Literature

The Riddle Ages

English Literature, Literature | Latin, Middle Ages, Old English, riddles, translation

The project website, launched in autumn 2020, made available texts and translations of two riddle collections: the 95 Old English riddles of the Exeter Book and the 63 Latin riddles known as the Bern Riddles. In addition to providing new translations and texts (with notes about previous editions and manuscript information), the project team produced commentary posts about each riddle’s proposed solutions, literary features and historical context. In 2021, the project team made available a further four Latin riddle collections: the 12 anonymous Lorsch riddles, 20 riddles by Boniface, 40 riddles by Tatwine and 60 riddles by Eusebius. In total, the website currently hosts 290 texts/translations and 168 commentary posts. A further 100 riddles by Aldhelm are to follow. In addition to original texts/translations, we have made available guest translations of riddles into other languages, including: Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin and Serbian, Indonesian and Spanish.

Data type: text

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Décabase

English Literature, Literature | France, French, nineteenth century, poetry, translation

A database of British Decadent poetry published in translation in French periodicals

Data type: text

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Late Medieval English Scribes

English Literature, Literature | England, handwriting, Middle Ages, poetry, prose

Late Medieval English Scribes is an online catalogue of all scribal hands (identified or unidentified) which appear in the manuscripts of the English writings of five major Middle English authors: Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, John Trevisa, William Langland and Thomas Hoccleve.

Data type: images, text

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Muslim Women’s Popular Fiction Database

Literature, Media Studies | autobiography, cinema, English, ethnic minorities, fiction, gender, poetry, stories, television, twenty-first century, women's studies

This website, developed by the project PI, is a continually updated database of works of genre fiction, film and TV by Muslim women creators. Initially developed to support a third-year module, over the course of the AHRC project it has been updated and further developed. As of 8 March 2024 it contains 455 entries across 20 genres, published between 2002 and 2024.

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UK RED

English Literature, Literature | autobiography, diaries, eighteenth century, fifteenth century, interviews, letters, nineteenth century, seventeenth century, sixteenth century, twentieth century, United Kingdom

The Reading Experience Database, 1450-1945 (RED), housed and developed at the OU is the world’s largest database about reading habits. An online, open-access project with over 30,000 entries, it is revolutionising public understanding of the history of reading. RED is democratising scholarship about the history of reading by encouraging ordinary members of the public from any location to contribute and use information about readers through history. 120+ volunteers from outside academia have already contributed some 6,000 entries. RED attracts over 1500 users per month from over 135 countries and has inspired partner projects in Australia, Canada, the Netherlands and New Zealand.

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Russian Visual Arts: Art Criticism in Context, 1814-1909

Literature, Russian Studies | art, Russia

Russian Visual Arts: Art Criticism in Context, 1814-1909 is an online research archive documenting the growth of diverse forms of commentary on the visual arts (particularly painting) in Russia from the early ninteenth- to early twentieth centuries. The archive contains over 100 hundred primary texts, in Russian and in many cases in new English translations, as well as over 300 digital images of journal and newspaper reproductions of works of art. A comprehensive editorial structure places these rare and/or previously unpublished works in their cultural and historical context. This editorial work includes introductions to the critics and the texts, new annotations to the translations, a glossary, a timeline of the development of art criticism, and an extensive bibliographical database.

Data type: images, text

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The Origins of Early Modern Literature

Literature | Early Modern, England, sixteenth century, Tudor

“Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, this project aims to redress the critical neglect of mid-Tudor writing, a period which saw the Reformation, the consolidation of the Tudor state, and the rise of English as a national language. Whilst there is a great deal of general interest in the history of this period, very little is known about its writers and the work they produce. During the three years of AHRC funding (from April 2005), the project team have compiled a searchable, on-line catalogue of literary works printed in English, 1519-1579 – the decades which precede, and lay the foundations for, the canonical period of English Renaissance Literature. “This catalogue – which is accessible from this website – includes details of titles, authors (including the authors of liminary material, such as prefaces and dedicatory poems), printers, booksellers, dedicatees, entries in the Stationers Register, the format in which books were published, and type faces and foreign languages used. It also contains a list of contents for each work, and information about genres, subjects, sources and literary coteries, as well as short essays on the context for each work. The catalogue significantly adds to the information available on ESTC and other bibliographical resources, providing scholars, students and members of the general public with a first point-of-call for research on works from this formative period of early modern literature.”

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John Foxe’s The Acts and Monuments Online

History, Literature | Christianity, Early Modern, England, sixteenth century

This Variorum Edition concentrates on the four English editions of Foxe’s martyrology published in London during his own lifetime: those of 1563 ; 1570 ; 1576 and 1583. There were, of course, many editions of the work published after Foxe’s death in 1587 and, like any great and controversial book, the text acquired a dynamic and a history of its own. However, the objective of this edition is to recover Foxe’s sources and strategy as he sought to collect and present his picture of the protestant reformation as a transforming experience in the religious history of England and Europe, and its pre-history within the broadest historical and doctrinal context that he could conceive of. It is the dynamics of the text during the twenty years from 1563 to 1583 which this edition seeks to recover.

Data type: images, text

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Early Modern Festival Books Database

Literature | books, Early Modern, festivals

The Early Modern Festival Books Database presents more than 3000 festival books published between 1500 and 1800 in 12 languages. These are printed accounts commissioned by kings and princes, by cities, and by the church to record such events as coronations, ceremonial entries into cities, ambassadorial visits, weddings, christenings, victory and peace celebrations, funerals, civic celebrations of all kinds, investitures of popes and cardinals, canonizations of saints and translations of relics, among others. The database is an expanded and fully revised version of the bibliographical and historical handbook Festivals and Ceremonies. A Bibliography of Works Relating to Court, Civic and Religious Festivals in Europe 1500-1800 by Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly and Anne Simon (London: Continuum, 2000). Festivals and Ceremonies not only provided bibliographic details of the works it listed, but also historical information about the festival the publication relates to, such as the occasion, its main actors, and the artists and genres involved. When this standard tool of festival research went out of print, it was decided not to reprint it in book form but to turn it into a freely available, fully searchable database and to use this opportunity not only to check the information it contained but to provide links to a digitized version of the texts, wherever such a version existed.

Data type: text

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Glossary