Tag Archives: early modern history

Re-trial until 25 April: Early Modern England: Society, Culture & Everyday Life, 1500-1700

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We decided to repeat a trial of Early Modern England: Society, Culture & Everyday Life, 1500-1700. The trial ends 25 April.

This resource offers access to rare and invaluable sources for examining the lived experience of people in England between 1500 and 1700. From ‘ordinary’ people through to more prominent individuals and families, these documents show how everyday working, family, religious and administrative life was experienced across England.

Rather than dealing specifically with the great political and religious upheavals of these years, the project aims to look at the everyday happenings of people in different parts of England.

What topics can you research?

The sources are useful for the study of many aspects of life in early modern England. They include:

  • Agriculture
  • Arts, literature and culture
  • Births, marriages and deaths
  • Family life and relationships
  • Finance
  • Foreign affairs
  • Health and medicine
  • Land and property
  • Law and order
  • Monarchy
  • Politics and government
  • Possessions
  • Poverty
  • Religion
  • Scholarship: science and humanities
  • Trade and economics
  • Travel
  • War
  • Women’s history
  • Work and employment

What type of documents are included?

These experiences are revealed through a wide range of materials including legal records, family correspondence, tax records, administrative records, wills, inventories, petitions, military papers and commonplace books and more.

There is a strong material culture element to this project with the inclusion of images of everyday objects used in early modern households. Many can be viewed in 360-degree rotation.3 early modern objects: cream coloured cap, a chamberpot, a fire bellowsWhich regions are covered?

The different collections of documents enable a regional comparison, for example with court records from the South East, London, the West Midlands and the North West.A guide to the different collections incl. Commonplace books, local legal documents, quarter sessions, archives, etc.Searching

You can browse or search in many different ways. Useful are, for instance, indices for names, themes, regions and places.

The resource also offers searching of manuscripts using Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) technology. This is still a developing area and results may not always be perfect.

Tell us what you think

The trial ends on 25 April. While there currently is no funding for this resource, your feedback is still helpful to gauge interest amongst the scholarly community. Please email  isabel.holowaty@bodleian.ox.ac.uk to comment on the usefulness of the content, who would benefit from it and whether the searching functionality is adequate.

Trial until 15 February: Early Modern England Society, Culture & Everyday Life, 1500-1700

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Oxford researchers are warmly invited to trial Early Modern England: Society, Culture & Everyday Life, 1500-1700 [access via SOLO.]

This resource offers access to rare and invaluable sources for examining the lived experience of people in England between 1500 and 1700. From ‘ordinary’ people through to more prominent individuals and families, these documents show how everyday working, family, religious and administrative life was experienced across England.

Rather than dealing specifically with the great political and religious upheavals of these years, the project aims to look at the everyday happenings of people in different parts of England.

What topics can you research?

The sources are useful for the study of many aspects of life in early modern England. They include:

  • Agriculture
  • Arts, literature and culture
  • Births, marriages and deaths
  • Family life and relationships
  • Finance
  • Foreign affairs
  • Health and medicine
  • Land and property
  • Law and order
  • Monarchy
  • Politics and government
  • Possessions
  • Poverty
  • Religion
  • Scholarship: science and humanities
  • Trade and economics
  • Travel
  • War
  • Women’s history
  • Work and employment

What type of documents are included?

These experiences are revealed through a wide range of materials including legal records, family correspondence, tax records, administrative records, wills, inventories, petitions, military papers and commonplace books and more.

There is a strong material culture element to this project with the inclusion of images of everyday objects used in early modern households. Many can be viewed in 360-degree rotation.3 early modern objects: cream coloured cap, a chamberpot, a fire bellowsWhich regions are covered?

The different collections of documents enable a regional comparison, for example with court records from the South East, London, the West Midlands and the North West.A guide to the different collections incl. Commonplace books, local legal documents, quarter sessions, archives, etc.Searching

You can browse or search in many different ways. Useful are, for instance, indices for names, themes, regions and places.

The resource also offers searching of manuscripts using Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) technology. This is still a developing area and results may not always be perfect.

Tell us what you think

The trial ends on 15 February. While there currently is no funding for this resource, your feedback is still helpful to gauge interest amongst the scholarly community. Please email  isabel.holowaty@bodleian.ox.ac.uk to comment on the usefulness of the content, who would benefit from it and whether the searching functionality is adequate.

New State Papers Online experience – preview from 1 Aug

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Called all early modernists: a new improved version of State Papers Online can be previewed from 1 August via the SPO webpage. The provider, Cengage Gale, is keen to get your feedback. Given the complexity of the material, I strongly encourage researchers to take a look and send in suggestions and comments. The plan is to retire the current version in December 2022.

What is State Papers Online I-IV 1509-1714?State Papers Online contains the Tudor and Stuart governments “domestic” and “foreign” papers – the equivalent of today’s documents from the Home and Foreign Offices and the Royal Archives. These everyday working papers of the British royal government reveal Tudor and Stuart society and government, religion and politics in all its drama allowing scholars to trace the remarkable – and frequently violent – transformations of the 16th & 17th centuries.

This major resource re-unites the Domestic, Foreign, Borders, Scotland, and Ireland State Papers of Britain with the Registers of the Privy Council and other State Papers now housed in the Cotton, Harley and Lansdowne collections in the British Library.

The papers are digitised images and are accompanied by the Calendars. The Calendars State Papers are fully searchable, and each Calendar entry has been linked directly to its related State Paper. Among the Calendars included are the HMC Calendars and the Haynes/Murdin transcriptions of the Cecil Papers in Hatfield House.

What is changing?

You can expect many improvements such as side-by-side viewing of the manuscript and calendar versions and more. See Gale’s blog post New State Papers Online Experience Available to Preview (5 July 2022) for more details.

Screenshot from the new State Papers Online interface showing a calendar entry of SP12 139.

Image from Gale’s bog post ‘New State Papers Online Experience Available to Preview’

Oxford researchers and registered Bodleian readers can access SPO from SOLO.

Trial until 18 May 2020: Droz ebooks: Humanisme et Renaissance – Calvin

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Colleagues in the Taylor Institution Library have set up trials to some online Droz French resources. Two of these will be of interest to early modern history, history of the book, intellectual history, religious history, and European history. You will need SSO for remote access. Please send feedback to isabel.holowaty@bodleian.ox.ac.uk.

Humanisme et Renaissance

The Droz Humanisme et Renaissance collection offers a collection of sources and studies on Humanism (Politien, Ficin, Erasmus, Budé…), the French Reformation (Lefèvre d’Etaples, Calvin, Farel, Beza…) and the Renaissance (literary and artistic, Hieronymus Bosch or Rabelais, Ronsard or Primaticcio), as well as the medicine, science, philosophy, book history, and all forms of knowledge and human activity from the long sixteenth century, roughly from 1450 to the death of Henry IV in 1610, the threshold of the classical age.

Calvin

This portal presents all the texts by or about John Calvin which have been published by the Librairie Droz from 1960 to 2012, with an initial focus on Geneva, Calvin, and the beginnings of the French evangelical movement with Lefèvre d’Etaples and Marguerite de Navarre.

Related resources already available in Oxford:

Anti-Calvin

This database comprises the writings of French Catholics against the doctrines of John Calvin (1509-1564) and other protestant leaders. France was a major centre in the clash between Catholics and Protestants during the sixteenth century. Much of the Protestant literature was in French in the hopes of converting the French people. In response, the Catholic Church preserved its position in France with these documents. This archive includes both sixteenth-century attacks on Calvinism and Protestantism as well as defences of the Catholic doctrine.

Huguenots

This collection offers a comprehensive survey of the original writings of the French Huguenot authors, from the first stirrings of radical dissent in the 1530s through to the end of the century. The selection privileges first and foremost original writings of authors writing within France and for an exclusively French audience. Thus whereas Calvin’s Genevan writings are not included, the tracts penned by Theodore de Bèze as part of the polemic exchange during the Colloquy of Poissy (1561) do appear here.

All told the writings collected here reveal an intellectually vibrant movement, meeting unprecedented challenges and later hardship with that mixture of confidence, aggression, and resolution in the face of adversity that characterises Calvinist churches of this era throughout Europe.

Access to Early European Books 5-16 until 31 May 2020

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ProQuest have kindly given Oxford researchers free temporary access to Early European Books Collections 5-16 until 31 May 2020. SSO is required for off-campus access.

Collections 5-16 draw mostly material held at Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) but also at Koninklijke Bibliotheek in The Hague, the Kongelige Bibliotek in Copenhagen and the Wellcome Library in London. It provides access to early printed European collections published between 1450 and 1700.

Some collections are themed:

Collection 16 – French Culture in the Early Modern Period – From the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF)

Collection 15 – Revolution and Reformation: Early Modern Science and Religion – From the Wellcome Library (London), the Kongelige Bibliotek (Copenhagen), the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (The Hague) and the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze (Florence).

All EEB collections can be cross-searched.  You can also cross-search with Early English Books Online (EEBO) (SSO required for off-campus access).

You have a number of searching and browsing options, including by subject. You can view the documents in thumbnail, Full View and see the full metadata description. Early European Books can now also be analysed visually with the new Interactive Historical Map. Check out the useful EEB LibGuide to learn more about the collection and how to use it.

Please note that book-level details are not in SOLO. You will need to access EEB directly to search for a particular titles.

After 31 May 2020, researchers will continue to have access to EEB Collections 1-4.

British Online Archives – full access until 20 April 2020

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British Online Archives are providing 30-day free access (starting from 23 March) of its entire collection to existing customers in light of the COVID-19 outbreak.

The company provides access to over 3 million records drawn from both private and public archives. There are 88 collections with thematically organised records covering early modern and modern world history, from politics and warfare to slavery and medicine. These are great source materials for 18th to later 20th century British and global history. Contributing archives include India Office, British Library, The National Archives, British Foreign & Commonwealth Office, LSE.

Examples of themes:

Paris Peace Conference, Prosecuting the Holocaust, Colonial Law in Africa, British Labour Party Papers 1906-1994, Liverpool and Bristol shipping records, slave trade records, missionary archives, British colonial government reports, and much more.

Please remember that this access will cease on 20 April 2020. However, the Bodleian Libraries has purchased a few of these collections already so you can continue to access them after 20 April.

Ecclesiastical History Sources for Postgraduates sessions

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We are pleased to announce two sessions of interest to Postgraduates studying ecclesiastical history:

Ecclesiastical History for postgraduates: Introduction to using the Special Collections at the Weston Library

Thurs 30 Jan, 11am-1pm, Horton Room, Weston Library (make sure you store your bags in £1 lockers first)

This session will provide a practical introduction to using special collections at the Bodleian Libraries. We will outline the nature of the main Bodleian collections and explain how to find research material using online and printed finding aids. (This will include practical exercises for which a laptop will be useful.) We will end with the practicalities of ordering and handling manuscripts and how to cite them in your work.

Presenter: Matthew Holford (Tolkien Curator of Medieval Manuscripts) and Mike Webb (Early Modern Curator)

Please note that there is limited availability. Email Isabel.holowaty@bodleian.ox.ac.uk if you are interested.

Ecclesiastical History for postgraduates: Digital resources

Thurs 13 Feb, 11am-1pm, Horton Room, Weston Library (make sure you store your bags in £1 lockers first)

A two hour seminar during which key online resources relating to church history, covering largely Christianity from medieval to early 20th century, will be demonstrated. The resources include bibliographical and reference tools, digital source materials and how to keep up-to-date with new publications. Presenters: Isabel Holowaty (History Librarian) and Hilla Wait (Theology & Philosophy Librarian)

Please note that there is limited availability. Email Isabel.holowaty@bodleian.ox.ac.uk if you are interested.

 

Trial: State Papers Online: Eighteenth Century, 1714-1782 and The Stuart and Cumberland Papers (until 20 Sept)

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(c) Gale CengageOxford early modernists are now invited to trial two State Papers Online resources:

State Papers Online: Eighteenth Century, 1714-1782

King George I
studio of Sir Godfrey Kneller, Bt
oil on canvas, 1714-1725, based on a work of 1714
NPG 544
© National Portrait Gallery, London

This resource  represents the final section of the State Papers series from the National Archives in the UK before the series was closed and replaced by the Home Office and Foreign Office series in 1782.

Covering the reigns of the Hanover rulers George I (1714-1727) and George II (1727-1760) and part of the reign of George III (up to 1782), the series provides unparalleled access to thousands of manuscripts that reveal the behind-the-scenes, day-to-day running of the British Government during the eighteenth century.

It comprises 4 parts:

  • Part I: State Papers Domestic, Military and Naval and the Registers of the Privy Council
  • Part II: State Papers Foreign: Low Countries and Germany
  • Part III: Western Europe;
  • Part IV: Scandinavia, Eastern Europe and Turkey.

State Papers Online: The Stuart and Cumberland Papers

William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland
studio of David Morier
oil on canvas, 1749-1770, based on a work of circa 1748-1749
NPG 537
© National Portrait Gallery, London

Digitised for the first time, the Stuart and Cumberland Papers from the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle are now available online in their entirety.

The Stuart Papers represent the correspondence and personal documents of the exiled members of the Stuart dynasty after 1688.

Available here alongside the Cumberland Papers of William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland and second surviving son of George II, they provide a unique window into the world of the Stuarts and their Jacobite followers, as well as to the incumbent Hanoverian monarchy during a time of continental wars, domestic conspiracies and rival claims to the Throne.

Please send any feedback to Isabel Holowaty by 20 September 2019.

While you are here, check out other key resources for the 18th century?

New: Military Architecture 1600-1900

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S. Vauban, Traité de l’attaque et de la défense des places (La Haye, 1743). Military Architecture 1600-1900 (Leiden, 2018), accessed 8 July 2019, http://primarysources.brillonline.com/browse/military-architecture-1600-1900.

I’m pleased to report that Oxford researchers now have access to Brill’s Military Architecture 1600-1900.

This online resource contains 99 printed works which represent the revolutionary developments in fortification in Early Modern Europe in theory and in practice.

The collection covers not only military architecture, but to some extent also the military arts (artillery, army camps, siege) and military and some naval history. While it focuses on early modern history, there are translations of works from Ancient Rome and there is at least one book on medieval military architecture (A. Hamilton Thompson, Military Architecture in England during the Middle Ages. London, 1912). A number of early modern printed books were published before 1600.

It’s possible to search the full-text of the entire collection or of individual books, but bear in mind that the collection comprises works in different languages, including Latin, and may use old language and orthography. Likewise, the rendering of the text from early modern print-type has not always been successful, so it pays to browse the books and read texts to get a sense of the content.

Many works will include illustrations of buildings, fortifications, harbours, etc. It does not appear to be possible to search for these separately.

Obsedio Bredana Armis Phillippi IIII (Antwerpen, 1629), p.9. Military Architecture 1600-1900 (Leiden, 2018), accessed 8 July 2019, http://primarysources.brillonline.com/bowse/military-architect

You will be able to copy the OCRed text of any selections or of a page; you can also download the ebook, or selections of it, as a zipped file; and you can share the link to the resource via email and social media.

Citations can be saved to Endnote and RefWorks, but also seem to work with Zotero.

More about the content

“Similar to the arts, military architecture was split up in national schools or styles, so called fortification manners.The works of Busca, Cattaneo, De Marchi, Tensini, Theti, Zanchi, reflect the Italian School, Errard and Perret the French one and Specklin’s Architektur von Vestungen is an adaptation of the Italian school in Germany.

Stevin’s Sterctenbouwing discusses Cattaneo, Theti and Specklin to assess the benefits of their fortification systems for the Low Countries. The later French school is well represented by Pagan and the works of probably the most famous engineer of all times, Vauban. His various “fortification manners” were applied all over Europe and beyond.

While these works in Military Architecture 1600-1900 allow for a comparative analysis in text and image of European fortification schools, others focus on more local conditions such as Stevin’s works in Dutch and French on the role of pivoted sluices in the fortifications of various harbor towns.

Moreover, Military Architecture 1600-1900 provides insight in the training of fortification in theory and practice for multiple “user-groups”. While the works of the classical authors Caesar, Valturius and Vegetius were used for the philological study of the military arts at universities, the reality of warfare required for training of practical skills for engineers and landsurveyors in the field. Translations of Euclid, works on the practice of geometry and landsurveying (Mallet, Nienrode, Metius, Sems&Dou) were filling that gap. Although Military Architecture 1600-1900 represents the protagonists of the history of fortification, it also includes lesser known authors such as Bruist, Capo-Bianco, Gaya, Gerbier and Pfeffinger. Moreover, the selection does not limit itself to military architecture, but includes the military arts (artillery, army camps, siege) and history.” (Military Architecture, Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2018, accessed 8 July 2019 http://primarysources.brillonline.com/browse/military-architecture-1600-1900).

The breakdown of titles per country is as follows:

  • Netherlands: 46 titles
  • France: 25 titles
  • Italy: 14 titles
  • Germany: 13 titles
  • England: 1 title

Military Architecture 1600-1900 is now accessible via SOLO or via Databases A-Z. Enjoy!

Chinese eresources trials until 25 August 2019

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I’m pleased to report that the HD Chung Chinese Studies Librarian has organised trials of three Chinese eresources. Access is available on-campus and off-campus with VPN.

The resources being trialled are:

雕龙中日古籍全文资料库 Diaolong Database of Chinese & Japanese Pre-Modern Books: Provides full-text access to almost 30,000 pre-modern Chinese and Japanese titles covering history, politics, economy, religion, philosophy, literature, ethnography and geography. It includes collected works such as 方志丛书 (China local gazetteer series), 四库全书  (Classified collection of complete works), Japanese Pre-Modern Books and Qing Dynasty archives. http://hunteq.com/ancientc/ancientkm

中国近代报刊 (Chinese Modern Newspapers): Database provides access to pre-1949 Chinese newspapers published on mainland China and Taiwan, including Shen bao, Zhong yang ri bao, Taiwan min bao and Taiwan ri bao. http://www.dhcdb.com.tw/SP/

大公报 = Ta Kung Pao (1902 -1949): one of the major Chinese newspaper titles which is considered to be an authoritative source for the study of Chinese modern history, politics and society. http://tk.dhcdb.com.tw/tknewsc/tknewskm

The trials end on 25 August 2019. If you have any feedback or questions, please email the HD Chung Chinese Studies Librarian.

While you are here, check out…