Selected Medieval and Early Modern Sources
The following resources are major tools for finding digitized texts related to the history of women and gender.
- Library of Congress Digital CollectionsOnline access to manuscripts, ephemera, images, maps, and more. Includes several sets of materials related to the suffrage movement.
- Defining Gender, 1450-1910 This link opens in a new window
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Contains primary source material from British and European archives, and includes four thematic areas: Conduct and Politeness, Domesticity and the Family, Consumption and Leisure, Education and Sensibility, and The Body. - Early English Books Online (EEBO) This link opens in a new window
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Citations from early English texts from 1475 to 1700, presented as digital images. Includes works by Malory, Bacon, More, Erasmus, Boyle, Newton, Galileo; musical exercises by Henry Purcell and novels by Aphra Behn; prayer books, pamphlets, and proclamations; almanacs, calendars, and many other primary sources. - Early English Books Online - Text Creation Partnership This link opens in a new windowSearchable SGML/XML text editions of image files contained in Early English Books Online.
- Empire Online
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Primary source manuscripts and secondary essays relevant to Empire Studies. The sections cover Cultural Contacts, 1492-1969; Empire Writing and the Literature of Empire; The Visible Empire; Religion and Empire; and Race, Class and Colonialism, 1783-1969.
- Medieval Family Life This link opens in a new window
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Five collections of family letters from 15th-century England. The database contains full-color images of the original medieval manuscripts, viewable side-by-side with searchable transcripts. - Medieval Travel Writing This link opens in a new window
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Presents manuscripts of some of the most important works of European travel writing from the later medieval period. The chief focus is on journeys to central Asia and the Far East, including accounts of travel to Mongolia, Persia, India, China and South-East Asia. The collection also includes a number of important accounts of travels to or through the Holy Land although in this it makes no claims to full or even broad coverage: a separate collection, covering crusading and pilgrimage narratives, would be required for that. - Women Writers Online This link opens in a new window
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A full-text collection of early women's writing in English, published by the Women Writers Project at Northeastern University. It includes full transcriptions of texts published between 1526 and 1850, focusing on materials that are rare or inaccessible and women's literate culture in the early modern period. - Archives of Latin American and Caribbean History, Sixteenth to Twentieth Century This link opens in a new window
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Over 1.3 million pages of archival material concerning Latin America and the Caribbean, including major collections about Latin American independence, Brazilian popular groups, Diplomatic activities in Cuba and more. Formerly known as Gale World Scholar: Latin America and the Caribbean, this database has been reorganized as Archives of Latin American and Caribbean History, Sixteenth to Twentieth Century. If you used this database under its former name, Gale World Scholar: Latin America and the Caribbean, you may be looking for some of the periodicals and reference books included in that database. Those have been moved to Gale’s Dictionary of Literary Biography and Gale eBooks
Manuscripts and Ephemera: Finding Aids and Indexes
Many historical materials are not available online, and housed only in archives or in harder to find publications. These discovery tools can help identify their holdings and locations.
- Online Archive of California (OAC) This link opens in a new windowCollection of online finding aids for special collections materials across California.
- UCLA Library Special CollectionsUCLA Library Special Collections is comprised of Charles E. Young Research Library Department of Special Collections; the Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library History of Science and Medicine Special Collections; the Performing Arts Special Collections; the University Archives; and the Center for Oral History Research. Collections include a wide variety of literary rare books, as well as manuscripts and archival collections relating to specific individuals and organizations.
- ArchiveGrid This link opens in a new window
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Searches finding aids for historical documents, personal papers, and family histories held in libraries, museums, and archives around the world. Researchers searching ArchiveGrid can learn about the items in each of these collections, contact archives to arrange a visit to examine materials, and order copies.