English Language & Literature

Resources for conducting literary research on English & American Literatures.

Medieval - quick starts

Dictionary of Old English This link opens in a new window
The Dictionary of Old English (DOE) defines the vocabulary of the first six centuries (600 - 1150 A.D.) of the English language.

Middle English Dictionary (MED)
The Middle English Dictionary (MED) is the world's largest searchable database of Middle English lexicon and usage for the period 1100-1500.

ITER: Gateway to the Middle Ages & Renaissance This link opens in a new window
ITER contains journal articles, reviews, bibliographies, catalogues, editions, abstracts, discographies, and notes focused on the Middle Ages and Renaissance (400-1700).

ARTstor This link opens in a new window
ARTstor is a digital library of nearly one million images in the areas of art, architecture, the humanities, and social sciences, including medieval manuscripts.
British Literary Manuscripts Online: 1120 -1900 This link opens in a new window
Contains facsimile images of literary manuscripts, including letters and diaries, drafts of poems, plays, novels, and other literary works from the Middle Ages and Renaissance through the Restoration and Victorian era.

Celtic and Medieval Manuscripts or 'Early Manuscripts at Oxford'
This project from Oxford University has been concentrating on the high-resolution digitization of a series of medieval manuscripts which were selected as major treasures from their respective libraries, to create wider availability for originals which may otherwise be too fragile for handling.

Dictionary of Old English Web Corpus This link opens in a new window
Contains at least one copy of every surviving Old English text, and in some cases, more than one copy is included.

Digital Medieval Manuscripts at Houghton Library, Harvard University
Includes works in Latin, Greek, and most of the vernacular languages of Europe that are the primary sources for the study of the literature, art, history, music, philosophy, and theology of the periods.
Digitised Manuscripts at the British Library
Contains digitised copies of manuscripts and archives in the British Library’s collections, with descriptions of their contents.

Early English Books Online (EEBO) This link opens in a new window
Contains over 100,000 works published in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and British North America from 1473-1700. Includes novels, pamphlets, broadsides, calendars, sermons, almanacs, and much more.

Electronic Beowulf
Includes A full-color electronic facsimile of Cotton Vitellius A. xv.

English Drama (1280-1915) This link opens in a new window
Contains dramatic works published in the British Isles from the late thirteenth century to the early twentieth century. Includes Elizabethan and Jacobean plays, as well as Medieval morality plays, mystery cycles, and nineteenth-century closet dramas.
English Poetry (600-1900) This link opens in a new window
Contains poems published in the British Isles from the eighth century to the early twentieth century. Includes canonical and lesser known poets, including women poets.

Images of Medieval Manuscripts
Contains images of medieval manuscripts available for browsing, in date order. They are taken from Oxford University's Bodleian Library's filmstrips and slide collection, and include illuminations and text-pages.
Manuscripts from the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms Online
Contains a list of manuscripts digitized by the British Library.
Medieval and Renaissance Illuminated Manuscripts from Western Europe
Contains manuscript pages and associated illuminations dating from the 9th through the 16th centuries give vivid testimony to the creative impulses of the often nameless craftsmen who continually discovered new ways of animating the contents of hand-produced books. From the New York Public Library.

Medieval Family Life This link opens in a new window
Contains full color images and fully searchable transcriptions of the following major family letter collections from 15th century England: Paston Family Papers; Cely Family Papers; Plumpton Correspondence; Stonor Correspondence; Armburgh Family Papers
Medieval Travel Writing This link opens in a new window
Contains collections of original medieval manuscripts that describe travel - real and imaginary - in the Middle Ages, including journeys of famous travelers from Prester John and Marco Polo to Sir John Mandeville and John Capgrave.
Patrologia Latina This link opens in a new window
Contains the works of the Church Fathers from Tertullian in 200 AD to the death of Pope Innocent III in 1216. The database contains the complete Patrologia Latina, including all prefatory material, original texts, critical apparatus and indexes. Migne's column numbers, essential references for scholars, are included.

Perseus Digital Library
Assembles digital collections of humanities resources from Greco-Roman classics to the English Renaissance to 19th century American materials.

Thesaurus Linguae Graecae This link opens in a new window
Contains virtually all Greek texts surviving from the period between Homer (8th century BCE) and CE 600, as well as the majority of surviving works up to the fall of Byzantium in CE 1453.