This guide has been designed as a starting point for research involving the Renaissance and Early Modern time period.

If you need help, please contact Ivana Niseteo, Liaison Librarian for English, French, French Programs (FASS), Global Humanities, Linguistics, and World Languages & Literatures at 778.782.6838 or iniseteo@sfu.ca or Ask a librarian

A useful starting point is the book Literary research and the British Renaissance and early modern period : strategies and sources.

Reference sources

• Literary research and the British Renaissance and early modern period : strategies and sources. A useful starting point.
• Literary Encyclopedia. ​An expanding global literary reference work written by over 2000 specialists from universities around the world, and currently provides more than 5100 authoritative profiles of authors, works and literary and historical topics.
• LEME: 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
• Oxford Reference Online. Online versions of 100 general reference works plus material in language, science and medicine, humanities and social sciences, business, and professional areas.
• Encyclopedia Britannica.  An all-purpose online encyclopedia, including an online atlas, dictionary, and select journal articles.

Dictionaries and literary terms

• Oxford English Dictionary. Covers words from across the English speaking world. It also gives etymological analysis, variant spellings, and pronunciation using IPA.
• The Oxford dictionary of literary terms. The Penguin dictionary of literary terms and literary theory [print]
• The Bedford glossary of critical and literary terms [print]. A glossary of contemporary literary theory [print]
• Shakespeare's language : a glossary of unfamiliar words in Shakespeare's plays and poems [print].
• Shakespeare's bawdy. Dictionary of literary-rhetorical conventions of the English Renaissance [print]
• Classical myths and legends in the Middle Ages and Renaissance : a dictionary of allegorical meanings [print]

Literary criticism

• MLA International Bibliography. Contains scholarly articles on English literature, linguistics, language and folklore.
• Literature Online. A searchable library of more than 350,000 works of English and American poetry, drama and prose, full-text literature journals, and other key criticism and reference resources.
• Iter: Gateway to the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Index to Medieval and Renaissance journals and books.
• Shakespeare Survey Online. All issues of the Shakespeare Survey, a yearly publication since 1948 which publishes the best of international Shakespeare scholarship.
• World Shakespeare Bibliography. Annotated entries for all important books, articles, book reviews, dissertations, theatrical productions, reviews of productions, audiovisual materials, electronic media, and other scholarly and popular materials related to Shakespeare and published or produced between 1964 and early 2005.
• Oxford Bibliographies Online. Online index to bibliographies in Renaissance and Reformation with a bibliographical essay on sources.
• Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser World Bibliography. Online annotated bibliography of material by and about Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser.
• Literature Criticism Online. Full text access to six major Gale literary criticism series, covering literature from 1400 to the present.
• Project MUSE Search. Full text access to the back files of Humanities and Social Science Journals; Good English Literature content.
• JSTOR. Full text access to the back files of Humanities and Social Science Journals; Good English Literature content. Note content in JSTOR is 3-5 years old.

Primary sources

• Early English Books Online (EEBO). A library of over 100,000 individual titles from 1473-1700. Online digital images are available for every page.
• State Papers Online. A resource for the study of Early Modern Britain and Europe. It reproduces original historical manuscripts in facsimile, linking each manuscript to its corresponding fully-searchable Calendar entry. Available parts include: Part I: The Tudors, 1509-1603: Domestic and Part II: The Tudors, 1509-1603: Foreign
• British Literary Manuscripts. Scans of letters and diaries, poems, plays, novels, religious writings, and similar materials from 1100-1900.
• Digital Scriptorium. Medieval and Renaissance manuscripts [Columbia University]
• Map of Early Modern London. Maps the streets, sites, and significant boundaries of late sixteenth-century and early seventeenth-century London (1560-1640). The project links encyclopedia-style articles, scholarly work, student work, editions, and literary texts to the places mentioned therein [University of Victoria].
• Bodleian Library Broadside Ballads. Digitized copies of the sheets and ballads in several major collections. The original printed materials range from the 16th to the 20th century.
• English Broadside Ballad Archive. Website dedicated to early ballads in English, especially 17th-century broadside ballads; provides full transcriptions and images of the originals, search facilities, sung versions of ballads, and background essays [Early Modern Center, University of California-Santa Barbara].
• The Shakespeare Quartos Archive. A digital collection of pre-1642 editions of William Shakespeare's plays.
• Treasures in Full: Shakespeare in Quarto. Copies of the 107 plays by Shakespeare printed in quarto before the 1642 theatre closures [British Library].
• Internet Shakespeare Editions. Shakespeare-related resources, including fully annotated texts of his plays and poems, exciting multimedia materials and records of his plays in performance, and thousands of searchable pages devoted to the history, arts, politics, society, and stage of Shakespeare's world, as well as biographical details of his life [University of Victoria]

Images & film

Related topics

History

Religion

• The Oxford encyclopedia of the Reformation [online]
• The age of Reformation : the Tudor and Stewart realms, 1485-1603 [print]
• Renaissance and Reformation, 1500-1620 : a biographical dictionary [print or online]
• Bible in English. A collection of 20 different versions of the English Bible from the tenth to the twentieth century, including 12 full Bibles, 5 New Testament texts, 2 versions of the Gospels only, and William Tyndale's translations of the Pentateuch, Jonah and the New Testament.
• The Book of Common Prayer - 1559. Online version of the 1559 edition of the Book of Common Prayer.  Includes background information and links to other resources.
• Digital Library of Classic Protestant Texts. More than 1,200 works from the Reformation and post-Reformation eras, including the theological writings of more than 300 Protestant authors, as well as confessional documents, biblical commentaries, polemical treatises, and Bible translations.
• Digital Library of the Catholic Reformation. Includes over 450,000 pages of primary-source material from the 16th and 17th Centuries, including all the key catechisms, scholarly treatises, papal documents, devotional works, and theological volumes that sparked and sustained the reform from within the Catholic Church.
• ATLA Religion Database. Indexes journal articles on all aspects of religion and theology, including church and religious history.

Theatre

• English professional theatre, 1530-1660 [print]
• English Renaissance theatre history : a reference guide [print]
• The English stage : a history of drama and performance [print]
• The Shakespearean stage 1574-1642 [print]
• The Shakespeare Company, 1594-1642 [print]
• Playgoing in Shakespeare's London [print]
• The Shakespearian playing companies [print or online]
• Staging in Shakespeare's theatres [print]
• The Elizabethan stage [print]
• Annals of English drama, 975-1700 [print]
• Database of Early English Playbooks (DEEP). Contains early modern plays and playwrights with additional information, such as genre, dates of first publication and production.
• Records of Early English Drama (REED): Patrons & Performances. A wide range of data about professional performers on tour in the provinces – their patrons, the performance venues they used and the routes they took across the kingdom.
• Shakespeare's Globe. An international online resource dedicated to further the understanding of Shakespeare in performance.

Additional sources

• Early English Prose Fiction. More than 200 full text works which provide a representative view of prose fiction by writers from the British Isles from the period 1500-1700.
• Project Gutenberg. Provides access to free eBooks.
• Luminarium: Anthology of English Literature. Provides information on medieval, renaissance, 17th and 18th century authors, with the full text of selected works, and additional materials including biographical sketches, book reviews, essays, and graphics.
• Renascence Editions. An online repository of works printed in English between the years 1477 and 1799.
• Early Modern Literary Studies (Electronic Texts). Links to select electronic texts of fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth century materials.
• Oxford Text Archive. A repository of full-text literary and linguistic resources
• Perseus Digital Library Project - Renaissance Materials. Digital versions of primary and secondary sources in early modern English literature [Tufts University].
• Representative Poetry Online. English poems by over 700 poets, from Caedmon, in the Old English period, to the work of living poets today. It is based on Representative Poetry, established by Professor W. J. Alexander of University College, University of Toronto.
• Spenser and the Tradition: English Poetry 1579-1830
• Early Stuart Libels: An Edition of Poetry. Web-based edition of early seventeenth-century political poetry from manuscript sources.
• The Complete Works of William Shakespeare
• Centre for Early Modern Studies. From Oxford University, a central forum for research, conferences and graduate study.
• Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies
• Voice of the Shuttle: Literature (In English)
• Literary Resources -  Renaissance
• Renaissance Sites and Elizabethan Resources
• Early Modern Resources. A research portal for the early modern period (c.1500-1800 CE) which only lists websites that are free to access