Medieval and Early Modern Open-Access Sources (Western)

The Medieval Period (fifth to fifteenth century)

• See the compiled list of Medieval and Renaissance Studies: Open Access Resources made by the University of Tennessee, including links to the Digital Scriptorium and the Research Group on Manuscript Evidence, among others. Several of these resources are linked on this site’s manuscripts page, as well.
• Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Index. This is an interdisciplinary index of “journal articles, book reviews, and essays in books about women, sexuality, and gender during the Middle Ages.”
• Open Marginalis “is a selection of digitized medieval manuscripts accessible under open use terms working to guide new users to open collections for casual and scholarly use.”
• See also the University of Ottawa’s site on Digital Medieval Studies.

Early Modern

• The Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies at the University of Toronto has a near comprehensive list of Early Modern Resources, including several specifically devoted to Book History.
• See Sharon Howard’s Early Modern Resource’s page for numerous open access journals and bibliographies on early-modern topics (besides sources on Britain, there are also sources on Early Modern America and Early Modern Japan). See also her page of primary sources.
• Concordance of Shakespeare’s Complete Works. Enter any word or form of a word and see in what plays and sonnets and what lines that word appears.
• Compendium of Renaissance Drama.
• Connected Histories offers British history resources from 1500–1900.
• Primary Sources on Copyright, 1450–1900, begins with the Early Modern Period.
• The Women Writers Project is “a long-term research project devoted to early modern women’s writing and electronic text encoding. [The] goal is to bring texts by pre-Victorian women writers out of the archive and make them accessible to a wide audience of teachers, students, scholars, and the general reader.”