognition of her contributions to natural philosophy, or for some other reason? What were the circumstances of her invitation and visit, and how was she received by the Society fellows? Originating from informal discussions between natural philosophers meeting at Gresham College in the 1640s, the Royal Society of London was founded officially on November 28, 1660 to be a “Colledge for the Promoting of Physico-Mathematicall Experimentall Learning,”6 In 1662 the Royal Society received permission by Royal Charter to publish its first two works, Sylva by John Evelyn and Micrographia by Robert Hooke, both authors with whom Margaret Cavendish would engage in different ways. To determine the actual date and circumstances surrounding her visit, we could start by consulting a general biographical reference source, which should provide the basic facts of the event. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is a logical choice for obtaining this kind of information, and as we know from previous discussions, it is also likely to give some indication of Cavendish’s contemporary reception. Indeed, the entry for Cavendish states that in 1667, “On 23 May she received an invitation to visit the Royal Society, duly attending on 30 May to watch the scientific demonstrations offered her by such notables as Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke, and gener-

336

Chapter Thirteen

ally impressing the members of the society.” This brief mention is followed by quotes from contemporaries Samuel Pepys and Mary Evelyn but which are centered on her appearance and demeanor, rather than on her literary or philosophical works. If we read further, however, the subsection addressing her reputation informs us that it is “difficult to gauge what Margaret’s literary reputation was during her lifetime” and includes comments by Dorothy Osborne, Bathsua Makin, and Elizabeth Pepys—none of which remark directly on her philosophical ideas. Although we have obtained the date of her invitation and visit to the Royal Society and a general sense that she impressed the society members, we still don’t know why she was invited and what actually happened there. We also know that it is generally considered difficult to assess contemporary reception to her literary works. But apart from the comments by Dorothy Osborne in her letters to William Temple about Cavendish’s Poems and Fancies (which uses poetry as a vehicle to describe her atomic theory), that there are “many soberer People in Bedlam,” the biographical essay does not provide any insights into how her contemporaries regarded Cavendish’s natural philosophy. Before moving on to another source, however, it will be important to note the essay’s author, in this case James Fitzmaurice, since he is probably a significant Cavendish scholar. We should also consider the list of sources for potential biographical or relevant critical works, and the archival holdings. From these references we get the titles of several biographies and citations to modern editions of Pepys and Evelyn’s diaries and Osborne’s letters. We also learn that the British Library holds a compendium of Cavendish’s philosophy (Sloane MS 1950, fols. 35–38), and that there are additional manuscripts at the Nottinghamshire Archives, University of Nottingham; the Bodleian Library; and the Huntington Library. It can also be worthwhile to review the archived biographical essay, in case it contains further details about Cavendish’s Royal Society visit or her reception. Published in 1886 by Joseph Knight, he remarks that “Her philosophy is the dead weight which drags her to the ground. In these deliveries an occasional piece of common sense is buried in avalanches of ignorance and extravagance,” but he does not mention the Royal Society visit. He also describes, however, the book of commendatory poems compiled and published by her husband after her death, Letters and Poems in Honour of the Incomparable Princess, Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle (1676), which Knight says consists of poems and letters, in English and Latin, written chiefly in acknowledgment of the receipt of presentation copies of her works by various people, including the senate of the university of Cambridge. Among those who are guilty

Researching a Thorny Problem

337

of the most fulsome adulation are Henry More, Jasper Mayne, Jn. Glanville, G. Etherege, and Thomas Shadwell.

So here we have a list of male contemporaries to consult for potential comments about her natural philosophy (although the assumption is that these will be insincere for the most part), which we can add to the female contemporaries Dorothy Osborne, Bathsua Makin, and Elizabeth Pepys. The next source to check for more biographical information about Cavendish, before turning to the biographies themselves, is the Dictionary of Literary Biography. The online version lets us quickly identify essays about her in three volumes, Volume 281: British Rhetoricians and Logicians, 1500–1660, Second Series (2003); Volume 252: British Philosophers, 1500–1799 (2001); and Volume 131: Seventeenth-Century Nondramatic Poets, Third Series (1993). The second of these, British Philosophers, 1500–1799, appears the most promising and it is encouraging to know that she is considered among other period philosophers. We can use the table of contents to acquire the names of other contemporary female philosophers who may have left material evidence of their opinions of Margaret Cavendish. Of these, Anne Conway is the only true contemporary (1631–1679), but we could look at the opinions of Mary Astell (1666–1731), Damaris Cudworth, Lady Masham (1659–1708), and Catharine Trotter (1679–1749) for slightly later assessment. Written by Erin Lang Bonin, the Margaret Cavendish essay presents similar biographical information as the ODNB, but provides more description of her individual works. We learn here that “While her earlier philosophical texts professed an originality grounded in ignorance, later works directly challenged the ideas of major early modern thinkers including Hobbes, Descartes, the poet and philosopher Henry More, the Belgian naturalist and philosopher Franciscus Mercurius van Helmont, the physicist and chemist Robert Boyle, and the physicist and architect Robert Hooke” so that we could look to these authors for responses to her criticism. Bonin states that contemporary reactions to Cavendish’s persona were varied and cites the same Osborne material. Her description of the Royal Society visit, however, gives us a slightly fuller picture, with some interesting details. She reveals that it was only “after much debate within the group” that “Cavendish was permitted to attend a Royal Society meeting” and concludes that Cavendish’s gender “strongly influenced men’s perceptions of her scientific acumen. For instance, Boyle conducted an experiment he deemed especially appealing to the ladies.” Bonin also gives us a quote from and the date of Pepys’s diary entry for the visit, as well as John Evelyn’s diary commentary for the same day in which he refers to Cavendish as “a mighty pretender to Learning, Poetrie & Philosophie.”7 Since these remarks comment specifically on Cavendish’s

338

Chapter Thirteen

visit to the Royal Society, it will be advisable to read the complete diary entries to ascertain their genuine impressions, rather than rely on quotes that may be taken out of context. The DLB essay provides us with a complete list of Cavendish’s works, if we wanted to concentrate on reception to specific philosophical publications, as well as references for modern editions (up through 2001), editions of her letters, two biographies, and a beginning bibliography of scholarly books and journal articles. Among the citations are earlier works that investigate her role within the developing scientific milieu, such as Meyer’s The Scientific Lady in England 1650–1760; An Account of Her Rise, with Emphasis on the Major Roles of the Telescope and Microscope (1955); Mintz’s article “The Duchess of Newcastle’s Visit to the Royal Society” in Journal of English and Germanic Philology (April 1952); Schiebinger’s The Mind Has No Sex?: Women in the Origins of Modern Science (1989); Sarasohn’s article “A Science Turned Upside Down: Feminism and the Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish” in the Huntington Library Quarterly (Autumn 1984); and Stevenson’s “The Mechanist-Vitalist Soul of Margaret Cavendish” in Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 (1996). Before moving on to other sources, we can review the Anne Conway essay to obtain the recommended edition of her letters, Marjorie Nicolson’s Conway Letters: The Correspondence of Anne, Viscountess Conway, Henry More, and Their Friends, 1642–1684, Collected from Manuscript Sources,8 as well as edited letters and/or papers for Mary Astell and Damaris Cudworth, Lady Masham (none are provided for Catharine Trotter). We can also search the full text of all DLB entries for Margaret Cavendish, in case there is a reference to her influence on or responses to her works from a contemporary. This search retrieves twelve document matches, including references in essays on Lady Anne Clifford, Lady Mary Wroth, An Collins, and Susanna Centlivre, none of which turn out to be relevant to our research topic. We now have several possible avenues to pursue. We could start by reading the complete Pepys and Evelyn diary entries about Cavendish’s Royal Society visit, as well as any other comments about her in their diaries, and follow up the citation to Dorothy Osborne’s letters regarding Cavendish. We could obtain copies of the recommended Cavendish biographies and also search the library catalog for newer biographical works, in hopes that these works would give us more detailed assessments of the Royal Society visit and contemporary reception. While searching in the library catalog, we could look for critical works that explore Cavendish’s role within the development of seventeenth-century natural philosophy and science, or for those that specifically address her reception and/or afterlife. Alternatively, we could begin compiling a collection of relevant journal articles, updating the sources listed

Researching a Thorny Problem

339

in the DLB and ODNB by searching MLAIB and ABELL, as well as the Philosopher’s Index and Web of Science for additional disciplinary perspectives. We could also look for discussions in all these sources about contemporary female reception to Cavendish’s philosophical ideas, and review the primary material (letters and diaries) in modern editions of the female contemporaries identified up to this point. So far we have followed biographical sources, so let’s continue in that direction. The ODNB entry lists two specific titles to consult, Douglas Grant’s Margaret the First: A Biography of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (Hart-Davis, 1957) and Katie Whitaker’s Mad Madge: The Extraordinary Life of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, the First Woman to Live by her Pen (Basic Books, 2002), as well as an early twentiethcentury biography about Margaret and her husband. Searching in our local library catalog for Margaret Cavendish and biography as keywords finds no additional full-length biographical studies, but does retrieve an entry in the Age of Milton: An Encyclopedia of Major 17th-Century British and American Authors; an anthology of her writings, Paper Bodies: A Margaret Cavendish Reader; and some topical works that address several figures, such as Privacy, Playreading, and Women’s Closet Drama, 1550–1700. From the results, we can identify the subject headings Women dramatists, English—Biography and Authors, English—Early modern, 1500–1700—Biography to be used in combination with the official heading identified earlier (in chapter 4) for Cavendish, Newcastle, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of, 1624?–1674. Not wanting to rely only on local holdings, we should also search in WorldCat to make sure that we don’t miss any relevant new biographies. Once we have the biographies in hand, we can consult the indexes for sections regarding the Royal Society, reputation, natural philosophy, or the names of contemporary figures. As an example, the Mad Madge index entry for Cavendish and reputation contains specific subentries for contemporary praise, contemporary criticism, and responses to her philosophy. The “relationships” heading includes a subentry for her relationships with intellectuals outside her family and a “see-also” reference for individual people, all of which may hold potential for our topic, even though the only females listed are Mary Evelyn and Leonora Duarte. The Anne Conway index entry, which falls within a discussion of responses to Cavendish’s philosophy, states that Conway’s friend, the philosopher Henry More, wrote a letter suggesting that she answer Cavendish’s Philosophical Letters, though he deigned to do so himself, in fact writing to Conway that “I believe she may be secure from anyone giving her the trouble of a reply” (Mad Madge, 315).9 Perhaps the Conway letters also include her private evaluation of Cavendish but here we only learn that she did not send Cavendish a response. Indeed, the footnotes to the chapter,

340

Chapter Thirteen

“Queen of Philosophers, 1667–1673,” provide many valuable leads in terms of identifying additional secondary and primary sources to consult. In Margaret the First, there is a detailed account of Cavendish’s Royal Society visit. Grant writes that Cavendish asked to be invited and that Lord Berkeley mentioned her request at the Society’s meeting on May 23. His motion to invite her was seconded by the Earl of Carlisle and Dr. Charleton and so she was invited to attend on the 30th. Grant also suggests that Cavendish’s connections to the Society (her husband was a member, among other friends) enabled the visit to take place, despite the opposition alluded to by Pepys in his diary, which Grant attributes to “a fear that her visit would give the Society’s critics a chance to mock at it; and as its aims were not yet widely understood, it was naturally sensitive to criticism, especially when such criticism threatened to take the form of ballads hawked about the street.”10 This information casts the visit in a different light, and suggests that Cavendish was allowed to attend only because of her position in society and her connections, rather than in recognition of her contributions to natural philosophy. Grant then goes on to provide lengthy sections from the ballad John Evelyn wrote for his personal amusement mocking the occasion, the complete version of which exists as a holograph in the National Archives (State Papers 29/450). For further information about her visit, we can review Thomas Birch’s History of the Royal Society (1756), referenced in Grant’s footnote, and now available digitally through the subscription database Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Grant also cites Pepys’s diary as another source for his account of the visit. Consulting the modern edition, we read that Pepys expected a surge in popular response to Cavendish’s visit, writing that “we do believe the town will be full of ballets of it.”11 This could be an interesting path to research for contemporary popular response. Are there surviving broadside ballads about Margaret Cavendish’s Royal Society visit, her natural philosophy, or about her in general? We could search the ballad collection websites described in chapter 12, such as the Bodleian Library Broadside Ballads and the English Broadside Ballad Archive, as well as Early English Books Online (EEBO) or even print seventeenth-century ballad anthologies, for those pertaining to Cavendish. The next step that we might take is to look for journal articles that examine Cavendish’s role in the development of the new science and try to identify those in particular that might discuss contemporary female reaction to her philosophy. As you might recall from chapter 4, there isn’t a print authorspecific bibliography for Margaret Cavendish. In that chapter we outlined the various steps you can take to construct your own bibliography for an author by searching MLAIB and ABELL for books, chapters, articles, dissertations, and journal bibliographies; ESTC for primary print source material; WorldCat

Researching a Thorny Problem

341

for books and many different kinds of materials; and NCBEL and OBNB for bibliographies to check. Let’s return to MLAIB and ABELL and this time do a search targeted more directly to our topic. In MLAIB, if we enter Cavendish, Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, as the primary subject author (PSA), we retrieve 216 results, with suggested subject terms for further limiting the search listed on the side, including science and natural sciences. We could select one of these terms (choosing the subject heading “science” limits the results to twelve and “natural sciences” retrieves six), or we could simply add the truncated keyword scien* to pull a broader selection of forty sources, such as the book chapter “A Philosophical Duchess: Understanding Margaret Cavendish and the Royal Society” in Science, Literature, and Rhetoric in Early Modern England (Ashgate, 2007); the journal article “Mad Science Beyond Flattery: The Correspondence of Margaret Cavendish and Constantijn Huygens” in Early Modern Literary Studies (2004); and the dissertation “An Early Challenge to the Precepts and Practice of Modern Science: The Fusion of Fact, Fiction, and Feminism in the Works of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623–1673)” (1990). Another search strategy might be to combine Cavendish as primary subject author with other headings, if they exist, or keywords for Royal Society, reputation, reception, critical heritage, afterlife, or legacy. Margaret Cavendish (PSA) and Royal Society as keyword obtains only four sources, however, and the former search only retrieves two articles: “Margaret Cavendish’s Critical Heritage and the Creation of an Infamous Gendered Literary Identity” in Inbetween (2000) and “The Life and Literary Reputation of Margaret Cavendish” in Quidditas: Journal of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association (1999). We might also try searching for Margaret Cavendish in combination with specific works (primary subject work), the keyword philosophy, or by searching more generally for Cavendish and women or women writers. We can then follow the similar search strategies in ABELL, remembering that the subject heading is Newcastle, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess. This retrieves 258 entries alone; 34 results by adding the keyword scien*, including some unique book chapters; 3 articles with the keywords Royal Society (all unique from the MLAIB results, since the terms are picked up in the full text and consequently, not nearly as relevant); and 13 results with the reception keywords, such as “Margaret Cavendish’s Nonfeminist Natural Philosophy” in Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science, and Technology (2004), which contains the keyword reputation in the full text, but otherwise is not concerned specifically with Cavendish’s contemporary reputation. Since we know that Margaret Cavendish is currently receiving more attention from scholars investigating the history of philosophy and science, it may be worthwhile to check additional disciplinary databases. In this regard,

342

Chapter Thirteen

Philosopher’s Index has a “People as Subject” field and an official heading, Cavendish, Margaret. This refined search finds twelve sources, such as “The Philosophical Innovations of Margaret Cavendish” in British Journal for the History of Philosophy (1999) and “Margaret Cavendish and Joseph Glanvill: Science, Religion, and Witchcraft” in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science (2007). A broader keyword search for Margaret Cavendish retrieves a few more sources, eighteen in all, including Jacqueline Broad’s book Women Philosophers of the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge UP, 2002); this looks promising given the following excerpt from the abstract, “She examines the work of thinkers such as Mary Astell, Elisabeth of Bohemia, Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway, and Damaris Masham, who were active participants in the intellectual life of their time and were also the respected colleagues of philosophers, such as Descartes, Leibniz, and Locke.” Searching in Web of Science (all citation indexes) for the phrase “Margaret Cavendish” returns sixty-three results from the following subject categories: literature, history, medieval and Renaissance studies, humanities, philosophy, history and philosophy of science, literary theory and criticism, language and linguistics, theater, and women’s studies, among others. We might also try searching for additional disciplinary perspectives in Historical Abstracts (52 results) or Google Scholar (2,900 results with a phrase search, not all relevant), to name a few possibilities. Margaret Cavendish was something of a celebrity during her life and received much public attention, as evidenced in Pepys’s descriptions of her visit to London. We may be able to get an account of her visit to the Royal Society or an indication of public opinion about her philosophy or writings in some of the contemporary periodicals. Following the strategies outlined in chapter 6, we can search for mention of Margaret Cavendish in the subscription databases 17th and 18th Century Burney Collection Newspapers, EEBO, or British Periodicals, Collections I and II. Of these three, the Burney collection is the most relevant, since EEBO only has one periodical from 1681 (with a gap between 1663 and 1681), several years after her Royal Society visit, and British Periodicals begins coverage with the year 1680. The advanced search interface lets us do a fuzzy keyword search of the entire document, and limit by publication date. Searching for Margaret Cavendish with medium fuzzy capabilities between the years 1667 and 1680 retrieves no results; searching for Duchess of Newcastle for the same dates is also unsuccessful. Newcastle alone retrieves ten results but all irrelevant, although one article mentions her husband, William, the Duke of Newcastle, in the London Gazette (April 1677). Trying Duchess with a high fuzzy level for the same years obtains eleven results, again none of which turn out to be relevant. The keywords Royal Society retrieve nothing as well. As we know, periodical publications

Researching a Thorny Problem

343

are quite ephemeral, with a relatively low survival rate, and during this time they published little domestic news. In this case, it appears that we have encountered a dead end, although checking the footnotes in relevant books and journal articles may lead to a citation in a seventeenth-century periodical not indexed in the Burney collection. Our research topic is concerned with contemporary reception, and so we can turn to the strategies presented in chapter 7 for paths that we have yet to explore. Although there isn’t a Critical Heritage series volume devoted to Cavendish, we know that the biographies and several of the books and journal articles identified so far address this issue. We can search the library catalog with the keywords Cavendish Margaret and (reputation or reception or afterlife or legacy). This search retrieves five titles in WorldCat; of those, one doesn’t discuss Cavendish’s reputation per se but might be pertinent to our topic: Sarah Hutton’s book Anne Conway: A Women Philosopher (Cambridge UP, 2004), which has a chapter on John Finch, Thomas Hobbes, and Margaret Cavendish. We learned in chapter 12 that sometimes an author website, especially society websites, publishes an author bibliography. It might be worthwhile checking the International Margaret Cavendish Society website’s bibliography, in case it contains sources about her contemporary reception. Indeed, the bibliography, written by James Fitzmaurice (who authored the ODNB essay), devotes a section to Cavendish’s critical heritage. Listed here are the diaries of Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn, with references to comments by Mary Evelyn; the letters of Dorothy Osborne; Bathsua Makin’s An Essay to Revive the Antient Education of Gentlewomen (1673); and the commendatory publication A Collection of Letters and Poems: Written by Several Persons of Honour and Learning upon Divers Important Subjects, to the late Duke and Duchess of Newcastle (1678), representing contemporary sources. The other works noted include eighteenth- and nineteenth-century assessments, as well as an advertisement for her work in the periodical The Kingdoms intelligencer of the affairs now in agitation in England, Scotland, and Ireland, together with foraign intelligence (1662). We can check EEBO for digital versions of the collection and Makin’s essay, as well as the Duke of Newcastle’s compilation published in tribute to Cavendish after her death, Letters and Poems in Honour of the Incomparable Princess, Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle (1676), as described in the ODNB essay. Consulting Makin’s essay in EEBO, we learn that she refers to Margaret Cavendish once: “The present Duchess of Newcastle, by her own genius rather than any timely instruction, over-tops many grave grown men.”12 Interestingly, Makin includes Cavendish in the section entitled “Women Educated in the Arts and Tongues Have Been Eminent in Them” rather than in the “Women Have Been Profound Philosophers” section or the one devoted to female poets. If

344

Chapter Thirteen

we look at the modern edition of Makin’s essay in Bathsua Makin, Woman of Learning, Frances Teague states: Establishing that she knew about certain aristocratic or upper-class women who valued learning and formed patronage networks is a straightforward process, since she often names such women in An Essay: Lord Burleigh’s daughters, Lady Mary Carr, Queen Christina of Sweden, the Cooke sisters, the Princess Elizabeth, Dr. Nicholas Love’s daughters, Lady Grace Sherrington Mildmay, Margaret Duchess of Newcastle, Mary Countess of Pembroke, Katherine Philips, Anna Maria van Schurman, Lady Arebella Stuart, and Mrs. Thorold are her contemporaries and are mentioned.13

We could use this list to identify additional female intellectual contemporaries to Margaret Cavendish, and check their published and personal writings for mention of her and her natural philosophy. If we return to the ODNB to consult the essay on Bathsua Makin herself, for example, we learn that the Huntington Library holds Makin’s manuscript letters and poems to Lucy, Countess of Huntington. Reading these papers could possibly reveal more details of her opinions about Margaret Cavendish. One potential source for measuring contemporary opinion could be seventeenth-century miscellanies or commonplace books. Although the miscellanies won’t give us an idea of personal opinion regarding Cavendish, they could indicate the popularity of her poetic philosophical works. Adam Smyth’s An Index of Poetry in Printed Miscellanies, 1640–1682 can be searched to determine if Cavendish’s verse was anthologized in this fashion. Unfortunately, an author search only retrieves poems by William Cavendish (Margaret’s husband), but we could try instead searching by first or last line for matches on specific poems from Poems and Fancies. The diligent researcher could also review the Adam Matthew commonplace microfilm collections described in chapters 7 and 11: Renaissance Commonplace Books from the Huntington Library, Renaissance Commonplace Books from the British Library, London, and Renaissance Commonplace Books from the Sloane Collection at the British Library. Excerpts from Cavendish’s philosophical works in a commonplace book could illustrate the personal value placed on her ideas by certain individuals. In addition to reading the microfilm commonplace book collections, we could also try the subscription databases Literary Manuscripts: 17th and 18th Century Poetry from the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds and Perdita Manuscripts to potentially identify excerpts of Cavendish’s work in the collections’ miscellanies and commonplace books, or the freely available digitized commonplace books at Scriptorium: Medieval and Early Modern Manuscripts Online and Beineke Flickr Laboratory’s Photostream.

Researching a Thorny Problem

345

Identifying extant copies of Cavendish’s philosophical works that contain marginal notes might be another means of assessing contemporary opinion of her ideas. Following the strategies outlined in chapter 7 for researching marginalia, we could search the English Short Title Catalogue to identify those copies of her works that have manuscript notes, keeping in mind that not all marginalia will be contemporary to Margaret’s lifetime. If we search for ms notes in the “Copy-Specific Notes” field and add Cavendish as an author, four titles are retrieved, none of them relevant. Trying marginal notes instead is also unsuccessful. Since searching the ESTC doesn’t lead us to any copies with marginalia, we could look at Alston’s Books with Manuscript: A Short Title Catalogue of Books with Manuscript Notes in the British Library, Including Books with Manuscript Additions, Proofsheets, Illustrations, Corrections. Although the print Index of English Literary Manuscripts does not contain a section on Cavendish, it is possible that the new and revised Web version, Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts 1450–1700 (CELM) might do so since they intend to add many more female authors. If the print and electronic resources Private Libraries in Renaissance England and PLRE. Folger covered the latter part of the seventeenth century, then they could be used to determine who owned copies of Cavendish’s philosophical works in their libraries, especially copies owned by her intellectual contemporaries. Since Private Libraries in Renaissance England represents library holdings only until 1653 (Cavendish’s Poems and Fancies was published in 1653), however, we could try looking for her natural philosophy titles instead in sales catalogs, such as those listed in British Book Sales Catalogues, 1676–1800: A Union List. Even though identifying Cavendish’s works in private libraries wouldn’t necessarily indicate what the owners thought of her philosophy, this approach would at least show that her works were purchased and most likely read by particular members of society; this fact might be used to formulate a broad understanding of her reception by other intellectuals. Following up on this idea of examining copies of Cavendish’s works in libraries, Stephen Clucas’s endnote to the introduction in A Princely Brave Woman: Essays on Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle informs us that Shirley Stacey is doing a bibliographical project regarding extant copies of Margaret Cavendish’s works presented to libraries.14 However, Shirley Stacey isn’t listed in the book’s bibliography, and searching the library catalogs as well as MLAIB and ABELL retrieves nothing published yet on Cavendish by this individual. We can search for Stacey on Google, and doing a phrase search on her name in combination with the keyword Cavendish retrieves hits for the Margaret Cavendish Society website, including contact information for Shirley Stacey at Hertford College, Oxford University that must be

346

Chapter Thirteen

verified since it dates from a 1997 posting. Shirley Stacey is also thanked for giving advice about different editions in the preface to Susan James’s edition of Cavendish’s “Political Writings,” published as part of the Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought series; Stacey is also listed for her presentation, “‘ex Dono . . . [Authoris]’: Margaret Cavendish’s Works in Oxbridge Libraries,” given at the Women and the Book workshop, October 2004, as part of the Oxford-Princeton Partnership in the History of the Book. These leads suggest that Shirley Stacey might be a valuable contact for evaluating Cavendish’s presentation copies at the major universities; she might even be aware of any extant marginalia that would give a more private reflection of how her works were received. Contacting other scholars through the Society for Early Modern Women listserv could be another way to gather information about reception to Cavendish’s philosophical works by her contemporaries, or we could also choose to review recent conference presentations related to early modern literature to identify scholars working on our research topic. These are just some ideas and suggestions for how you could use the range of resources and research methodologies presented in this volume to pursue a complex inquiry. Remember, if you run into dead ends with your research or have questions about the resources most likely to provide the information you seek, you can always check with a subject-specialist reference librarian, as well as ask your colleagues for advice. Research methodology, just like intellectual inquiry, builds upon previous knowledge. Using the acquired knowledge and experience of librarians, faculty, and colleagues will help you to creatively, effectively, and confidently approach a research project.

CONCLUSION The British Renaissance and early modern period is remarkable for its rich and fascinating contribution to the development of English literature. Dominated traditionally (and still to a great extent) by Shakespeare, nevertheless, new literary and theoretical approaches have opened up the primarily male Renaissance canon to embrace a wide range of new and rediscovered voices. Exciting digital projects, from EEBO to Perdita Manuscripts to Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Burney Collection Newspapers to Bodleian Library Broadside Ballads, have made it possible to explore contemporary primary source material, such as books, manuscripts, periodicals, and ephemera, in ways previously unimagined. Since this volume attempts to cover the literature of two centuries from 1500 to 1700, including the Restoration—a period frequently studied with the eighteenth century—we have done our best to identify resources and accommodate the research needs of literary projects

Researching a Thorny Problem

347

grounded in the early Tudor period all the way through those inquiries merging with early-eighteenth-century concerns and topics. We discovered in the process that there are enough reference materials to devote an entire research guide just to William Shakespeare alone! Although some of the resources discussed in this volume are likely to become outdated, the majority will continue to assist and guide literary scholars, either in their current format or converted to enhanced electronic versions. Many of the long-standing, traditional print reference sources may remain valuable and viable for their unique contribution to literary research. Interestingly enough, the websites described in this volume are probably the most likely to change with time. And, of course, many new resources for studying sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury British literature will be developed. Whether a reference tool changes or is unfamiliar, however, the basic research skills presented in this volume will remain fairly constant. Good research practices, careful evaluation of sources, and critical thinking are the research foundations that will enable you to adapt to new technologies and revised versions of familiar tools, since change is guaranteed. Consider your reference librarian as an ally in the process, one who can inform you of and recommend new and relevant digital or microform projects, literary databases, or print resources that match the needs of your individual project. As always, remain flexible, expect change, be creative, ask questions, and enjoy the invigorating and unpredictable nature of literary research.

NOTES 1. Margaret Cavendish, “To the Reader,” in Observations upon experimental philosophy to which is added The description of a blazing new world (London: Printed by A. Maxwell, 1666). Wing 1532:17, in Early English Books Online, 0-gateway .proquest.com.bianca.penlib.du.edu/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2003&res_id=xrieebo& rft_id=xri:eebo:image:64702. 2. Stephen Clucas, “Introduction,” in A Princely Brave Woman: Essays on Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, ed. Stephen Clucas (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003), 9–10. 3. Jacqueline Broad, review article “Cavendish Redefined,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 12, no. 4 (2004): 731–32. 4. Eric Lewis, “The Legacy of Margaret Cavendish,” Perspectives on Science 9, no. 3 (2001): 341. 5. Royal Society, “Gender Profile of the Fellowship,” Royal Society of London, royalsociety.org/page.asp?tip=1&id=2214. In 1945, the first two female members were admitted: biochemist Marjory Stephenson and crystallographer Kathleen Lonsdale. See Dr. Patricia Fara’s brief article on the Royal Society website,

348

Chapter Thirteen

“Women Scientists and the Royal Society” (June 2004), royalsociety.org/publication .asp?id=1010. 6. Royal Society, “Brief History of the Society.” Royal Society of London, royalsociety.org/page.asp?id=2176. 7. Quotations from Erin Lang Bonin’s “Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623–1673),” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 252, British Philosophers, 1500–1799, ed. Peter S. Fosl and Philip B. Dematteis (Detroit: Gale, 2001), 112, 113. 8. Marjorie Hope Nicolson, The Conway Letters: The Correspondence of Anne, Viscountess Conway, Henry More, and Their Friends, 1642–1684, Collected from Manuscript Sources (Yale University Press, 1930; rev. with an introduction and new material by Sarah Hutton, Clarendon Press, 1992). 9. Quoted from Nicolson, 237. 10. Douglas Grant, Margaret the First: A Biography of Margaret Cavendish Duchess of Newcastle, 1623–1673 (London: Hart-Davis, 1957), 23. 11. Samuel Pepys, “May 30, 1667,” in The Diary of Samuel Pepys: A New and Complete Transcription, vol. 8, 1667, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 243. 12. Bathsua Makin, An essay to revive the antient education of gentlewomen in religion, manners, arts & tongues (London: Printed by J. D., 1673), 10. Wing 697:02, in Early English Books Online, 0-gateway.proquest.com.bianca.penlib.du.edu/ openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2003&res_id=xri:eebo&rft_id=xri:eebo:image:64990. 13. Frances Teague, Bathsua Makin, Woman of Learning (London: Associated University Presses, 1998), 89. 14. Clucas, 14.

Bibliography

Altick, Richard D., and John J. Fenstermaker. The Art of Literary Research. 4th ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 1993. Antelman, Kristin, Emily Lynema, and Andrew K. Pace. “Toward a Twenty-First Century Library Catalog.” Information Technologies and Libraries 25, no. 3 (September 2006): 128–39. Barnard, John, and D. F. McKenzie, eds. Cambridge History of the Book in Britain. Vol. 4, 1557–1695. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Beal, Peter. In Praise of Scribes: Manuscripts and Their Makers in SeventeenthCentury England. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Beall, Jeffrey, and Karen Kafadar. “The Proportion of NUC Pre-1956 Titles Represented in OCLC WorldCat.” College & Research Libraries 66, no. 5 (September 2005): 431–35. Bentley, Gerald Eades. The Jacobean and Caroline Stage. Vol. 7. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941–1968. Berg, Donna Lee. A Guide to the Oxford English Dictionary. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Berry, Helen. Gender, Society and Print Culture in Late-Stuart England: The Cultural World of the Athenian Mercury. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003. Birrell, T. A. “Reading as Pastime: The Place of Light Literature in Some Gentlemen’s Libraries of the 17th Century.” In Property of a Gentleman: The Formation, Organisation and Dispersal of the Private Library, 1620–1920, edited by Robin Myers and Michael Harris, 113–31. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 1991. Black, Jeremy. The English Press, 1621–1861. Thrupp, Stroud, Gloucestershire, UK: Sutton, 2001. Brewer, Charlotte. “The Second Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary.” The Review of English Studies, New Series, 44, no. 175 (August 1993): 313–42. Broad, Jacqueline. “Cavendish Redefined.” Review article, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 12, no. 4 (2004): 731–41.

349

350

Bibliography

Brown, Pamela Allen. “Review of The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare, ed. by Michael Dobson and Stanley Wells.” Shakespeare Quarterly 54, no. 2 (Summer 2003): 188–91. Calhoun, Karen. The Changing Nature of the Catalog and Its Integration with Other Discovery Tools. Final Report, March 17, 2006. Prepared for the Library of Congress. www.loc.gov/catdir/calhoun-report-final.pdf. Chambers, E. K. The Elizabethan Stage. Vol. 3. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967. Clarke, Bob. From Grub Street to Fleet Street: An Illustrated History of English Newspapers to 1899. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004. Clarke, Elizabeth, and Jonathon Gibson. “Introduction.” In Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Poetry, edited by Jill Seal Millman and Gillian Wright, 1–10. New York: Manchester University Press, 2005. Clucas, Stephen, ed. A Princely Brave Woman: Essays on Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003. Cowley, Abraham. The Complete Works in Verse and Prose of Abraham Cowley. Vol. 1. New York: AMS Press, 1967. Coyle, Karen. “The Future of Library Systems, Seen from the Past.” The Journal of Academic Librarianship 33, no. 1 (January 2007): 138–40. ———. “The Library Catalog in a 2.0 World.” The Journal of Academic Librarianship 33, no. 2 (March 2007): 289–91. ———. “The Library Catalog: Some Possible Futures.” The Journal of Academic Librarianship 33, no. 3 (May 2007): 414–16. Cummings, Robert. “Recent Studies in English Translation, c. 1520–c. 1590.” English Literary Renaissance 37, no. 2 (Spring 2007): 274–316. Daems, Jim, and Holly Faith Nelson, eds. Eikon Basilike with Selections from Eikonoklastes John Milton. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Editions, 2005. Dahl, Folke. A Bibliography of English Corantos and Periodical Newsbooks, 1620– 1642. London: Bibliographical Society, 1952. Daly, Peter M. Literature in the Light of the Emblem: Structural Parallels between the Emblem and Literature in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. 2nd ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998. Dees, Jerome S. “Recent Studies in the English Emblem.” English Literary Renaissance 16, no. 2 (Spring 1986): 391–420. DeZelar-Tiedman, Christine. “The Proportion of NUC Pre-56 Represented in the RLIN and OCLC Databases Compared: A Follow-up to the Beall/Kafadar Study.” College & Research Libraries 69, no. 5 (September 2008): 401–6. Diehl, Huston. An Index of Icons in English Emblem Books, 1500–1700. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986. Dodson, Suzanne Cates, ed. Microform Research Collections: A Guide. 2nd ed. Westport, CT: Meckler Publishing, 1984. Dryden, John. Ovid’s Epistles Translated by Several Hands. London: Jacob Tonson, 1680. Wing 76:07. In Early English Books Online. gateway.proquest .com/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2003&res_id=xri:eebo&rft_id=xri:eebo:cita tion:12087338.

Bibliography

351

Dutton, Richard. “Review of A Ben Johnson Companion, by D. Heyward Brock.” The Modern Language Review 82, no. 4 (October 1987): 913. Ellis, Roger, and Liz Oakley-Brown. “British Tradition.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, edited by Mona Baker, 333–47. 1998. Reprint, New York: Routledge, 2006. Fehrenbach, R. J., and E. S. Leedham-Green, eds. Private Libraries in Renaissance England: A Collection and Catalogue of Tudor and Early Stuart Book-Lists. Vol. 1. Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1992. Fernie, Ewan, Ramona Wray, Mark Thornton Burnett, and Clare McManus, eds. Reconceiving the Renaissance: A Critical Reader. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Freeman, Rosemary. English Emblem Books. 1948. Reprint, New York: Octagon Books, 1966. Garrett, Martin, ed. Sidney: The Critical Heritage. New York: Routledge, 1996. Gillespie, Stuart. “Translation and Canon-Formation.” In The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English. Vol. 3, 1660–1790, edited by Stuart Gillespie and David Hopkins, 7–20. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Grant, Douglas. Margaret the First: A Biography of Margaret Cavendish Duchess of Newcastle, 1623–1673. London: Hart-Davis, 1957. Grinnell, Richard. “Review of The Shakespeare Name Dictionary, by J. Madison Davis and A. Daniel Frankforter.” Sixteenth Century Journal 28, no. 4 (Winter 1997): 1370–71. Hammond, Gerald. “Translations of the Bible.” In A Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture, edited by Michael Hattaway, 165–75. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000. Hanson, Eugene R., and Jay E. Daily. “Catalogs and Cataloging.” In Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science. Vol. 1, edited by Miriam A. Drake. 2nd ed., 431–68. New York: Marcel Dekker, 2003. Harner, James L. Literary Research Guide: An Annotated Listing of Reference Sources in English Literary Studies. 5th ed. New York: Modern Language Association, 2008. Havens, Earle. Commonplace Books: A History of Manuscripts and Printed Books from Antiquity to the Twentieth Century. New Haven, CT: Yale University, 2001. Hopkins, David. “Dryden and His Contemporaries.” In The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English. Vol. 3, 1660–1790, edited by Stuart Gillespie and David Hopkins, 55–66. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Hopkins, Judith. “The 1791 French Cataloging Code and the Origins of the Card Catalog.” Libraries and Culture 27, no. 4 (Fall 1992): 378–404. Jordan, Constance, and Clare Carroll. “Introduction.” In Longman Anthology of British Literature. Vol. 1B, The Early Modern Period, edited by David Damrosch (2nd ed.), 641–61. New York: Longman, 2003. Jordon, Jay. “OCLC and the Emerging Worldwide Library Co-operative.” Library Management 24, no. 3 (2003): 107–15.

352

Bibliography

Kastan, David Scott. “Print, Literary Culture and the Book Trade.” In The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature, edited by David Loewenstein and Janel Mueller, 81–116. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Lawton, David. “The Bible.” In The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English. Vol. 1, To 1550, edited by Roger Ellis, 228–29. New York, Oxford University Press, 2008. Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer. Writing Women in Jacobean England. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993. Lewis, Eric. “The Legacy of Margaret Cavendish.” Perspectives on Science 9, no. 3 (2001): 341–65. Londry, Michael. “On the Use of First-Line Indices for Researching English Poetry of the Long Eighteenth Century, c. 1660–1830, with Special Reference to Women Poets.” Library 7th ser., 5 (2004): 12–38. Love, Harold. “L’Estrange, Sir Roger.” In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/16514. ———. Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Love, Harold, and Arthur F. Marotti. “Manuscript Transmission and Circulation.” In The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature, edited by David Loewenstein and Janel Mueller, 55–80. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Mann, Thomas. “The Changing Nature of the Catalog and Its Integration with Other Discovery Tools. Final Report. March 17, 2006. Prepared for the Library of Congress by Karen Calhoun. A Critical Review.” Journal of Library Metadata 8, no. 2 (2008): 169–97. Manning, John. The Emblem. London: Reaktion Books, 2002. Marcus, Leah S. “Renaissance/Early Modern Studies.” In Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies, edited by Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn, 41–63. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1992. Marcuse, Michael J. A Reference Guide for English Studies. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Orgel, Stephen. “Marginal Maternity: Reading Lady Anne Clifford’s A Mirror for Magistrates.” In Printing and Parenting in Early Modern England, edited by Douglas A. Brooks, 267–89. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2005. Osselton, Noel. “Unsuccessful Saywhats.” Times Literary Supplement (November 9–15, 1990): 1201. Pearson, David. Provenance Research in Book History: A Handbook. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 1998. Pepys, Samuel. “May 30, 1667.” In The Diary of Samuel Pepys: A New and Complete Transcription. Vol. 8, 1667, edited by Robert Latham and William Matthews, 242–44. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974. Pomeroy, Elizabeth W. The Elizabethan Miscellanies: Their Development and Conventions. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973.

Bibliography

353

Saunders, J. W. “The Stigma of Print: A Note on the Social Bases of Tudor Poetry.” Essays in Criticism, 1 (1951): 139–64. Saurat, Denis. “Review [untitled].” Review of English Studies 7, no. 28 (October 1931): 472–74, 473. Schäfer, Jürgen. Early Modern English Lexicography. Vol. 1. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Schibel, Wolfgang, and Jeffrey A. Rydberg-Cox. “Early Modern Culture in a Comprehensive Digital Library.” D-Lib Magazine 12:3 (March 2006). www.dlib.org/ dlib/march06/schibel/03schibel.html. Sherman,William H. Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Shuster, George N. “Facsimiles for Everybody.” The Commonweal: A Weekly Review of Literature, The Arts and Public Affairs 17, no. 18 (March 1, 1933): 494. Smith, Christopher. “Review of MLAIB and ABELL: Periodische Fachbibliographien, CD-ROM- und Online-Datenbanken zur Anglistik, by Jost Hindersmann.” The Modern Language Review 97, no. 4 (October 2002): 1062. Smyth, Adam. “Profit and Delight”: Printed Miscellanies in England, 1640–1682. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004. Sommerville, C. John. The News Revolution in England: Cultural Dynamics of Daily Information. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Steiner, George, After Babel: Aspects of Language & Translation. 3rd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Stevenson, Jane. “Women Translators from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century.” In Translation—Theory and Practice: A Historical Reader, edited by Daniel Weissbort and Astradur Eysteinsson, 128–43. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Strout, Ruth French. “The Development of the Catalog and Cataloging Codes.” Library Quarterly 26, no. 1/4 (January/October 1956): 254–75. Teague, Frances. Bathsua Makin, Woman of Learning. London: Associated University Presses, 1998. Tedder, H. R. “Royston, Richard (1601–1686).” Revised by William Proctor Williams. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/ 24240. Walker, Thomas D. “Libraries, National.” In Encyclopedia of Communication and Information. Vol. 2, edited by Jorge Reina Schement, 541–45. New York: Macmillan Reference USA, 2002. Woodward, D. H. Review of An Index of Icons in English Emblem Books, 1500–1700, by Huston Diehl. Choice 24 (December 1986): 604.

Index

AACR2R. See Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules ABELL. See Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature Abraham, Terry, Repositories of Primary Sources, 204, 212 Accessing English Literary Periodicals: A Guide to the Microfilm Collection with Title, Subject, Editor, and Reel Number Indexes (Puravs & Kavanagh & Smith), 133, 135–36 Accessions to Repositories, 204, 210 Access to Archives (A2A), 204, 209–10 accuracy, of Web resources, 295 Adam Matthew Publications, 268, 272 Aemilia Lanyer, 1569–1645 (McBride), 311, 314 Alciato’s Book of Emblems: The Memorial Web Edition in Latin and English (Barker & Feltham & Guthrie), 305, 310 allusions, 161–62 Alston, R. C., Books with Manuscript: A Short Title Catalogue of Books with Manuscript Notes in the British Library Including Books with Manuscript Additions, Proofsheets, Illustrations, Corrections, 168, 169–70

American Society for EighteenthCentury Studies (ASECS) (Cutting), 324, 326 “and” (Boolean operator), 7–9, 8f, 9f Anglo–American Cataloguing Rules (AACR2R), 47, 48–49 Annals of English Drama, 975–1700: An Analytical Record of All Plays, Extant or Lost, Chronologically Arranged and Indexed by Authors, Titles, Dramatic Companies, &c., (Harbage), 224, 228–29 Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (ABELL), 73, 74–75, 78–80; compared with MLAIB, 79–80 annual reviews, 73, 82 Aphra Behn: An Annotated Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources (O’Donnell), 156, 160 Aphra Behn Page (Nestvold), 311, 313–14 Aphra Behn Society, 311, 314 apparatus, scholarly, for the study of genre, 221 Appositions: Studies in Renaissance/ Early Modern Literature and Culture (Howard), 324, 328 Archive Finder, 204, 212 355

356

Index

archives, 183–219; general information about, 186–91; locating, 191–203; research in, best practices for, 186– 91; websites for locating, 204–12 Archives Hub, 204, 211 Archives Network Wales, 204, 210–11 ARCHON Directory, 204, 209 ASECS. See American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Ash, Lee, Subject Collections: A Guide to Special Book Collections and Subject Emphases as Reported by University, College, Public, and Special Libraries and Museums in the United States and Canada, 191, 203 associations, 324–329 A2A. See Access to Archives Auchter, Dorothy, Dictionary of Literary and Dramatic Censorship in Tudor and Stuart England, 25, 31–32 Augustan Reprint Society, 287, 289–90 authority, of Web resources, 294 authors: bibliographies of, 90–94; journals on, 110–16; library catalog searches on, 49–52, 50f, 51f; sources on, 38–43; websites on, 311–315 Autograph Poetry in the English Language: Facsimiles of Original Manuscripts from the Fourteenth to the Twentieth Century (Croft), 212, 215–16 Bacon, Francis: Baconiana: The Journal of the Francis Bacon Society, 110, 115 Balay, Robert, Early Periodical Indexes: Bibliographies and Indexes of Literature Published in Periodicals before 1900, 138, 148–49 Barbour, Reid: “Recent Studies in Elizabethan Prose Fiction.” English Literary Renaissance, 231, 232–33; “Recent Studies of Prose

Fiction, 1603–1660, including Sidney’s Arcadia.” English Literary Renaissance, 231, 232–33 Barker, William, Alciato’s Book of Emblems: The Memorial Web Edition in Latin and English, 305, 310 Bateson, F. W., Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (CBEL), 74, 80 Baue, Frederic William, A Bibliographical Catalogue and First–Line Index of Printed Anthologies of English Poetry to 1640, 162, 164 BBTI. See British Book Trade Index BCMSV. See Leeds Verse Database Bear, Risa, Renascence Editions, 300, 302 The Beginnings of the English Newspaper 1620–1660 (Frank), 124, 125 Behn, Aphra, 156, 160–61; Aphra Behn: An Annotated Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources (O’Donnell), 156, 160; Aphra Behn Page (Nestvold), 311, 313–14; Aphra Behn Society, 311, 314 Beineke Flickr Laboratory’s Photostream, 162, 167–68 Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, First-Line Index of English Poetry 1500–1800 in Manuscripts of the James M. and Marie-Louise Osborn Collection in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University. 191, 200–201 Bell, Maureen, A Biographical Dictionary of English Women Writers: 1580–1720, 25, 30–31 Bellany, Alastair, Early Stuart Libels: An Edition of Poetry from Manuscript Sources, 305, 307–8 A Ben Jonson Companion (Brock), 38, 40

Index

Ben Jonson Journal: Literary Contexts in the Age of Elizabeth, James, and Charles (BJJ), 110, 112 Bentley, Gerald Eades, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, 224, 227 Berger, Thomas L., An Index of Characters in Early Modern English Drama Printed Plays, 1500–1660, 224, 230–31 Bergeron, David M., Twentieth-Century Criticism of English Masques, Pageants, and Entertainments: 1558–1642, 224, 231 Bergquist, G. William: Three Centuries of English and American Plays, A Checklist: England 1500–1800; United States 1714–1830, 273, 278; Three Centuries of English and American Plays, 1500–1830: Microfiche Collection Checklist, 273, 278; A Bibliographical Catalogue and First-Line Index of Printed Anthologies of English Poetry to 1640 (Baue), 162, 164 Bibliographie Internationale de l’Humanisme et de la Renaissance, 84, 89–90 bibliographies, 72–95; authors, early modern period, 90–94; authors, Renaissance, 90–94; compiling an author-centered bibliography, 93–94; early modern period, 84–90; general literary, 74–84; Renaissance, 84–90; seventeenth–century periodicals, 124–26. See also indexes Bibliographies and Guides (Library of Congress Humanities and Social Sciences Division, Microform Reading Room), 268, 269 Bibliography and Index of English Verse in Manuscript, 1501–1558 (Ringler), 192, 197–99, 243, 247 Bibliography and Index of English Verse Printed 1476–1558 (Ringler), 243, 246, 254, 257

357

A Bibliography of English Corantos and Periodical Newsbooks, 1620–1642 (Dahl), 138, 139–42, 145 A Bibliography of English Poetical Miscellanies, 1521–1750 (Case), 162, 165 “A Bibliography of Ovidian Translations and Imitations in English” (Gillespie) (Translation and Literature), 254, 256 A Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration (Greg), 224, 227–28 BibSite: The Bibliographical Society of America, 316, 320 A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers & Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660–1800 (Highfill & Burnim & Langhans), 224, 230 A Biographical Dictionary of English Women Writers: 1580–1720 (Bell & Parfitt & Shepherd), 25, 30–31 biographical sources, 36–38 BJJ. See Ben Jonson Journal: Literary Contexts in the Age of Elizabeth, James, and Charles Black, Hester M., A Short Title Catalogue of the Emblem Books and Related Works in the Stirling Maxwell Collection of Glasgow University Library (1499–1917), 237, 243 Black, Jeremy, The English Press, 1621–1861, 124, 125 Blogging the Renaissance, 324, 328 Bodleian Library Broadside Ballads, 285–86, 305, 308–9 Bond, Richmond Pugh, Studies of British Newspapers and Periodicals from Their Beginning to 1800: A Bibliography, 124, 125 Books with Manuscript: A Short Title Catalogue of Books with Manuscript Notes in the British Library

358

Index

Including Books with Manuscript Additions, Proofsheets, Illustrations, Corrections (Alston), 168, 169–70 Boolean searching, search strategies, 7–9, 7f, 8f, 9f Booth, Roy, Early Modern Whale, 324, 328 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation (BorrowersL), 110, 115 Boston, Ray, The Newspaper Press in Britain: An Annotated Bibliography, 124, 125 Bracken, James K., Reference Works in British and American Literature, 21, 24–25 Bradford, William C., An Index of Characters in Early Modern English Drama Printed Plays, 1500–1660, 224, 230–31 Bradley, Jesse Franklin, The Jonson Allusion Book: A Collection of Allusions to Ben Jonson from 1597– 1700, 161, 162 Brennan, Michael G., A Sidney Chronology, 1554–1654, 38, 39–40 British Archives: A Guide to Archive Resources in the United Kingdom (Foster & Sheppard), 192, 202–3 British Book Sale Catalogues, 1676– 1800: A Union List (Munby & Coral), 173, 177 British Book Trade Index (BBTI), 316, 321–22 British History Online, 329–30 British Library, 65; Books with Manuscript: A Short Title Catalogue of Books with Manuscript Notes in the British Library Including Books with Manuscript Additions, Proofsheets, Illustrations, Corrections (Alston), 168, 169–70; The British Library: Guide to the Catalogues and Indexes of the Department of Manuscripts (Nickson), 204, 206

British Literary Manuscripts microfilm collections, 273, 282–83; Guide to Sale Catalogues, 172, 177; Index of Manuscripts in the British Library, 204, 206; Integrated Catalogue, 64, 65; Manuscripts Catalogue, 64, 65– 66, 204, 205–6; Microform Research Collections, 268, 270; Renaissance Commonplace Books from the British Library, London, 162, 166–67, 274, 279; Renaissance Commonplace Books from the British Library, London: A Listing and Guide to the Microfilm Collection (Sherman) 163, 166–67; Renaissance Commonplace Books from the Sloane Collection at the British Library, 163, 166–67, 274, 279–80; Renaissance Commonplace Books from the Sloane Collection at the British Library (Sheppard), 163, 166–67; Thomason Tracts, 133, 134–35, 274, 275; The Thomason Tracts, 1640–1661: An Index to the Microfilm Edition of the Thomason Collection of the British Library, 133, 135, 274, 276 The British Library: Guide to the Catalogues and Indexes of the Department of Manuscripts (Nickson), 204, 206 British Literary Magazines. Vol. 1, The Augustan Age and the Age of Johnston, 1698–1788 (Sullivan), 138, 148 British Literary Manuscripts from the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Series One: The English Renaissance c. 1500–1700, 273, 282 British Literary Manuscripts from the British Library, London, 273, 282 British Literary Manuscripts from the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C., 273, 282 British Literary Manuscripts from the National Library of Scotland, 273, 282–83

Index

British Newspapers and Periodicals, 1641–1700: A Short–Title Catalogue of Serials Printed in England, Scotland, Ireland, and British America: With a Checklist of Serials Printed 1701–March 1702 and Chronological, Geographical, Foreign Language, Subject, Publisher, and Editor Indexes 1641–1702 (Nelson & Seccombe), 138, 142–45 British Periodicals, 126, 130–31 British Printed Images to 1700, 329, 332 British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (BSECS), 324, 326 British Union Catalogue of Periodicals (Stewart & Hammond & Saenger), 138, 149 Broadhead, Philip, The Longman Handbook of Early Modern Europe, 1453–1763, 25, 32 Brock, D. Heyward, A Ben Jonson Companion, 38, 40 Brock, Susan, Playhouse Wills, 1558–1642: An Edition of Wills by Shakespeare and His Contemporaries in the London Theatre, 224, 230 BSECS. See British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Budeit, Janice L., Early English Newspapers: Bibliography and Guide to the Microfilm Collection, 133, 137 Burgess, Irene, “Recent Studies in Margaret Cavendish, William Cavendish, Elizabeth Cavendish, and Jane Cavendish–Cheyne.” English Literary Renaissance, 90, 94 Burnim, Kalman A., A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers & Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660–1800, 224, 230 Butler, Anthony, Restoration Theatre Song Archive, 316, 319

359

Cahiers Elisabéthains: A Biannual Journal of Renaissance Studies (Cahiers E), 99, 102 Calendar of English Renaissance Drama, 1558–1642 (Kawachi), 224, 229 calendars, 34–35 call numbers, 57–58; browsing, 58 Calore, Michela, Music in Shakespeare: A Dictionary, 258, 262 Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (CBEL) (Bateson), 74, 80 Cambridge Collections Online, 25, 27 Cambridge Companions to Literature series, 156, 158 The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1500–1600 (Kinney), 25, 28 Cardinale, Susan, Women and the Literature of the Seventeenth Century: An Annotated Bibliography Based on Wing’s Short-Title Catalogue, 85, 86–88 Carney, Jo Eldridge, Renaissance and Reformation, 1500–1620: A Biographical Dictionary, 25, 29–30 Case, Arthur E., A Bibliography of English Poetical Miscellanies, 1521– 1750, 162, 165 catalog searches: author, 49–52, 50f, 51f; subject, 55–57, 56f; title, 52–54, 53f, 54f catalogs, library, 45–71 Cavendish, Margaret, 333–348; bibliographies on, 90, 93–94; catalog searches for, 11–13, 49–50, 57–58; “Recent Studies in Margaret Cavendish, William Cavendish, Elizabeth Cavendish, and Jane Cavendish-Cheyne” (Burgess) (English Literary Renaissance), 90, 94 CBEL. See Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature A Census of British Newspapers and Periodicals, 1620–1800 (Crane & Kaye), 138, 147–48

360

Index

Center for Research Libraries (CRL), 58, 62–63 Centre for Early Modern Studies, 295, 297 Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 295, 298 CERES, Cambridge English Renaissance Electronic Service, 295, 297–298 cfp.english.upenn.edu: category: renaissance, 324, 327–28 Chambers, E. K., The Elizabethan Stage, 224, 226–27 A Chronological List of Prose Fiction in English Printed in England and Other Countries, 1475–1640 (O’Dell), 231, 235 chronologies, 34–36 Clarke, Bob, From Grub Street to Fleet Street: An Illustrated History of English Newspapers to 1899, 124, 125 Classe, Olive, Encyclopedia of Literary Translation into English, 253, 255 commonplace books, 162–68 companions, 26–28; national literatures, 32–34 A Companion to Early Modern omen’s Writing (Pacheco), 25, 31 Companion to Emblem Studies (Daly), 237 A Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture (Hattaway), 25, 26 The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Hylton), 305, 307 concordances, 41–42 A Concordance to the Poems of Edmund Spenser (Osgood), 39, 41 contemporary reception, 154–82 context, of Web resources, 295 Cook, Chris, The Longman Handbook of Early Modern Europe, 1453–1763, 25, 32

Cook, James Wyatt, Encyclopedia of Renaissance Literature, 25, 28–29 Copac, 58, 63 Coral, Lenore, British Book Sale Catalogues, 1676–1800: A Union List, 173, 177 Cox, Michael, The Oxford Chronology of English Literature, 34, 35–36 Cox, Susan M., Early English Newspapers: Bibliography and Guide to the Microfilm Collection, 133, 137 Coye, Dale, Pronouncing Shakespeare’s Words: A Guide from A to Zounds, 258, 262 Crane, R. S., A Census of British Newspapers and Periodicals, 1620– 1800, 138, 147–148 Creamer, Kevin J. T., John Milton: The Milton-L Home Page, 311, 312–13 Critical Heritage series, 156, 157–58 critical reception sources, 156–61 CRL. See Center for Research Libraries Croft, Peter J.: Autograph Poetry in the English Language: Facsimiles of Original Manuscripts from the Fourteenth to the Twentieth Century, 212, 215–16; Index of English Literary Manuscripts, 168, 170–71, 191, 195–96 Crowell’s Handbook of Elizabethan and Stuart Literature (Ruoff), 25, 29 Crum, Margaret, First-Line Index of English Poetry, 1500–1800, in Manuscripts of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, 192, 200 Crystal, Ben, Shakespeare’s Words: A Glossary and Language Companion, 258, 262 Crystal, David, Shakespeare’s Words: A Glossary and Language Companion, 258, 262 cultural sources, online, 329–32 Cummings, Robert: “A Bibliography of Ovidian Translations and Imitations

Index

in English.” Translation and Literature, 254, 256; “Recent Studies in English Translation, c. 1520–c. 1590.” English Literary Renaissance, 253, 255 A Cuppe of Newes (Schwyzer), 324, 328 Curran, Kevin, Textual Studies, 1500– 1800, 324, 328 currency, of Web resources, 295 current awareness resources, 324–329 Cutting, Vickie, American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS), 324, 326 Dahl, Folke, A Bibliography of English Corantos and Periodical Newsbooks, 1620–1642, 138, 139–42, 145 Daly, Peter M.: Companion to Emblem Studies, 237; The English Emblem: Bibliography of Secondary Literature (Corpus Librorum Emblematum), 237, 241–42; The Modern Critical Reception of the English Emblem (Corpus Librorum Emblematum), 237, 242 databases, versus search engines, 16–17, 16t Davis, J. Madison, The Shakespeare Name Dictionary, 38, 42–43 Dawson, Giles E., Elizabethan Handwriting, 1500–1650: A Manual, 212, 213–14 DEEP: Database of Early English Playbooks (Farmer & Lesser), 316, 317 Dees, Jerome S., “Recent Studies in the English Emblem.” English Literary Renaissance, 237, 241 Dessen, Alan, A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama, 1580– 1642, 224, 230 Dewald, Jonathan, Europe, 1450–1789: Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World, 25, 32 dictionaries, 29–32, 223

361

Dictionary of Literary and Dramatic Censorship in Tudor and Stuart England (Auchter), 25, 31–32 Dictionary of Literary Biography (DLB), 36, 38, 156, 159–60, 192, 194–95 Dictionary of Literary Rhetorical Conventions of the English Renaissance (Donker & Muldrow), 223 A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama, 1580–1642 (Dessen & Thomson), 224, 230 Diehl, Huston, An Index of Icons in English Emblem Books, 1500–1700, 237, 240–41 digital collections, 126–33, 265–92 digital projects. See library digital projects Digital Renaissance Editions: Early Modern Drama Online, 305, 307 Digital Scriptorium, 300, 304 discovery tools, 66–69, 68f DLB. See Dictionary of Literary Biography Dobson, Michael, The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare, 38, 43 Documents of the Rose Playhouse (Rutter), 224, 230 DocumentsOnline, 204, 207 Dodson, Suzanne Cates, Microform Research Collections: A Guide, 268, 269 Donker, Marjorie, Dictionary of Literary Rhetorical Conventions of the English Renaissance, 223 Donne, John: John Donne: An Annotated Bibliography of Modern Criticism, 1912–1967 (Roberts), 90, 91–92; John Donne: An Annotated Bibliography of Modern Criticism, 1968–1978 (Roberts), 90, 91–92; John Donne: An Annotated Bibliography of Modern Criticism, 1979–1995 (Roberts), 90, 91–92;

362

Index

John Donne Journal: Studies in the Age of Donne (JDJ), 110, 112 Drabble, Margaret, The Oxford Companion to English Literature, 32, 33 drama/theater, resources on, 224–31 Dramatic Texts and Records of Britain: A Chronological Topography to 1558 (Lancashire), 224, 230 Dryden, John: John Dryden: A Bibliography of Early Editions and of Drydeniana (Macdonald), 90, 92–93 Early British Periodicals, 133, 136 Early English Books, 1475–1640 (EEBI), 133, 134, 273, 274–75 Early English Books, 1475–1640, Selected from Pollard and Redgrave’s Short-Title Catalogue: A Cross Index to the Microfilm Collection, 273, 275–76 Early English Books, 1475–1640, Selected from Pollard and Redgrave’s Short–Title Catalogue: A Guide to the Microfilm Collection, 133, 134, 273, 275–76 Early English Books, 1641–1700 (EEBII), 273, 274–275 Early English Books, 1641–1700: A Cumulative Index to Units 1–60 of the Microfilm Collection, 273, 275–76 Early English Books, 1641–1700, Selected from Donald Wing’s Short– Title Catalog: A Cross Index to the Microfilm Collection, 273, 275–76 Early English Books, 1641–1700, Selected from Donald Wing’s Short–Title Catalog: A Guide to the Microfilm Collection, 273, 275–76 Early English Books Online (EEBO), 126–29, 127f, 128f, 131–32, 142, 178, 179, 253, 256, 273, 276–77

Early English Drama, Everyman to 1580: A Reference Guide (White), 225, 226 Early English Newspapers: Bibliography and Guide to the Microfilm Collection (Cox & Budeit), 133, 137 The Early English Newspapers, Burney Collection, 133, 136–37 Early English Prose Fiction, 231, 236–37 Early Modern Culture: An Electronic Seminar, 105, 108–9 Early Modern English Lexicography (Schäfer), 258, 260–61 Early Modern Englishwoman: Series I: Printed Writings, 1500–1640, 254, 257, 287, 288–89 Early Modern Englishwoman: Series II: Printed Writings, 1641–1700, 254, 257, 287, 288–89 Early Modern Englishwoman: A Facsimile Library of Essential Works: Series III: Essential Works for the Study of Early Modern Women, 254, 257, 287, 288–89 early modern handwriting, resources for, 212–18 early modern libraries, 172–78 Early Modern Literary Studies: A Journal of Sixteenth– and Seventeenth–Century English Literature (EMLS), 99, 104 Early Modern Literary Studies Electronic Texts (Steggle), 300, 304 Early–Modern Paleography (Postles), 213, 217–18 early modern period: bibliographies on, 84–90; definitions of, ix–xii; drama/theater, resources on, 224–31; emblem books, resources on, 237–243, 310–11; encyclopedias, dictionaries, and companions to, 25– 32, 223; general literature journals

Index

on, 116–17; journals on, 99–110; library digital projects on, 283–87; microforms and digital collections on, 273–83; poetry, resources on, 243–48; prose fiction, resources on, 231–37; studies on, 105–10 Early Modern Resources (Howard), 295, 298–99 Early Modern Whale (Booth), 324, 328 Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 105, 109 Early Modern Women Database, 295, 299 Early Periodical Indexes: Bibliographies and Indexes of Literature Published in Periodicals before 1900 (Balay), 138, 148–49 Early Stuart Libels: An Edition of Poetry from Manuscript Sources (Bellany & McRae), 305, 307–8 ECCB: The Eighteenth Century Current Bibliography, 85, 89 Econolingua: A Glossary of Coins and Economic Language in Renaissance Drama (Fischer), 258, 262 editions, 178–79 Editions and Adaptations of Shakespeare, 273, 283 Edmund Spenser Home Page (Zurcher), 311, 314–15 EEBO. See Early English Books Online EEBI. See Early English Books, 1475– 1640 EEBII. See Early English Books, 1641– 1700 Eighteenth Century Journals: A Portal to Newspapers and Periodicals, c1685–1815, 126, 131–32, 132f Eighteenth Century Resources (Lynch), 295, 296–97 EIRC. See Explorations in Renaissance Culture electronic records, 3–6, 3t electronic text archives, general, 300–05

363

electronic text archives, specialized, 305–311 Electronic Text Center, Modern English Collection, 300, 302–3 Elizabethan Bibliographies (Tannenbaum & Tannenbaum), 90, 93 Elizabethan Handwriting, 1500–1650: A Manual (Dawson & Kennedy– Skipton), 212, 213–14 Elizabethan Poetry: A Bibliography and First-Line Index of English Verse, 1559–1603 (May & Ringler), 192, 199–200, 243, 247–48 The Elizabethan Stage, (Chambers), 224, 226–27 ELR. See English Literary Renaissance Emblematica: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Emblem Studies (Emblematica), 237–38 emblem books, resources on, 237–243, 310–11 EMLS. See Early Modern Literary Studies: A Journal of Sixteenth– and Seventeenth– Century English Literature EMS. See English Manuscript Studies 1100–1700 An Encyclopedia of British Women Writers (Schlueter & Schlueter), 25, 31 Encyclopedia of British Writers. Vol. 1, 16th and 17th Centuries (Hagar), 25, 30 Encyclopedia of Literary Translation into English (Classe), 253, 255 Encyclopedia of Renaissance Literature (Cook), 25, 28–29 Encyclopedia of the Renaissance (Grendler), 25, 32 encyclopedias, 28–29, 30, 32 English Broadside Ballad Archive (Fumerton), 305, 309 English Drama, 273, 278–79

364

Index

The English Emblem: Bibliography of Secondary Literature (Corpus Librorum Emblematum) (Daly & Silcox), 237, 241–42 The English Emblem Book Project, 237, 238, 305, 310 English Handwriting 1500–1700: An Online Course, 212, 216–17 English Handwriting, 1400–1650: An Introductory Manual (Preston & Yeandle), 213, 214–15 English Literary Autographs, 1550– 1650 (Greg), 212, 215–16 English Literary Hands from Chaucer to Dryden (Petti), 213, 215 English Literary Periodicals, 133, 135 English Literary Renaissance (ELR), 100, 102; “Recent Studies in Elizabethan Prose Fiction” (Barbour), 231, 232–33; “Recent Studies in English Translation, c. 1520–c. 1590” (Cummings), 253, 255; “Recent Studies in Margaret Cavendish, William Cavendish, Elizabeth Cavendish, and Jane Cavendish-Cheyne” (Burgess), 90, 94; “Recent Studies in the English Emblem” (Dees), 237, 241; “Recent Studies in the English Renaissance,” 85, 88–89; “Recent Studies in the 1611 ‘Authorized Version’ of the Bible” (Hornsby), 254, 255–56; “Recent Studies of Prose Fiction, 1601–1660, including Sidney’s Arcadia” (Barbour), 231, 232–33 English Manuscript Studies 1100–1700 (EMS), 100, 103–4, 186, 188 The English Novel, 1660–1700: An Annotated Bibliography (Letellier), 231, 234–35 English Poetry, Second Edition, 273, 279 The English Press, 1621–1861 (Black), 124, 125

English Prose Fiction: 1578–1700: A Critical History (Salzman), 232, 235–36 English Prose Fiction, 1600–1700: A Chronological Checklist (Mish), 231, 235 The English Renaissance 1500–1620 (Hadfield), 25, 26–27 English Renaissance Prose Fiction, 1500–1660: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism (Harner), 231, 233–34 English Renaissance Prose Fiction, 1500–1660: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism, 1976– 1983 (Harner), 231, 233–34 English Renaissance Prose Fiction, 1500–1660: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism, 1984– 1990 (Harner), 231, 233–34 English Renaissance Theatre History: A Reference Guide (Stevens), 224, 225–26 English Short Title Catalogue, 1473– 1800 (ESTC), 85, 86, 133, 137–38, 149–50, 151f, 168, 171–72, 178, 179, 254, 256 ESTC. See English Short Title Catalogue, 1473–1800 Europe, 1450–1789: Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World (Dewald), 25, 32 EuroDocs: Online Sources for European History (Hacken), 329, 330–31 Exemplaria: A Journal of Theory in Medieval and Renaissance Studies (Exemplaria), 105, 107 Exploring Literary Manuscripts (Norbrook), 186, 187–88 Explorations in Renaissance Culture (EIRC), 105, 107 Eysteinsoon, Astradur, TranslationTheory and Practice: A Historical Reader, 254, 257

Index

facsimiles, 287–91, 289f Facsimile Text Society, 287, 290 Farmer, Alan B., DEEP: Database of Early English Playbooks, 316, 317 Fehrenbach, R. J., Private Libraries in Renaissance England: A Collection and Catalogue of Tudor and Early Stuart Book-Lists (PLRE), 172, 174–75 Feltham, Mark, Alciato’s Book of Emblems: The Memorial Web Edition in Latin and English, 305, 310 Ficino (Raiswell), 324, 327 field searching, search strategy, 6–7 The First Folio of Shakespeare (Shakespeare), 287, 288, 290–91 First-Line Indexes of English Verse, 1650–1800: A Checklist (Woolley), 163, 165, 192, 201–2 First-Line Index of English Poetry, 1500–1800, in Manuscripts of the Bodleian Library, Oxford (Crum), 192, 200 First-Line Index of English Poetry 1500–1800 in Manuscripts of the James M. and Marie-Louise Osborn Collection in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library), 91, 200–201 FirstSearch, 11–13, 12t Fischer, Sandra K., Econolingua: A Glossary of Coins and Economic Language in Renaissance Drama, 258, 262 Folger Shakespeare Library, Digital Image Collection, 305, 308 Foster, Janet, British Archives: A Guide to Archive Resources in the United Kingdom, 192, 202–3 France, Peter, The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, 254–55

365

Frank, Joseph, The Beginnings of the English Newspaper 1620–1660, 124, 125 Frankforter, A. Daniel, The Shakespeare Name Dictionary, 38, 42–43 Frazier, Patrick, A Guide to the Microform Collections in the Humanities and Social Sciences Division of the Library of Congress, (Library of Congress Humanities and Social Sciences Division, Microform Reading Room), 268, 269–70 French Emblems at Glasgow, 305, 310–11 From Grub Street to Fleet Street: An Illustrated History of English Newspapers to 1899 (Clarke), 124, 125 Fumerton, Patricia, English Broadside Ballad Archive, 305, 309 fuzzy searching, 10, 42 genre, 220–50; scholarly apparatus for the study of, 221 George Herbert Journal (GHJ), 110, 112 GHJ. See George Herbert Journal Gillespie, Stuart: “A Bibliography of Ovidian Translations and Imitations in English,” Translation and Literature, 254, 256; The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, 254–55; Shakespeare’s Books: A Dictionary of Shakespeare Sources, 254, 257 Glasgow University Emblem Website, 237, 242–43 A Glossary of Archival and Records Terminology (Pearce–Moses), 186, 187 A Glossary of Tudor and Stuart Words, Especially from the Dramatists (Skeat), 258, 261 Google, searching with, 17–18 Google Books, 69, 300, 304–5

366

Index

Gray, Terry A., Mr. William Shakespeare and the Internet, 311, 312 Greg, Walter Wilson: A Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration, 224, 227–28; English Literary Autographs, 1550–1650, 212, 215–16; A List of Masques, Pageants, &c., 224, 231 Gregorian calendar. See calendars Grendler, P. F., Encyclopedia of the Renaissance, 25, 32 Gruffydd, R. Geraint, A Guide to Welsh Literature. Vol. 3, c.1530–1700, 32, 34 guides, national literatures, 32–34 Guide to Microforms in Print: Author, Title, 268–69 Guide to Microforms in Print: Subject, 268–69 Guide to Sale Catalogues, 172, 177 Guide to the Contents of the Public Record Office, 204, 207 A Guide to the Early British Periodicals Collection on Microfilm with Title, Subject, Editor, and Reel Number Indexes (Hoornstra & Puravs), 133, 136 A Guide to the Microform Collections in the Humanities and Social Sciences Division of the Library of Congress, (Library of Congress Humanities and Social Sciences Division, Microform Reading Room) (Frazier), 268, 269–70 A Guide to Welsh Literature. Vol. 3, c.1530–1700 (Gruffydd), 32, 34 A Guide to Welsh Literature. Vol. 2, c.1282–c.1550 (Johnston), 32, 34 Guthrie, Jean, Alciato’s Book of Emblems: The Memorial Web Edition in Latin and English, 305, 310 Hacken, Richard, EuroDocs: Online Sources for European History, 329, 330–31

Hadfield, Andrew, The English Renaissance 1500–1620, 25, 26–27 Hager, Alan: Encyclopedia of British Writers. Vol. 1, 16th and 17th Centuries, 25, 30; Major Tudor Authors: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, 90, 93 Halsall, Paul, Internet Modern History Sourcebook, 329, 330 Hammond, Muriel E., British Union Catalogue of Periodicals, 138, 149 Hamnet: Folger Shakespeare Library Online Catalog, 168, 172 handwriting, early modern, resources for, 212–18 Hanson, Marilee, Primary Sources: Eyewitness Accounts of People and Events in Tudor England; Letters; Journals; etc., 329, 331 Harbage, Alfred, Annals of English Drama, 975–1700: An Analytical Record of All Plays, Extant or Lost, Chronologically Arranged and Indexed by Authors, Titles, Dramatic Companies, &c., 224, 228–29 Harner, James L.: English Renaissance Prose Fiction, 1500–1660: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism, 231, 233–34; English Renaissance Prose Fiction, 1500– 1660: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism, 1976–1983, 231, 233–34; English Renaissance Prose Fiction, 1500–1660: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism, 1984–1990, 231, 233–34; Literary Research Guide: An Annotated Listing of Reference Sources in English Literary Studies, 21–23; World Shakespeare Bibliography Online, 90, 91 Harrison, Brian, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB), 36–38, 156, 159–60, 192, 193, 195

Index

Hassel, R. Chris, Jr., Shakespeare’s Religious Language: A Dictionary, 258, 262 Hattaway, Michael, A Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture, 25, 26 Herbert, George: George Herbert Journal (GHJ), 110, 112 Highfill, Philip H., Jr., A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers & Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660–1800, 224, 230 history sources, online, 329–32 HLQ. See The Huntington Library Quarterly: A Journal for the History and Interpretation of English and American Civilization Hofmann, Theodore, Index of English Literary Manuscripts, 168, 170–71, 191, 195–96 Honigmann, Ernst, Playhouse Wills, 1558–1642: An Edition of Wills by Shakespeare and His Contemporaries in the London Theatre, 224, 230 Hoornstra, Jean, A Guide to the Early British Periodicals Collection on Microfilm with Title, Subject, Editor, and Reel Number Indexes, 133, 136 Horace Howard Furness Shakespeare Library, 300, 302 Horden, John, Index of English Literary Manuscripts, 168, 170–71, 191, 195–96 Hornsby, Samuel G., Jr., “Recent Studies in the 1611 ‘Authorized Version’ of the Bible.” English Literary Renaissance, 254, 255–56 Howard, Sharon, Early Modern Resources, 295, 298–99 Howard, W. Scott, Appositions: Studies in Renaissance/Early Modern Literature and Culture, 324, 328

367

Hume, Robert D., A Register of English Theatrical Documents, 1660–1737, 192, 202 Hunter, William B., A Milton Encyclopedia, 39, 40–41 The Huntington Library Quarterly: A Journal for the History and Interpretation of English and American Civilization (HLQ), 105, 108 Hylton, Jeremy, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, 305, 307 The Impresa Index to the Collections of Paradin, Giovio, Simeoni, Pittoni, Ruscelli, Contile, Camilli, Capaccio, Bargagli, and Typotius, (Tung), 237 indexes, 72–95; general literary, 74–84. See also bibliographies An Index of Characters in Early Modern English Drama Printed Plays, 1500–1660 (Berger & Bradford & Sondergard), 224, 230–31 Index of English Literary Manuscripts (Croft & Hofmann & Horden), 168, 170–71, 191, 195–96 An Index of Icons in English Emblem Books, 1500–1700 (Diehl), 237, 240–41 Index of Manuscripts in the British Library, 204, 206 An Index of Poetry in Printed Miscellanies, 1640–1682 (Smyth), 163, 164–65 Index to Personal Names in the National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections, 1959–1984, 204, 212 Index to Subjects and Corporate Names in the National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections, 1959–1984, 204, 212 Integrated Catalogue (British Library), 64, 65

368

Index

Internet Modern History Sourcebook (Halsall), 329, 330 Internet Shakespeare Editions, 305, 306 The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks, 1641–1649 (Raymond), 124, 125 Irish Newspapers in Dublin Libraries, 1685–1754, 133, 137 Irish Newspapers Prior to 1750 in Dublin Libraries, 133, 137 Iter Bibliography, 85, 88 The Jacobean and Caroline Stage (Bentley), 224, 227 Jayne, Sears, Library Catalogues of the English Renaissance, 172, 176–77 JDJ. See John Donne Journal: Studies in the Age of Donne JEMCS. See Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies Jenkinson, Hilary, Sir, The Later Court Hands in England from the Fifteenth to the Seventeenth Century: Illustrated from the Common Paper of the Scriveners’ Company of London, the English Writing Masters, and the Public Records, 212–13, 216 JMEMSt. See Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies John Donne: An Annotated Bibliography of Modern Criticism, 1912–1967 (Roberts), 90, 91–92 John Donne: An Annotated Bibliography of Modern Criticism, 1968–1978 (Roberts), 90, 91–92 John Donne: An Annotated Bibliography of Modern Criticism, 1979–1995 (Roberts), 90, 91–92 John Donne Journal: Studies in the Age of Donne (JDJ), 110, 112 John Dryden: A Bibliography of Early Editions and of Drydeniana (Macdonald), 90, 92–93

John Milton Reading Room (Luxon), 311, 313 John Milton: The Milton-L Home Page (Creamer), 311, 312–13 Johnston, Dafydd, A Guide to Welsh Literature. Vol. 2., c.1282–c.1550, 32, 34 Jokinen, Anniina, Luminarium: Anthology of English Literature, 300, 303–4 Jones, Miriam, Mrs. Spectator’s Coffeehouse, 324, 329 Jonson, Ben: A Ben Jonson Companion (Brock), 38, 40; Ben Jonson Journal: Literary Contexts in the Age of Elizabeth, James, and Charles (BJJ), 110, 112; The Jonson Allusion Book: A Collection of Allusions to Ben Jonson from 1597–1700 (Bradley), 161, 162 The Jonson Allusion Book: A Collection of Allusions to Ben Jonson from 1597–1700 (Bradley), 161, 162 Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies (JEMCS), 105, 109 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (JMEMSt), 105, 107–8 journals: general literature, 116–17; scholarly, 96–116. See also periodicals JSTOR: The Scholarly Journal Archive, 74, 83–84 Julian calendar. See calendars Kavanagh, Kathy L., Accessing English Literary Periodicals: A Guide to the Microfilm Collection with Title, Subject, Editor, and Reel Number Indexes, 133, 135–36 Kawachi, Yoshiko, Calendar of English Renaissance Drama, 1558–1642, 224, 229 Kaye, F. B., A Census of British Newspapers and Periodicals, 1620– 1800, 138, 147–48

Index

Kennedy-Skipton, Laetitia, Elizabethan Handwriting, 1500–1650: A Manual, 212, 213–14 keywords, search strategy: brainstorming, 2–3; in field searching, 7; versus subject searching, 13–15 Kinnamon, Noel J., A Sidney Chronology, 1554–1654, 38, 39–40 Kinney, Arthur F., The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1500–1600, 25, 28 Lancashire, Ian: Dramatic Texts and Records of Britain: A Chronological Topography to 1558, 224, 230; Lexicons of Early Modern English (LEME), 258, 261; Representative Poetry Online, 300, 301 Langhans, Edward A.: A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers & Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660–1800, 224, 230; Restoration Promptbooks, 224, 230 Lanyer, Aemilia: Aemilia Lanyer, 1569– 1645 (McBride), 311, 314 The Later Court Hands in England from the Fifteenth to the Seventeenth Century: Illustrated from the Common Paper of the Scriveners’ Company of London, the English Writing Masters, and the Public Records (Jenkinson), 212–13, 216 LCHS. See Library of Congress Subject Headings Leary, Patrick, Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, & Publishing (SHARP), 324, 327 Leedham-Green, Elisabeth: Libri Pertinentes series. Medieval and Renaissance Texts & Studies, 172, 176; Private Libraries in Renaissance England: A Collection and Catalogue of Tudor and Early

369

Stuart Book–Lists (PLRE), 172, 174–75 Leeds Verse Database (BCMSV), 316, 321 LEME. See Lexicons of Early Modern English Lesser, Zachary, DEEP: Database of Early English Playbooks, 316, 317 Letellier, Robert, Ignatius, The English Novel, 1660–1700: An Annotated Bibliography, 231, 234–35 Letterwriting in Renaissance England (Stewart & Wolfe), 213, 215 lexicons, 251–52, 257–64 Lexicons of Early Modern English (LEME) (Lancashire), 258, 261 libraries, early modern, 172–78 library catalogs, 45–71; national, 64–66; union, 58–64, 61f Library Catalogues of the English Renaissance (Jayne), 172, 176–77 library digital projects: American Memory (Library of Congress), 283, 286–87; Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (Yale University), 283, 287; Bodleian Library (Oxford University), 283, 285–86; British Library, 284–85; Cambridge University Library, 284, 287; European Digital Library, 284, 287; Folger Shakespeare Library, 284, 287; Harry Ransom Center (University of Texas at Austin), 284, 287; Huntington Library, 284, 287; National Library of Ireland, 284, 287; National Library of Scotland, 284, 285; National Library of Wales, 284, 286 Library of Congress: Bibliographies and Guides, (Library of Congress Humanities and Social Sciences Division, Microform Reading Room), 268, 269; A Guide to the Microform Collections in the Humanities and Social Sciences

370

Index

Division of the Library of Congress, (Library of Congress Humanities and Social Sciences Division, Microform Reading Room) (Frazier), 268, 269–70; Library of Congress Online Catalog, 64, 66; Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCHS), 13–15, 14f, 15f, 179–80; National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections (NUCMC), 204, 211–12 Library of Congress Online Catalog, 64, 66 Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCHS), 13–15, 14f, 15f, 179–80 Libri Pertinentes series. Medieval and Renaissance Texts & Studies (Leedham-Green), 172, 176 limiting, search strategy, 16 Linton, David, The Newspaper Press in Britain: An Annotated Bibliography, 124, 125 A List of Masques, Pageants, &c. (Greg), 224, 231 Literary Manuscripts: 17th and 18th Century Poetry from the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds, 162, 167, 213, 218, 274, 280–81 literary reference resources, general, 20–44 Literary Research Guide: An Annotated Listing of Reference Sources in English Literary Studies (Harner), 21–23 Literary Resources-Renaissance (Lynch), 295, 296 Literature Compass (LiteratureC), 100, 104–5 Literature Criticism from 1400–1800, 156, 158–59 “Literature of the Renaissance in [1917– 1968]: A Bibliography” (Studies in Philology), 85, 89 Liu, Alan, Voice of the Shuttle: Literature (In English) (VOS), 295, 296

London Spy Compleat, In Eighteen– Parts, 126, 132–33 The London Stage, 1660–1800: A Calendar of Plays, Entertainments & Afterpieces Together with Casts, Box-Receipts and Contemporary Comment, 224, 229–30 The Longman Handbook of Early Modern Europe, 1453–1763 (Cook & Broadhead), 25, 32 Luminarium: Anthology of English Literature (Jokinen), 300, 303–4 Luxon, Thomas, John Milton Reading Room, 311, 313 Lynch, Jack: Eighteenth Century Resources, 295, 296–97; Literary Resources—Renaissance, 295, 296 Macdonald, Hugh, John Dryden: A Bibliography of Early Editions and of Drydeniana, 90, 92–93 Machine Readable Cataloging. See MARC records Magazines for Libraries, 98–99 The Mainstream Companion to Scottish Literature (Royle), 32, 33–34 Major Tudor Authors: A BioBibliographical Critical Sourcebook (Hager), 90, 93 Mansell. See National Union Catalog, Pre-1956 Imprints manuscripts, 183–219; locating, 191– 203; websites for locating, 204–12 Manuscripts Catalogue (British Library), 64, 65–66, 204, 205–6 MARC records, 49; structure of, 3–6, 4f, 5f Marcuse, Michael J., A Reference Guide for English Studies, 21, 23–24 marginalia, 168–172 Matthew, Henry C. G., Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB), 36–38, 156, 159–60, 192, 193, 195

Index

May, Steven W., Elizabethan Poetry: A Bibliography and First–Line Index of English Verse, 1559–1603, 192, 199–200, 243, 247–48 McBride, Kari Boyd, Aemilia Lanyer, 1569–1645, 311, 314 McRae, Andrew, Early Stuart Libels: An Edition of Poetry from Manuscript Sources, 305, 307–8 Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England: An Annual Gathering of Research, Criticism, and Reviews (MRDE), 100, 103 Mercurius Politicus: A Blog about Early Modern Books, History and Culture (Poyntz), 324, 329 Microform Research Collections (British Library), 268, 270 Microform Research Collections: A Guide (Dodson), 268, 269 microforms collections, 133–38, 265–92 Milhaus, Judith, A Register of English Theatrical Documents, 1660–1737, 192, 202 Miller, William G., Subject Collections: A Guide to Special Book Collections and Subject Emphases as Reported by University, College, Public, and Special Libraries and Museums in the United States and Canada, 191, 203 Milton, John: John Milton Reading Room (Luxon), 311, 313; John Milton: The Milton-L Home Page (Creamer), 311, 312–13; A Milton Encyclopedia (Hunter), 39, 40–41; Milton Quarterly (MiltonQ), 110, 112–13; Milton Studies (MiltonS), 111, 113 A Milton Encyclopedia (Hunter), 39, 40–41 Milton Quarterly (MiltonQ), 110, 112–13 Milton Studies (MiltonS), 111, 113 miscellanies, 162–68

371

Mish, Charles C., English Prose Fiction, 1600–1700: A Chronological Checklist, 231, 235 MLA Directory of Periodicals, 98 MLAIB. See MLA International Bibliography of Books and Articles on the Modern Languages and Literatures MLA International Bibliography of Books and Articles on the Modern Languages and Literatures (MLAIB), 73, 74–78, 79–80, 77f, 78f; compared with ABELL, 79–80 The Modern Critical Reception of the English Emblem (Corpus Librorum Emblematum) (Daly & Silcox), 237, 242 Modern English Collection (Electronic Text Center), 300, 302–3 modifying, search strategy, 16 More, Thomas: Moreana: Bulletin Thomas More (Moreana), 111, 113; Thomas More Studies, 111, 113 Moreana: Bulletin Thomas More (Moreana), 111, 113 MRDE. See Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England: An Annual Gathering of Research, Criticism, and Reviews Mrs. Spectator’s Coffeehouse (Jones), 324, 329 Mr. William Shakespeare and the Internet (Gray) 311, 312 Muldrow, George M., Dictionary of Literary Rhetorical Conventions of the English Renaissance, 223 Munby, A. N. L., British Book Sale Catalogues, 1676–1800: A Union List, 173, 177 Music in Shakespeare: A Dictionary (Wilson & Calore), 258, 262 NAS. See National Archives of Scotland The National Archives, 204, 206–7 National Archives of Ireland, 204, 211

372

Index

National Archives of Scotland (NAS), 204, 210 National Archives. Palaeography: reading old handwriting, 1500–1800: A practical online tutorial, 213, 217 National Portrait Gallery, 324, 331–32 National Register of Archives (NRA), 204, 208–9 National Register of Archives for Scotland (NRAS), 204, 210 National Union Catalog, Pre-1956 Imprints (NUC) (Mansell), 58, 63–64 National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections (NUCMC), 204, 211–12 NCBEL. See The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature Nelson, Carolyn, British Newspapers and Periodicals, 1641–1700: A Short–Title Catalogue of Serials Printed in England, Scotland, Ireland, and British America: With a Checklist of Serials Printed 1701– March 1702 and Chronological, Geographical, Foreign Language, Subject, Publisher, and Editor Indexes 1641–1702, 138, 142–45 nesting, search strategy, 10–11 Nestvold, Ruth, Aphra Behn Page, 311, 313–14 The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (NCBEL). Vols. 1 & 2 (Watson), 74, 80–82, 138, 145– 47, 163, 165, 178–79, 254, 256 The New Companion to the Literature of Wales (Stephens), 32, 34 The Newspaper Press in Britain: An Annotated Bibliography (Linton & Boston), 124, 125 The News Revolution in England: Cultural Dynamics of Daily Information (Sommerville), 124, 125 new style. See calendars Nickson, Margaret A. E., The British Library: Guide to the Catalogues

and Indexes of the Department of Manuscripts, 204, 206 Norbrook, David, Exploring Literary Manuscripts, 186, 187–88 Norton Topics Online, 316, 323–24 “not” (Boolean operator), 7–9, 8f NRA. See National Register of Archives NRAS. See National Register of Archives for Scotland NUC. See National Union Catalog, Pre–1956 Imprints NUCMC. See National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections objectivity, of Web resources, 295 O’Dell, Sterg, A Chronological List of Prose Fiction in English Printed in England and Other Countries, 1475– 1640, 231, 235 ODNB. See Oxford Dictionary of National Biography O’Donnell, Mary Ann, Aphra Behn: An Annotated Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources, 156, 160 OED. See The Oxford English Dictionary old style. See calendars Onions, C. T., A Shakespeare Glossary, 258, 261–62 On–line Provenance Resources, 173, 177–78 online searching, basics of, 1–19 OpenEmblem Portal, 237, 238, 305, 311 Open Source Shakespeare: Concordance of Shakespeare’s Complete Works, 316, 323 “or” (Boolean operator), 7–9, 8f Orinda: The Literary Manuscripts of Katherine Philips (1631–1664), 274, 283 Osgood, Charles Grosvenor, A Concordance to the Poems of Edmund Spenser, 39, 41 Ostovich, Helen, “Translations/ Alterations.” Reading Early Modern

Index

Women: An Anthology of Texts in Manuscripts and Print, 1550–1700, 254, 257 The Oxford Chronology of English Literature (Cox), 34, 35–36 The Oxford Companion to English Literature (Drabble), 32, 33 The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature (Welch), 32, 34 The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare (Dobson & Wells), 38, 43 Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) (Matthew & Harrison), 36–38, 156, 159–60, 192, 193, 195 The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) (Simpson & Weiner), 258, 259–60 The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English (France & Gillespie), 254–55 Oxfordian: The Annual Journal of the Shakespeare Oxford Society, 111, 115 Oxford Text Archive, 300–301 Oxley, Gord, Records of Early English Drama (REED), 316, 317–18 Pacheco, Anita, A Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing, 25, 31 Palaeography: reading old handwriting, 1500–1800: A practical online tutorial (National Archives), 213, 217 Paleographical Commons, 213, 218 PAO. See Periodicals Archive Online Parergon: Journal of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies (ParergonJ), 106, 108 Parfitt, George, A Biographical Dictionary of English Women Writers: 1580–1720, 25, 30–31 Partridge, Eric, Shakespeare’s Bawdy: A Literary and Psychological Essay and a Comprehensive Glossary, 258, 262

373

Pearce-Moses, Richard, A Glossary of Archival and Records Terminology, 186, 187 Pearson, David, Provenance Research in Book History: A Handbook, 173, 174 Perdita Manuscripts, 162, 167, 274, 281–82 periodicals: research resources for, 98–99; seventeenth-century, 118–52; seventeenth-century, identifying, 138–50. See also journals Periodicals Archive Online (PAO), 74, 84 Periodicals Index Online (PIO), 74, 84 Petti, Anthony G., English Literary Hands from Chaucer to Dryden, 213, 215 Philosophical Transactions, 126, 132 phrase searching, search strategy, 11–13, 12t PIO. See Periodicals Index Online Playhouse Wills, 1558–1642: An Edition of Wills by Shakespeare and His Contemporaries in the London Theatre (Honigmann & Brock), 224, 230 PLRE. See Private Libraries in Renaissance England: A Collection and Catalogue of Tudor and Early Stuart Book–Lists PLRE.Folger: Private Libraries in Renaissance England, 173, 175–76 poetry, resources on, 243–48 Pollard, A. W., A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475–1640, 85–86 Postles, David, Early–Modern Paleography, 213, 217–18 Poyntz, Nick, Mercurius Politicus: A Blog about Early Modern Books, History and Culture, 324, 329

374

Index

Preston, Jean F., English Handwriting, 1400–1650: An Introductory Manual, 213, 214–15 Primary Source Media, 268, 272 Primary Sources: Eyewitness Accounts of People and Events in Tudor England; Letters; Journals; etc. (Hanson), 329, 331 Private Libraries in Renaissance England: A Collection and Catalogue of Tudor and Early Stuart Book-Lists (PLRE) (Fehrenbach & Leedham–Green), 172, 174–75 The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674–1913, 126, 132–33 Project Gutenberg, 300, 304 Project Muse, 74, 84 Pronouncing Shakespeare’s Words: A Guide from A to Zounds (Coye), 258, 262 prose fiction, resources on, 231–37 Provenance Research in Book History: A Handbook (Pearson), 173, 174 proximity operators, search strategy, 11–13, 12t Puravs, Grace: Accessing English Literary Periodicals: A Guide to the Microfilm Collection with Title, Subject, Editor, and Reel Number Indexes, 133, 135–36; A Guide to the Early British Periodicals Collection on Microfilm with Title, Subject, Editor, and Reel Number Indexes, 133, 136 Quidditas, 106, 108 Radcliffe, David Hill, Spenser and the Tradition: English Poetry 1579– 1830, 311, 315 Raiswell, Richard, Ficino, 324, 327 Raymond, Joad, The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks, 1641–1649, 124, 125 Reading Early Modern Women: An Anthology of Texts in Manuscripts

and Print, 1550–1700, “Translations/ Alterations” (Ostovich & Sauer) 254, 257 “Recent Studies in Elizabethan Prose Fiction” (Barbour) (English Literary Renaissance), 231, 232–33 “Recent Studies in English Translation, c. 1520–c. 1590” (Cummings) (English Literary Renaissance), 253, 255 “Recent Studies in Margaret Cavendish, William Cavendish, Elizabeth Cavendish, and Jane Cavendish– Cheyne” (Burgess) (English Literary Renaissance), 90, 94 “Recent Studies in the English Emblem” (Dees) (English Literary Renaissance), 237, 241 “Recent Studies in the English Renaissance” (English Literary Renaissance), 85, 88–89 “Recent Studies in the English Renaissance” (SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900), 85, 89 “Recent Studies in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century” (SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900), 85, 89 “Recent Studies in the 1611 ‘Authorized Version’ of the Bible” (Hornsby) (English Literary Renaissance), 254, 255–56 “Recent Studies in Tudor and Stuart Drama” (SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900), 85, 89 “Recent Studies of Prose Fiction, 1603–1660, including Sidney’s Arcadia” (Barbour) (English Literary Renaissance), 231, 232–33 reception, contemporary, 154–82 Records of Early English Drama (REED), 224, 230, 316, 317–18 Records of Early English Drama: Patrons and Performances Web Site, 316, 318–19

Index

RECTR. See Restoration and Eighteenth Century Theatre Research Redgrave, G. R., A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475–1640, 85–86 REED. See Records of Early English Drama A Reference Guide for English Studies (Marcuse), 21, 23–24 reference tools, Web resources, 316–24 Reference Works in British and American Literature (Bracken), 21, 24–25 Reformation, xi A Register of English Theatrical Documents, 1660–1737 (Milhaus & Hume), 192, 202 relevancy searching, search strategy, 15–16 Renaissance: bibliographies on, 84–90; Definitions of, ix–xii; drama/theater, resources on, 224–31; emblem books, resources on, 237–243; encyclopedias, dictionaries, and companions to, 25–32, 223; general literature journals on, 116–17; journals on, 99–110; library digital projects on, 283–87; microforms and digital collections on, 273–83; poetry, resources on, 243–48; prose fiction, resources on, 231–37; studies on, 105–10 Renaissance and Reformation, 1500– 1620: A Biographical Dictionary (Carney), 25, 29–30 Renaissance and Reformation/ Renaissance et Réforme (Ren&R), 106, 109 Renaissance Commonplace Books from the British Library, London, 162, 166–67, 274, 279 Renaissance Commonplace Books from the British Library, London: A Listing and Guide to the Microfilm Collection (Sherman) 163, 166–67

375

Renaissance Commonplace Books from the Huntington Library, 162, 166, 274, 279 Renaissance Commonplace Books from the Sloane Collection at the British Library, 163, 166–67, 274, 279–80 Renaissance Commonplace Books from the Sloane Collection at the British Library (Sheppard), 163, 166–67 Renaissance Drama (RenD), 100, 101 Renaissance Materials, 300, 303 Renaissance Poets: Critical Heritage Set (Southam), 156, 158 Renaissance Quarterly (RenQ), 106 Renaissance Society of America, 324, 325 Renaissance Studies: Journal of the Society for Renaissance Studies (RENST), 106, 107 Renaissance Women Online, 254, 257 Ren&R. See Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme Renascence Editions (Bear), 300, 302 RenD. See Renaissance Drama RenQ. See Renaissance Quarterly RENST. See Renaissance Studies: Journal of the Society for Renaissance Studies Repositories of Primary Sources (Abraham), 204, 212 Representative Poetry Online (Lancashire), 300, 301 research guides, 21–25 Restoration and Eighteenth Century Theatre Research (RECTR), 100, 101–2 The Restoration and the Augustans: Critical Heritage Set (Southam), 156, 158 Restoration Promptbooks (Langhans), 224, 230 Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660–1700 (Restoration), 100, 102–3 Restoration Theatre Song Archive (Butler), 316, 319

376

Index

Ringler, William A., Jr., 243–246; Bibliography and Index of English Verse in Manuscript, 1501–1558, 192, 197–99, 243, 247; Bibliography and Index of English Verse Printed 1476–1558, 243, 246, 254, 257; Elizabethan Poetry: A Bibliography and First–Line Index of English Verse, 1559–1603, 192, 199–200, 243, 247–48 Roberts, John Richard: John Donne: An Annotated Bibliography of Modern Criticism, 1912–1967, 90, 91–92; John Donne: An Annotated Bibliography of Modern Criticism, 1968–1978, 90, 91–92; John Donne: An Annotated Bibliography of Modern Criticism, 1979–1995, 90, 91–92 The Royal Historical Society Bibliography, 316, 320–21 Royle, Trevor, The Mainstream Companion to Scottish Literature, 32, 33–34 Ruoff, James E., Crowell’s Handbook of Elizabethan and Stuart Literature, 25, 29 Rutter, Carol Chillington, Documents of the Rose Playhouse, 224, 230 SAA. See Shakespeare Association of America Saenger, Erwin, British Union Catalogue of Periodicals, 138, 149 Salzman, Paul, English Prose Fiction: 1578–1700: A Critical History, 232, 235–36 Sauer, Elizabeth, “Translations/ Alterations.” Reading Early Modern Women: An Anthology of Texts in Manuscripts and Print, 1550–1700, 254, 257 SBTI. See Scottish Book Trade Index SCAN. See Scottish Archive Network SCen. See The Seventeenth Century

Schäfer, Jürgen, Early Modern English Lexicography, 258, 260–61 Schlueter, June, An Encyclopedia of British Women Writers, 25, 31 Schlueter, Paul, An Encyclopedia of British Women Writers, 25, 31 Schmidt, Alexander, Shakespeare Lexicon: A Complete Dictionary of all the English Words, Phrases, and Constructions in the Works of the Poet, 258, 262 scholarly apparatus for the study of genre, 221 scholarly journals, 96–117 Schwyzer, Philip, A Cuppe of Newes, 324, 328 SCJ. See Sixteenth Century Journal: The Journal of Early Modern Studies SCN. See Seventeenth Century News scope, of Web resources, 295 Scottish Archive Network (SCAN), 204, 210 Scottish Book Trade Index (SBTI), 316, 322–23 Scottish Handwriting.com, 213, 217 Scriptorium: Medieval and Early Modern Manuscripts Online, 163, 167 search engines, versus databases, 16–17, 16t search strategies, creating, 2–3, 6–19 Seccombe, Matthew, British Newspapers and Periodicals, 1641– 1700: A Short–Title Catalogue of Serials Printed in England, Scotland, Ireland, and British America: With a Checklist of Serials Printed 1701– March 1702 and Chronological, Geographical, Foreign Language, Subject, Publisher, and Editor Indexes 1641–1702, 138, 142–45 SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, 100, 101; “Recent Studies in the English Renaissance,” 85, 89; “Recent Studies in the

Index

Restoration and Eighteenth Century,” 85, 89; “Recent Studies in Tudor and Stuart Drama,” 85, 89 seventeenth century: bibliographies and recent studies on, 124–26; digital collections, periodicals, 126–33; microfilm collections, 133–38; periodicals from, 118–52; periodicals from, identifying, 138–50 17th and 18th Century Burney Collection Newspapers, 126, 129–30 The Seventeenth Century (SCen), 100, 103 Seventeenth Century News (SCN), 100–101 ShakB. See Shakespeare Bulletin: A Journal of Performance Criticism and Scholarship Shakespeare, 111, 114 Shakespeare, William: Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation (BorrowersL), 110, 115; The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Hylton), 305, 307; Editions and Adaptations of Shakespeare, 273, 283; The First Folio of Shakespeare, 287, 288, 290–91; Folger Shakespeare Library, Digital Image Collection, 305, 308; Hamnet: Folger Shakespeare Library Online Catalog, 168, 172; Horace Howard Furness Shakespeare Library, 300, 302; Internet Shakespeare Editions, 305, 306; Mr. William Shakespeare and the Internet (Gray) 311, 312; Music in Shakespeare: A Dictionary (Wilson & Calore), 258, 262; Open Source Shakespeare: Concordance of Shakespeare’s Complete Works, 316, 323; The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare (Dobson & Wells), 38, 43; Oxfordian: The Annual Journal of the Shakespeare Oxford Society, 111, 115; Pronouncing

377

Shakespeare’s Words: A Guide from A to Zounds (Coye), 258, 262; Shakespeare, 111, 114; Shakespearean Criticism, 156, 159; Shakespeare Association of America (SAA), 324, 326; Shakespeare Bulletin: A Journal of Performance Criticism and Scholarship (ShakB), 111, 115; A Shakespeare Glossary (Onions), 258, 261–62; Shakespeare in Southern Africa: Journal of the Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa (ShSA), 111, 115; Shakespeare Jahrbuch (ShJB), 111, 115; Shakespeare Lexicon: A Complete Dictionary of all the English Words, Phrases, and Constructions in the Works of the Poet (Schmidt), 258, 262; The Shakespeare Name Dictionary (Davis & Frankforter), 38, 42–43; Shakespeare Newsletter (ShN), 111, 115; Shakespeare Quarterly (SQ), 111, 114; Shakespeare’s Bawdy: A Literary and Psychological Essay and a Comprehensive Glossary (Partridge), 258, 262; Shakespeare’s Books: A Dictionary of Shakespeare Sources (Gillespie), 254, 257; Shakespeare’s Religious Language: A Dictionary (Hassel), 258, 262; Shakespeare Studies (ShakS), 111, 114; Shakespeare Survey: An Annual Survey of Shakespeare Studies and Production (ShS), 111, 114–15; Shakespeare’s Words: A Glossary and Language Companion (Crystal & Crystal), 258, 262; The Shakspere Allusion–book: A Collection of Allusions to Shakspere from 1591– 1700, 161–62; Treasures in Full: Shakespeare in Quarto, 305, 306–7; World Shakespeare Bibliography Online (Harner), 90, 91 Shakespearean Criticism, 156, 159

378

Index

Shakespeare Association of America (SAA), 324, 326 Shakespeare Bulletin: A Journal of Performance Criticism and Scholarship (ShakB), 111, 115 A Shakespeare Glossary (Onions), 258, 261–62 Shakespeare in Southern Africa: Journal of the Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa (ShSA), 111, 115 Shakespeare Jahrbuch (ShJB), 111, 115 Shakespeare Lexicon: A Complete Dictionary of all the English Words, Phrases, and Constructions in the Works of the Poet (Schmidt), 258, 262 The Shakespeare Name Dictionary (Davis & Frankforter), 38, 42–43 Shakespeare Newsletter (ShN), 111, 115 Shakespeare Quarterly (SQ), 111, 114 Shakespeare’s Bawdy: A Literary and Psychological Essay and a Comprehensive Glossary (Partridge), 258, 262 Shakespeare’s Books: A Dictionary of Shakespeare Sources (Gillespie), 254, 257 Shakespeare’s Religious Language: A Dictionary (Hassel), 258, 262 Shakespeare Studies (ShakS), 111, 114 Shakespeare Survey: An Annual Survey of Shakespeare Studies and Production (ShS), 111, 114–15 Shakespeare’s Words: A Glossary and Language Companion (Crystal & Crystal), 258, 262 ShakS. See Shakespeare Studies The Shakspere Allusion–book: A Collection of Allusions to Shakspere from 1591–1700, 161–62 SHARP. See Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, & Publishing Shepherd, Simon, A Biographical Dictionary of English Women Writers: 1580–1720, 25, 30–31

Sheppard, Jane, Renaissance Commonplace Books from the Sloane Collection at the British Library, 163, 166–67 Sheppard, Julia, British Archives: A Guide to Archive Resources in the United Kingdom, 192, 202–3 Sherman, William H., Renaissance Commonplace Books from the British Library, London: A Listing and Guide to the Microfilm Collection, 163, 166–67 ShJB. See Shakespeare Jahrbuch ShN. See Shakespeare Newsletter A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475–1640 (Pollard & Redgrave), 85–86 Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and British America, and of English Books Printed in Other Countries, 1641–1700 (Wing), 85–86 A Short Title Catalogue of the Emblem Books and Related Works in the Stirling Maxwell Collection of Glasgow University Library (1499– 1917), (Black), 237, 243 ShS. See Shakespeare Survey: An Annual Survey of Shakespeare Studies and Production ShSA. See Shakespeare in Southern Africa: Journal of the Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa Sidney, Philip: A Sidney Chronology, 1554–1654 (Brennan & Kinnamon), 38, 39–40 Sidney Journal (SiJ), 111, 115–16; Sir Philip Sidney World Bibliography (Stump), 316, 319–20 A Sidney Chronology, 1554–1654 (Brennan & Kinnamon), 38, 39–40 Sidney Journal (SiJ), 111, 115–16 SiJ. See Sidney Journal

Index

Silcox, Mary V.: The English Emblem: Bibliography of Secondary Literature (Corpus Librorum Emblematum), 237, 241–42; The Modern Critical Reception of the English Emblem (Corpus Librorum Emblematum), 237, 242 Simpson, J. A., The Oxford English Dictionary (OED), 258, 259–60 Sir Philip Sidney World Bibliography (Stump), 316, 319–20 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era, 106, 110 Sixteenth Century Journal: The Journal of Early Modern Studies (SCJ), 106, 110 Sixteenth Century Society & Conference, 324, 325–26 Skeat, Walter W., A Glossary of Tudor and Stuart Words, Especially from the Dramatists, 258, 261 Smith, Hilda L., Women and the Literature of the Seventeenth Century: An Annotated Bibliography Based on Wing’s Short-Title Catalogue, 85, 86–88 Smith, Vicki, Accessing English Literary Periodicals: A Guide to the Microfilm Collection with Title, Subject, Editor, and Reel Number Indexes, 133, 135–36 Smyth, Adam, An Index of Poetry in Printed Miscellanies, 1640–1682, 163, 164–65 Society for Emblem Studies, 237 Society for Renaissance Studies, 324, 325 Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, & Publishing (SHARP) (Leary), 324, 327 Society for the Study of Early Modern Women (SSEMW), 324, 325 Sommerville, C. John, The News Revolution in England: Cultural

379

Dynamics of Daily Information, 124, 125 Sondergard, Sidney L., An Index of Characters in Early Modern English Drama Printed Plays, 1500–1660, 224, 230–31 Southam, B. C.: Renaissance Poets: Critical Heritage Set, 156, 158; The Restoration and the Augustans: Critical Heritage Set, 156, 158 Spenser, Edmund: A Concordance to the Poems of Edmund Spenser (Osgood), 39, 41; Edmund Spenser Home Page (Zurcher), 311, 314–15; Spenser and the Tradition: English Poetry 1579– 1830 (Radcliffe), 311, 315; Spenser Review, 111, 116; Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual (SSt), 111, 116 Spenser and the Tradition: English Poetry 1579–1830 (Radcliffe), 311, 315 Spenser Review, 111, 116 Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual (SSt), 111, 116 SQ. See Shakespeare Quarterly SSEMW. See Society for the Study of Early Modern Women SSt. See Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual Steggle, Matthew, Early Modern Literary Studies Electronic Texts, 300, 304 Stephens, Meic, The New Companion to the Literature of Wales, 32, 34 Stevens, David, English Renaissance Theatre History: A Reference Guide, 224, 225–26 Stewart, Alan, Letterwriting in Renaissance England, 213, 215 Stewart, James, D., British Union Catalogue of Periodicals, 138, 149 The Stoughton Manuscript: A Manuscript Miscellany of Poems by Henry King and his Circle, circa 1636, 288, 291

380

Index

Studies in Philology, “Literature of the Renaissance in [1917–1968]: A Bibliography,” 85, 89 Studies of British Newspapers and Periodicals from Their Beginning to 1800: A Bibliography (Weed & Bond), 124, 125 Stump, Donald, Sir Philip Sidney World Bibliography, 316, 319–20 Subject Collections: A Guide to Special Book Collections and Subject Emphases as Reported by University, College, Public, and Special Libraries and Museums in the United States and Canada (Ash & Miller), 91, 203 subject searches, search strategy, 13–15, 14f, 15f; in library catalogs, 55–57, 56f Sullivan, Alvin, British Literary Magazines. Vol. 1, The Augustan Age and the Age of Johnston, 1698– 1788, 138, 148 Tannenbaum, Dorothy R., Elizabethan Bibliographies, 90, 93 Tannenbaum, Samuel A., Elizabethan Bibliographies, 90, 93 Textual Studies, 1500–1800 (Curran & Trotter), 324, 328 Thomas More Studies, 111, 113 Thomason Tracts, 133, 134–35, 274, 275 The Thomason Tracts, 1640–1661: An Index to the Microfilm Edition of the Thomason Collection of the British Library, 133, 135, 274, 276 Thomson, Leslie, A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama, 1580– 1642, 224, 230 Three Centuries of English and American Plays, A Checklist: England 1500–1800; United States 1714–1830 (Berquist), 273, 278 Three Centuries of English and American Plays, 1500–1830, 274, 277–78

Three Centuries of English and American Plays, 1500–1830: Microfiche Collection Checklist (Berquist), 273, 278 title searches, in library catalogs, 52–54, 53f, 54f Titus, Edna Brown, Union List of Serials in Libraries of the United States and Canada, 138, 149 translations, 251–57, 262–64 “Translations/Alterations” (Ostovich & Sauer) (Reading Early Modern Women: An Anthology of Texts in Manuscripts and Print, 1550–1700), 254, 257 Treasures in Full: Shakespeare in Quarto, 305, 306–7 Trotter, Megan, Textual Studies, 1500– 1800, 324, 328 truncation, search strategy, 9–10 Tung, Mason, The Impresa Index to the Collections of Paradin, Giovio, Simeoni, Pittoni, Ruscelli, Contile, Camilli, Capaccio, Bargagli, and Typotius, 237 Twentieth–Century Criticism of English Masques, Pageants, and Entertainments: 1558–1642 (Bergeron), 224, 231 Ulrich’s Periodicals Directory, 98–99 Union List of Serials in Libraries of the United States and Canada (Titus), 138, 149 Voice of the Shuttle: Literature (In English) (VOS) (Liu), 295, 296 VOS. See Voice of the Shuttle: Literature (In English) Watson, George, The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (NCBEL). Vols. 1 & 2, 74, 80–82, 138, 145–47, 163, 165, 178–79, 254, 256

Index

Web resources, 293–332; evaluation of, 294–295; scholarly gateways as, 295–99 Weed, Katherine Kirtley, Studies of British Newspapers and Periodicals from Their Beginning to 1800: A Bibliography, 124, 125 Weiner, E. S. C., The Oxford English Dictionary (OED), 258, 259–60 Weissbort, Daniel, Translation—Theory and Practice: A Historical Reader, 254, 257 Welch, Robert, The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature, 32, 34 Wells, Stanley, The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare, 38, 43 Werner, Sarah, Wynken de Worde: Books, Early Modern Culture, Post– Modern Readings, 324, 328–29 White, D. Jerry, Early English Drama, Everyman to 1580: A Reference Guide, 225, 226 wildcards, search strategy, 9–10 Wilson, Christopher, R., Music in Shakespeare: A Dictionary, 258, 262 Wing, Donald, Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and British America, and of English Books Printed in Other Countries, 1641–1700, 85–86 Wolfe, Heather, Letterwriting in Renaissance England, 213, 215

381

Women and the Literature of the Seventeenth Century: An Annotated Bibliography Based on Wing’s ShortTitle Catalogue (Smith & Cardinale), 85, 86–88 Woolley, James, First-Line Indexes of English Verse, 1650–1800: A Checklist, 163, 165, 192, 201–2 The Word on the Street, 305, 309–10 WorldCat, 11–13, 12t, 59–62, 61f, 138, 149–50, 150f, 192–94, 194f, 268, 271–72, 271f, 272f WorldCat.org, 59, 62 World Shakespeare Bibliography Online (Harner), 90, 91 Wynken de Worde: Books, Early Modern Culture, Post-Modern Readings (Werner), 324, 328–29 Yeandle, Laetitia, English Handwriting, 1400–1650: An Introductory Manual, 213, 214–15 Year’s Work in English Studies (YWES), 74, 82 Young, Abigail Ann, Records of Early English Drama (REED), 316, 317–18 YWES. See Year’s Work in English Studies Zurcher, Andrew, Edmund Spenser Home Page, 311, 314–15

About the Authors

Jennifer Bowers is an assistant professor and the social sciences reference librarian at the University of Denver Penrose Library. Peggy Keeran is a professor and the arts and humanities reference librarian at the University of Denver Penrose Library. Bowers and Keeran are coeditors of the Scarecrow Press series Literary Research: Strategies and Sources and authors of the first volume of the series, Literary Research and the British Romantic Era: Strategies and Sources.

383