British Literary Manuscripts Online

Representing the largest text-to-digital project of its kind, British Literary Manuscripts Online consists of two collections, British Literary Manuscripts Online, c.1660-1900 and British Literary Manuscripts Online: Medieval and Renaissance. Together, these priceless collections — once available only on microfilm or to those with access to the source libraries — enable researchers to view manuscripts page-by-page or preview and apprehend the entire work via the thumbnail view in a way that would never have been possible with the physical copy.

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British Literary Manuscripts Online: c. 1660-1900

The first installment in this series provides intimate glimpses into the lives and works of famous and lesser-known British authors from a significant two hundred-year literary period. It includes thousands of pages of poems, plays, essays, novels, diaries, journals, correspondence, and other manuscripts from the Restoration through the Victorian era.

British Literary Manuscripts Online: Medieval and Renaissance

The second part of British Literary Manuscripts Online series, British Literary Manuscripts Online: Medieval and Renaissance offers students and researchers unprecedented online access to nearly 400,000 pages of rare manuscripts from the Medieval and Early Modern periods, c.1100 to 1660. Researchers and students can explore a rich tapestry of letters, poems, stories, plays, chronicles, religious writings, and commonplace books through searchable online catalog records. Scholars will find important cultural and historical sources, like the 1488 manuscripts of Barbour's Life and Acts of Robert the Bruce.

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Researchers can see the frequency of search terms within sets of content to begin identifying central themes and assessing how individuals, places, events, and ideas interact and develop over time.

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By grouping commonly occurring themes, this tool reveals hidden connections within search terms—helping to shape research by integrating diverse content with relevant information.

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Search across the materials of complementary primary source products, including books, in one united, intuitive environment, enabling innovative new research connections.

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