ENL 240 British Literary Studies I

A user-friendly portal to the British Library's manuscript collections. Includes articles about notable works and discussions of genres. ENL 240 students will find the Discovering Literature: Shakespeare and the Renaissance and Discovering Literature: Medieval helpful.

"Use this website to view digitised copies of manuscripts and archives in the British Library’s collections, with descriptions of their contents."

"There are more than 1,400 manuscripts and over 1,500 charters, rolls, and seals from the Cotton collection at the British Library. These items range in date from the 4th century to the 1600s and have their origin in western Europe and beyond."

The British Library Manuscripts Online (1120-1900) provides "reproductions of manuscripts, letters, and diaries, handwritten drafts of poems, plays, novels, and other literary works, and similar materials. Catalog records can be searched, but the manuscripts themselves are not full-text searchable."

To use this resource, you must register for an e-card and create a PIN.

"Early English Books Online (EEBO) contains digital facsimile page images of virtually every work printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and British North America and works in English printed elsewhere from 1473-1700. It contains more than 132,000 titles & 17 million scanned pages taken from Pollard & Redgrave's Short-Title Catalogue (1475-1640) and Wing's Short-Title Catalogue (1641-1700) and their revised editions, as well as the Thomason Tracts (1640-1661) collection and the Early English Books Tract Supplement."

"The Oxford Text Archive (OTA) provides repository services for literary and linguistic datasets. In that role the OTA collects, catalogues, preserves and distributes high-quality digital resources for research and teaching. We currently hold thousands of texts in more than 25 languages, and are actively working to extend our catalogue of holdings. The OTA relies upon deposits from the wider community as the primary source of materials."

"The Middle English Compendium is a publication of the University of Michigan Library, the latest embodiment of the University's long-standing involvement in the study of Middle English. The Compendium has been designed to offer easy access to and some interconnectivity between three major Middle English electronic resources: an electronic version of the Middle English Dictionary (MED); a Bibliography of Middle English primary texts, limited to those cited by the MED and based on the MED bibliographies; and a searchable full-text Corpus of Middle English prose and verse."