List of digital resources at the Folger

This article provides a curated list of digital resources—arranged (mostly) alphabetically. This list is alphabetized according to the idiosyncrasies of what the Folger community most commonly calls a resource. If you are having trouble finding a resource, use the search box at the top of the page or your browser's "Find" feature (usually control-F).

Please visit the categorized Digital resources at the Folger page for the same resources, organized by subject and type. For an alphabetical list of subscription databases available only on-site, see the Hamnet e-resources tab.

♠ - Resources marked with this symbol can only be accessed while logged in to the Folger network, unless readers can access them through their own institutions.

Electronic Resources

Trial Databases

Please send any feedback regarding these databases to reference@folger.edu

Literary Print Culture: The Stationers' Company Archive includes the Entry Book of Copies (1554-1842) (more often known to book historians as the Stationers' Registers), Membership Records (1555-1940), Court Records (1602-1982), English Stock Company documents (1603-1961), Treasurers’ vouchers (1734-1800), and a photographic collection. Available April 1-29, 2019

Shakespeare's Globe Archive: Theatres, Players & Performance includes documents of the Globe’s performance archive, primarily dealing with productions from the opening of the theatre in 1997 to the end of Dominic Dromgoole’s tenure as Artistic Director in 2016. It includes materials on ‘Original Practice’ productions that attempted to recreate the acting methods and costumes of Shakespeare’s time. It also includes material on performances at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse from 2014-2016. The architectural material includes plans from the 1980s onwards and there are also oral histories discussing the theatre’s early days. Available April 1-29, 2019

A-C

1641 Depositions From Trinity College Dublin (MSS 809-841) are witness testimonies mainly by Protestants, but also by some Catholics, from all social backgrounds, concerning their experiences of the 1641 Irish rebellion. Create a free account to view the depositions.

American Book Prices Current: records of books, manuscripts, autographs, maps and broadsides sold at auction, primarily US and UK

American Council of Learned Societies Humanities E-Book (HEB): E-book records are searchable in Hamnet, with a link to ACLS full-text. All e-books are full-text searchable at ACLS site.

American National Biography is updated semi-annually with new articles and revisions of previously published entries; contains articles of notable Americans through the mid-twentieth century.

American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language (ARTFL) contains French-language texts from the 12th to 20th century, Diderot and d'Alembert's late 18th century Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, par une Société de Gens de lettres, digitized versions of many Bibliothèque Bleue de Troyes (17th to mid-19th c.), a searchable version of Montaigne's Essais, and a different search interface for Tufts' Perseus Project (Greek & Latin texts).

Archive Grid is a service provided by OCLC brings together information about archives, special collections and other collections of manuscripts and papers.

The Bibliographical Society of America list of resources compiles essays, lists, and other bibliographical materials in aid of bibliographical study. The resource features wide date ranges and ample geographical coverage.

Bibliography of British and Irish History provides bibliographic data on historical writing dealing with the British Isles, and with the British Empire and Commonwealth, during all periods for which written documentation is available - from 55BC to the present.

Bibliography of English Women Writers 1500-1640 currently indexes the works of around 740 female writers and translators.

Bindings Image Database on LUNA features the many gorgeous bindings held in the Folger.

List of bindings resources

Bookbinding Dictionary (Multilingual): an international dictionary of bookbinding and conservation terms.

British Book Trade Index: The BBTI aims to include brief biographical and trade details of all those who worked in the English and Welsh book trades up to 1851. BBTI includes not only printers, publishers and booksellers but also other related trades, such as stationers, papermakers, engravers, auctioneers, ink-makers and sellers of medicines, so that the book trade can be studied in the context of allied trades.

British History Online: Includes Calendars of State Papers, Domestic and the Calendars of State Papers for Scotland and Ireland, along with the Calendar of Close Rolls.

British Literary Manuscripts Online: facsimile images of literary manuscripts, including letters and diaries, drafts of poems, plays, novels, and other literary works, and similar materials; early 12th century through 1900.

British Theatre: Nineteenth Century Collections Online features a wide range of primary sources related to the arts in the Victorian era, from playbills and scripts to operas and complete scores.

Burke's Peerage and Gentry: genealogy and heraldry information for the Peerage of the United Kingdom, the historical families of Ireland and the Commonwealth of Nations, and royal and distinguished families worldwide.

Burney Collection: 17th-18th Century Newspapers contains not only newspapers, but newsbooks, Acts of Parliament, broadsides, pamphlets and proclamations.

The Casebooks Project: In the decades around 1600, the astrologers Simon Forman and Richard Napier produced one of the largest surviving sets of medical records in history. The Casebooks Project, a team of scholars at the University of Cambridge, has transformed this paper archive into a digital archive.

Cecil Papers: archive consisting principally of the correspondence of William Cecil, Lord Burghley (1520-1598) and his son, Robert, the 1st Earl of Salisbury (1563-1612).

Chronicling America contains fully searchable American historic newspaper pages from 1789-1963.

The Collation: a gathering of scholarship from the Folger Shakespeare Library is a blog about Folger collections and resources written by Folger staff and readers.

Common-Place

COPIA/CERES (Cambridge English Renaissance Electronic Service) provides access to manuscripts related to Spenser and resources for early modern English handwriting.

Court Depositions of South West England, 1500-1700 is a digital edition of 80 fully transcribed depositions relating to 20 cases heard in the church courts and Quarter Sessions between 1556 and 1694 across Devon, Hampshire, Somerset and Wiltshire. These depositions or witness statements relate to a range of crimes and offences tried in these two types of courts, from defamation to theft and are rich in detail of social, economic, political and religious life in early modern England. This digital edition has been prepared as part of the Leverhulme-funded project Women's Work in Rural England, 1500-1700 undertaken at the University of Exeter between 2013 and 2018.

D-F

Leonardo da Vinci and his Treatise on Painting: website examining all of the different variations of this text that appeared throughout the centuries; includes extensive bibliography.

A Digital Anthology of Early Modern English Drama: a database of early modern plays not by Shakespeare, with thirty documentary editions.

DEEP (Database of Early English Playbooks): searchable bibliography of "every playbook produced in England, Scotland, and Ireland from the beginning of printing through 1660".

DNB (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online): biographical information on men and women who have shaped British history and culture, worldwide, from the Romans to the 21st century; updated three time a year.

Dictionary for Library and Information Sciences

Early English Books Online - Chadwyck-Healey (EEBO): digital facsimile page images of works printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and British North America and works in English printed elsewhere from 1473-1700; full-text search of EEBO-TCP Phase 1; cross-search with ECCO. For more information, see History of Early English Books Online and Using Early English Books Online.

Early English Books Online - Text Creation Partnership (EEBO-TCP): encoded electronic text editions of many early print books in Early English Books Online, Eighteenth Century Collections Online, and Evans Early American Imprints.

Early English Studies

Early Modern Culture

Early Modern Literary Studies

Early Modern London Theatres (EMLoT): Information related to professional performance in purpose-built theatres and other permanent structures in the London area.

Early Print: Text Mining Early Printed English provides a range of tools for the computational exploration and analysis of English print culture before 1700.

Early Stuart Libels: early 17th century English political poetry from the accession of King James I to the outbreak of the English Civil War.

Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO): Primarily focused on publications from the British Isles, but does include material from Western Europe and Russia. Access to page images and some full-text search.

EMED: A Digital Anthology of Early Modern English Drama: a database of early modern plays not by Shakespeare, with thirty documentary editions.

EMMO: Early Modern Manuscripts Online: transcriptions, images, and metadata of manuscripts from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

England's Immigrants is a database of over 64,000 names of people known to have migrated to England in the period 1350-1550. The information is drawn from a variety of sources, such as taxation assessments, letters of denization and protection, and other licenses and grants.

English Book Owners in the Seventeenth Century is an ongoing provenance website by David Pearson.

English Broadside Ballad Archive from the University of California, Santa Barbara, provides access to images and transcriptions of English Broadside Ballads from the long 17th century.

English Short-Title Catalogue (ESTC) is a comprehensive, international union catalogue listing early books, serials, newspapers and selected ephemera printed before 1801. For more information on this resource please see English Short-Title Catalogue.

EuroDocs: Primary Historical Documents from Western Europe is a repository of links to freely available primary source documents on the web; organized by both geographic area and time period.

Exemplaria

Finding Aids at the Folger Shakespeare Library guides users through the extensive manuscript collections with descriptions and lists of items.

The Union First Line Index of English Verse enables researchers to locate poems held in seven prestigious collections in the US and UK, including the Folger Shakespeare Library. The Index provides a database of over 224,000 first lines of manuscript and printed verse. firstlines@folger.edu

FirstSearch: OCLC Databases: Default database: WorldCat. Select the "Search in database" dropdown to select one of the following databases: ArticleFirst, ClasePeriodica, OCLC Ebooks, OCLC ECO, ERIC, GPO, MEDLINE, OAIster, PapersFirst, Proceedings, WorldAlmanac, WorldCat, WorldCatDissertations.

Folger Digital Texts provides a digital version of the Folger Shakespeare texts with easy and sophisticated search options.

John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs Variorum Edition: browse and compare the unabridged texts of the four editions of this massive work published in John Foxe’s lifetime (1563, 1570, 1576, 1583).

G-I

GEMMS: Gateway to Early Modern Manuscript Sermons is a group-sourced online bibliographic database of early modern (1530-1715) manuscript sermons from the UK, Ireland and North America.

Global Middle Ages Project (G-MAP) is a portal site for digital projects encompassing the Medieval and Early Modern worlds.

Glossary of digital humanities terms aims to help both novices and more advanced users of digital tools and approaches understand common terms employed in the digital humanities.

Glossary of Illuminated Manuscripts: reproduced and illustrated by the British Library from Michelle P. Brown, Understanding Illuminated Manuscripts: A Guide to Technical Terms (J. Paul Getty Museum: Malibu and British Library: London, 1994).

Hamnet, the Folger's online catalog, gives bibliographic information, copy-specific notes, and detailed information—often with links to images—of most of the items in the collection.

Heritage of the Printed Book Database (HPB) (formerly called the Hand Press Book Database) is a steadily growing collection of files of catalogue records from major European and North American research libraries covering items of European printing of the hand-press period (c.1455-c.1830) integrated into one file. This makes it possible for information to be retrieved in one single search across all files. (N.b. as of Summer 2016, Folger items are not yet integrated into this database) As of January 2018, this resource is freely available!

Historical Calendar: Multi-country historical calendar for the years 1100 to 2100. Allows automatic conversion between Old Style and New Style dates.

History of Parliament is a research project creating a comprehensive account of parliamentary politics in England, then Britain, from their origins in the thirteenth century. It consists of detailed studies of elections and electoral politics in each constituency, and of closely researched accounts of the lives of everyone who was elected to Parliament in the period, together with surveys drawing out the themes and discoveries of the research and adding information on the operation of Parliament as an institution. Note: it is a work in progress, with some sections more complete than others.

History On-Line provides information for historians with details of university lecturers in the UK and the Republic of Ireland, current and past historical research, digital history projects, new books and journals from a range of leading publishers and sources of funding available for researchers in the UK.

The Holinshed Project parallel texts edition, furnished with links to each page of Early English Books Online (subscription required). Users can navigate using a variety of entry points. Project overview and history, as well as sample texts, can be found here.

Impositor is an online tool to automatically arrange digital images from the collection into simulated impositions (the laying out of pages into the formes of printed sheets).

International Library Catalogs from vialibri.net. Provides a list of union and other catalogs from Europe and the United States. Links to sources such as WorldCat, the KVK, and artlibraries.net.

Iter Bibliography is a bibliography comprised of secondary source material pertaining to the Middle Ages and Renaissance (400-1700), including citations for books and journal material (articles, reviews, review articles, bibliographies, catalogues, abstracts and discographies), dissertation abstracts, and essays in books (including entries in conference proceedings, festschriften, encyclopedias and exhibition catalogues).

Iter: Gateway to the Middle Ages & Renaissance brings together numerous database sources for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Some are subscription access only, while others are freely available.

Iter Italicum is a finding list for Renaissance humanistic manuscripts in libraries and collections all over the world.

J-L

Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson Online provides a fully digitized and updated edition of Jonson's complete writings, with editorial and scholarly remarks throughout the texts.

The JUBA Project: Early Blackface Minstrelsy in Britain 1842-1852, from the University of Toronto, draws together a range of documentation into a database that allows the visitor to access information on the individuals, troupes, and 'acts,' that toured in Britain during these crucial years.

Leibniz Translations: This site provides full-text translations of the work of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in English translation.

Lexicons of Early Modern English : searches and displays word-entries from monolingual English dictionaries, bilingual lexicons, technical vocabularies, and other encyclopedic-lexical works, 1480-1702.

Literary Manuscripts Online: 17th and 18th Century Poetry from the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds : manuscripts of 17th and 18th century English language verse, including first lines, last lines, attribution, author, title, date, length, verse form, content and bibliographic references for over 6,600 poems within the collection.

Loeb Classical Library: Fourteen centuries of Greek and Latin literature with accurate, literate, English translations on facing pages. And a handy Greek keyboard pop-up.

London Stage datasets: In conjunction with their subscription database on Eighteenth Century Drama, Adam Matthew Digital has made freely available a searchable and scanned version of The London Stage, a key reference work documenting theatrical performances in eighteenth-century London. This information has been compiled from the playbills, newspapers and theatrical diaries of the period.

Lost Plays Database is a wiki-style forum for scholars to share information about lost plays in England, 1570-1642.

Luminarium is an online anthology of English literature from the late Medieval period through the 18th century; texts from out-of-copyright editions.

LUNA Digital Image Database contains high-quality, high-resolution images of a large number of Folger collection items. Users have the ability to store their preferred images in media groups, create presentations, and export images.

M-O

Manus Online: MANUS is a database containing catalogue descriptions and digital images of manuscripts, private papers and archives held by Italian public, private and ecclesiastical libraries. The census, launched in 1988, aims to list and catalogue manuscripts written in Latin alphabet from the Middle Ages to date, including private papers and literary archives.

Manuscript Pamphleteering in Early Stuart England: Before the outbreak of Civil War in 1642, England developed a large, influential and often radical pamphlet literature. This project aims to survey the vast hidden archive of early Stuart England's manuscript pamphlets. Images and transcriptions of many early modern pamphlets are available, in addition to bibliographical descriptions.

Material Cultures of Early Modern Women's Writing Digital Archive: provides online editions of women's writing that circulated in a variety of forms in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This project draws from manuscript sources as well as print editions, and provides both images and transcriptions of these often multiform texts.

Map of Early Modern London (MoEML): Map comprises a digital edition of the 1561 Agas woodcut map of London; an Encyclopedia and Descriptive Gazetteer of London people, places, topics, and terms; a Library of marked-up texts rich in London toponyms; and a versioned edition of John Stow’s Survey of London.

Mary Wroth's Poetry: An Electronic Edition: Edited by Paul Salzman, this electronic edition includes a textual introduction, a contextual bibliography, a critical introduction to the poetry of Mary Wroth, and full text of the poems.

The Medici Archive Project: Documentary Sources for the Arts and Humanities in the Medici Granducal Archive, 1537-1743, is a fully searchable database describing hundreds of volumes of documents in the Medici Granducal Archive (Archivio Mediceo del Principato).

Medieval Digital Resources (MDR): The Medieval Academy of America has put together a curated database of peer-reviewed digital materials for the study of the Middle Ages. Users can browse an alphabetical list or search using controlled-vocabulary subject tags to find vetted online resources of many types. Please note that MDR does not include resources that are paywalled or require password access, although some resources may have restrictive use-licenses.

Microfilms Database at the Folger Shakespeare Library provides an easy way to search the Folger's microfilm collection so that readers may have some form of access to restricted or fragile materials.

Microfilms Hand-List at the Folger Shakespeare Library (PDF) is an addition/supplementary list to the microfilm database. Readers are advised to check both places when searching for a microfilm.

John Milton: A Bibliography (MRTS Online Series) attempts to bring together all manuscripts and editions of John Milton's works and all studies and critical statements concerning his life and works, all allusions and quotations, and all significant imitations during the years 1624-1799.

MLA International Bibliography provides citations to journal articles, books, dissertations, and scholarly websites, from 1921 to the present, in academic disciplines such as language, literature, folklore, linguistics, literary theory and criticism, and the dramatic arts.

The Newdigate newsletters, Numbers 1 through 2100 (13 January 1673/4 through 11 June 1692): thrice-weekly news releases issued by the Secretary of State's office, highlighting matters of interest to the Stuart court.

Nichols Newspaper Collection features the newspapers, periodicals, pamphlets and broadsheets that form the Nichols newspaper collection held at the Bodleian library in Oxford, UK. The collection includes approximately 300 primary titles of newspapers and periodicals and 300 pamphlets and broadsheets, covering the period 1672-1737.

Oxford English Dictionary Online (OED)

Oxford Scholarly Editions Online is an interlinked collection of authoritative Oxford editions of major works from the humanities. Our subscription includes early modern content.

Oxford Text Archive collects, catalogues, preserves and distributes high-quality digital resources for research and teaching; they currently have thousands of texts in more than 25 languages (some restrictions). Includes a separate catalog of TCP (Text Creation Partnership) items.

P-R

List of online resources for early modern English paleography:These resources were compiled to assist early modern scholars begin to learn to decipher, read, and interpret manuscript materials written in early handwriting.

Paper and Watermarks as Bibliographical Evidence from the Institut d'histoire du livre is a bibliographical guide to texts and images relating to the history of paper and papermaking, mainly comprising the hand-papermaking period.

Virtual St. Paul's Cathedral Project/Ambient Noise: A digital recreation of worship and preaching at St. Paul's Cathedral in early modern London.

Pedagogy Toolkit for English: Community-driven resources for digital pedagogy in composition, rhetoric, and literature.

The Diary of Samuel Pepys: Daily entries from the 17th century London diary.

Perdita Manuscripts: Women Writers, 1500-1700: Manuscripts written or compiled by women in the British Isles in the 16th and 17th centuries; also includes bibliographic sources.

Picturing Shakespeare was an NEH-funded project to help the Folger digitize thousands of 18th-, 19th-, and early 20th-century images representing Shakespeare’s plays.

PLRE.Folger: private libraries in Renaissance England complements the printed volumes of Private Libraries in Renaissance England (PLRE), an ongoing editorial project that has published eight volumes since 1992 in the Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies (MRTS) series.

Promptbooks from the Folger (also known as Adam Matthew Digital's database Shakespeare in Performance: Prompt Books from the Folger Shakespeare Library) features over 1000 fully digitized promptbooks from the Folger collection.

Restoration Printed Fiction is a database from the English Department at Texas Tech University. Including 394 fictions printed between 1660 and 1700 (fiction has been defined broadly here), this database allows users to search for basic information, such as author, title, bookseller, printer, and date, as well as more detailed information, such as whether the text has paratexts like dedications or prefaces.

Rinascimento: Harvard University's Research Guide for Renaissance Studies. Contains links to databases, websites, and other resources, divided and subdivided by general topical area.

Romeo and Juliet: Searchable Database for Prompt Books contains information from approximately 170 prompt-books for productions of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. These productions range from the seventeenth century to the 1980s.

S-U

Scriptorium: Medieval and Early Modern Manuscripts Online: A digital archive of manuscript miscellanies and commonplace books from c. 1450-1720.

Shakeosphere allows users to visualize, map, and explore these social networks in Shakespeare's England and beyond, from 1473-1800.

17th Century Shakespearean Prompt Books from the University of Virginia, with introductions to each book and descriptions of each annotation within the plays.

The Shakespeare Census attempts to locate and describe all extant copies of all editions of Shakespeare’s works through 1700, excluding the folios. It includes all items attributed to Shakespeare in print during the period, but not those attributed to him only by modern scholarship, and excludes the Restoration adaptations.

Shakespeare Documented is the largest and most authoritative collection of primary-source materials documenting the life of William Shakespeare (1564-1616), bringing together all known manuscript and print references to Shakespeare, his works, and additional references to his family, in his lifetime and shortly thereafter.

Shakespeare in Performance: Prompt Books from the Folger Shakespeare Library is a database from Adam Matthew Digital which features over 1000 fully digitized promptbooks from the Folger collection.

Shakespeare Quarterly (JSTOR): Back issues from 1950 through five years before the current issue.

Shakespeare Quarterly (Project Muse): Back issues for the most recent four years.

ShaLT: Shakespearean London Theatres: Histories of early modern theatres, with a map, guides, and films. A joint project of the De Montfort University and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

State Papers Online, 1509 - 1714 provides access to the Calendars, transcript and document images for the Domestic and Foreign State Papers, and Registers of the Privy Council for 1509-1714.

Sixteenth Century Collections in North American Research Libraries links to half a dozen library collections that are particularly strong in early modern materials.

Statutes of the Realm: for statutes from the Magna Carta to 1761, the most efficient place to search is ECCO. Search for the title "Statutes at Large" and the author Ruffhead.

T.E.A.M.S.: Transcribing Early American Manuscript Sermons is a collaborative scholarly effort to make the voluminous archival record of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century ecclesiastical worship more accessible to academic researchers, pastors, and the general public. This digital archive houses sermons transcribed from the papers of Baptist, Catholic, Congregational, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, and Unitarian ministers who preached up and down the Atlantic coast of North America; it includes the manuscript sermons of white, Native American, and African American preachers.

Theatregoing is an ongoing survey reproducing eyewitness testimony of seeing theatrical productions, from the sixteenth century to the present day.

Understanding Shakespeare (Beta) connects Folger Digital Texts with peer-reviewed articles that cite specific plays, scenes, and lines in Shakespeare.

The Union First Line Index of English Verse enables researchers to locate poems held in seven prestigious collections in the US and UK, including the Folger Shakespeare Library. The Index provides a database of over 224,000 first lines of manuscript and printed verse. firstlines@folger.edu

V-Z

Westminster Abbey|History includes short essays on each feature of the Abbey, including entries on each burial or memorial site.

The Victorian Illustrated Shakespeare Archive contains over 3000 illustrations from four of the most significant illustrated editions of Shakespeare's works in the Victorian period. All images have been tagged bibliographically and iconographically.

Virginia Company Archives: Transcripts and images of the Ferrar Papers from Magdalene College, Cambridge, and the papers of the Virginia Company. Documents date from approximately 1540-1770.

Who Were the Nuns?: A prosopographical study of the English Convents in exile 1600-1800. Traces the membership of the English convents in exile, from the opening of the first institution in Brussels to the nuns’ return to England as a result of the French Revolution and associated violence. Database provides the membership, family trees, edited documents, maps and analysis of the nuns’ experiences

Women Writers Online: a full-text collection of early women’s writing in English which includes full transcriptions of texts published between 1526 and 1850, focusing on materials that are rare or inaccessible.

WorldCat (FirstSearch: OCLC Databases): Default database: WorldCat. Select the "Search in database" dropdown to select one of the following databases: ArticleFirst, ClasePeriodica, OCLC Ebooks, OCLC ECO, ERIC, GPO, MEDLINE, OAIster, PapersFirst, Proceedings, WorldAlmanac, WorldCat, WorldCatDissertations.

World Shakespeare Bibliography: indexes Shakespeare-related scholarship and theatrical productions published or produced worldwide since 1960.

Twitter Accounts

@FolgerLibrary is the main twitter account for the Folger.

@FolgerResearch covers the research and collections aspects of the Folger.

@FolgerED is the twitter account for the Folger's Education Department.


Listservs

Folger Institute Commons listserv
Ficino--An interdisciplinary Renaissance listserv.
H-Albion--The H-Net discussion network for British and Irish history.
Milton-L
Shaksper--The global electronic Shakespeare conference.
SHARP-L--The electronic conference for the history of print culture.


Folger web archives

Read the article on Web archiving for an overview of the Folger's online web presence management.

Folger Shakespeare Library Websites and Social Media

Shakespeare Festivals and Theatrical Companies

William Shakespeare's 450th Birthday: Celebrations & Commentary