Broadside ballads were single-sheet songs that sold for a penny a piece. This website concentrates on over 100 resoundingly successful examples that you can investigate through recordings, images and a wealth of other materials. Whether you are interested in music, art, love, gender, tragedy, politics, family life, crime, history, humour or death, you will find something to engage you here.
The data is derived from surviving manuscript and printed sources from the English convents in exile. Where membership records are missing or have gaps, details have been sought in other sources such as biographical writings, histories and chronicles. Significant data has also been located in continental archives from visitation records and examinations of candidates for clothing and profession. Where possible data has been included for candidates who failed to complete a full career in convents for a variety of reasons including health or unsuitability. External documents have been attached to the database to provide additional data regarding family connections and networks: much of the detail is derived from sources external to the convents.
The Vernacular Aristotelianism in Renaissance Italy Database (VARI 2.0) is a searchable catalogue of Aristotelian works written or published in Italian between 1400 and 1650. The census covers both manuscript and printed sources preserved in libraries in Italy, other European countries, and the US.
The database accessible here is in need of updating, with the last addition of new data dating back to July 2013. Currently, the database covers over 200 printed editions, 200 manuscript works, 130 authors, 65 dedicatees, and 115 printers. Since the research is still in progress, these figures are expected to rise in the coming years and will be periodically updated. The census already counts a wide range of materials constituting a critical mass suitable for general overviews as well as closer analyses.
The Universal Short Title Catalogue (USTC) is a project aimed at bringing together information on all books published in Europe in the first age of print. At present this comprises 755,000 editions and around 4 million surviving copies, located in over 9,500 archives and libraries worldwide.
The War Widows' Stories website hosts all transcripts and recordings of the oral history interviews we have conducted in the course of the War Widows' Stories project, and they can be access and downloaded for free by anyone. Recordings can be streamed or downloaded; transcripts can be read and searched online or downloaded as PDFs.
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.
From the Project Abstract on the UKRI Grant List website: The key outputs will be 60 oral history interviews which will be available electronically and a searchable database of existing oral history resources on the 'Windrush generation'. 30 of the interviews will focus on the response of Caribbean governments and their representatives in London to the legal restrictions imposed on immigration to the UK from the Caribbean from the early 1960s, and the plight of those members of the diaspora community whose right to remain in the UK was challenged by the British state. The other 30 interviews will focus on members of the diaspora community, those who found themselves under threat of deportation or actually deported, and their supporters and legal and political representatives. The interviews will explore the extent to which the complexities and ambiguities of the law governing nationality exacerbated confusion around competing notions of Caribbean and British identity and belonging. They will seek to identify the extent to which members of the diaspora community were aware of changes to their rights and obligations brought about by successive acts of parliament from 1962, and the stages by which it became clear that significant numbers of people were having their right to remain in the UK challenged. This oral history research will be supplemented by archival research in collections in the UK and the Caribbean. Selected documents will be digitized and made available on the project website alongside the recordings of the interviews and supporting explanatory materials including a series of podcasts produced by the project team.
The project archive of the 2017 Judaica laboratory phase contains approximately 2TB of audiovisual materials: primarily audiovisual recordings generated by the DCTV method, as well as recorded audio conversations, photos, and video essays.
The database is comprised of 3 main sections, Sources, Participants, and Incidents. The source describes where the information is found, e.g. The National Archives, and how to locate it. It contains the text in English and sometimes in the original language. The source text has been used to construct listings of Participants and Locations. Participants comprise everyone who was affected by the rising - not only those accused of being rebels, but also victims, jurors, justices and lawyers who took part in prosecutions arising from the revolt. The database includes information on relationships between individuals, occupations and background biographical information from sources such as manorial records. Locations comprise both places where incidents occurred during the rising and places associated with a particular individual. Note that although a source associates a place with a participant, this does not mean that they lived there - medieval sources frequently use a variety of locations in identifying people. One rebel is described variously as being of Edenbridge in Kent, Carshalton in Surrey and Winchester in Hampshire but actually lived in Southampton. There may be multiple entries in the database for the same person or location as an entry exists for each source the person or incident is found in.
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.
