The Archaeology of Reading in Early Modern Europe (AOR) uses digital technologies to enable the systematic exploration of the historical reading practices of Renaissance scholars nearly 450 years ago. This is possible through AOR’s corpus of thirty-six fully digitized and searchable versions of early printed books filled with tens of thousands of handwritten notes, left by two of the most dedicated readers of the early modern period: John Dee and Gabriel Harvey.AOR presents a virtual library of many of Dee’s and Harvey’s most engaging and revealing annotated books. Their contents span a wide range of subjects, including agriculture, alchemy, ancient and medieval history, astrology, astronomy, humor, law, linguistics, mathematics, medicine, military theory, natural history, navigation, the occult, oratory, politics, poetry, and topography.

Stationers’ Register Online contains the entries for the literary, musical and artistic works made in the Registers of the Stationers’ Company of London between 1557 and 1640. Originally derived from Edward Arber’s edition of the Register, this release has corrected Arber against the original manuscript sources while retaining his notes and comments. Future releases will extend the period of coverage and add standardised names for persons and works. For all queries, contact the editors at editors@stationersregister.online

Designed for students, casual readers and specialists, the Petrarchive proposes a corrected diplomatic edition and a new edition of Petrarch’s songbook, the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (Canzoniere), together with multiple visual indexes to navigate, for the first time, Petrarch’s visual poetics and the material constructions of his songbook. We encourage users to first read our Instructions and consult the Glossary for conceptual and pragmatic use in order to have an overview of the core principles of the edition as well as directions on how to navigate the site.

This site aims to introduce Turkish Shakespeares to a broader international audience. You will find the latest news about Shakespeare in Türkiye, blog posts about the reception and production of Shakespeare in Türkiye, Performance Records and a Bibliography of Shakespeare in Türkiye.

Top pop from seventeenth-century England. Broadside ballads were single-sheet songs that sold for a penny a piece. This website concentrates on over 100 resoundingly successful examples that you can investigate through recordings, images and a wealth of other materials. Whether you are interested in music, art, love, gender, tragedy, politics, family life, crime, history, humour or death, you will find something to engage you here. 

"Measuring Polyphony" presents, for the first time, digitisations of polyphonic compositions copied in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century manuscripts in in mensural notation, and linked directly, where possible, to high-resolution images of the original manuscript sources, and MIDI audio files. The website offers new possibilities for mediating the scholarly and public experience of this richly evocative music within its original context. This project when the project director, Karen Desmond, was at the Schulich School of Music at McGill University, and now continues at Brandeis University. "Measuring Polyphony" leverages the potential of the rich digital image repositories of music manuscripts and the community-based standards for encoding music notation of the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI). 

"Truan’s project primarily entails the development of a comprehensive 3D virtual and interactive model of the early modern Corral del Príncipe, situated in Madrid during what is known as the Spanish Golden Age (1492–1681) and renowned for hosting plays (comedias) by esteemed writers such as Félix Lope de Vega and Pedro Calderón de la Barca. In its architectural essence, the project mirrors the various endeavours of those who have used The Sims to reconstruct other theatres, such as Shakespeare’s Globe, a structure contemporary with many Spanish corrales.2 This connection to the Globe and Shakespeare, one of the most well-known early modern writers, coupled with the relative accessibility of the reconstruction provided by The Sims and YouTube, boosts the potential of Truan’s project to significantly enhance the visibility of the corrales and the broader cultural expression they represent." (Reviewed by Eduardo Paredes Ocampo)

A database by Ana Valdemoros and David Amelang. The aim of this database is to highlight the many characters across early modern European theatre who, at some point in their stories, present themselves publicly and externally in attire that at the time would not have been associated with their gender. It is designed to be a resource for scholars and practitioners who wish to study the performance of gender transnationally in the early modern period. Much work has been done on some sections of literature from the period, and the database offers a starting point for queries made possible by expanded understandings of gender and sexuality.

Use this resource to explore early modern English ayres—songs c. 1590–1660 featuring the clear expression of text. View editions featuring variant lyrics and musical notation; read scholarly essays about cultural context; and listen to audio recordings of historically informed performances. Our beta website features the songs of Henry Lawes’s 1653 Ayres and Dialogues, a previously unedited compilation of songs in the declamatory style, emphasizing the speech-like rhythms of verse. The next stage of the project will focus on the ayres of the Shakespearean stage.

Queen’s Men Editions is a collaborative site, created by an international body of scholars, theatre practitioners, and digital developers, all working to achieve the same goals: to inspire a love of early theatre beyond Shakespeare; to recover the plays associated with the Queen’s Men in particular as enjoyable, teachable, and performable theatrical texts; and to present those texts in a richly linked, open-access, online environment.

In May 2003, EBBA set its sights first on digitizing the largest extant collection of English broadside ballads published in the 17th century: the five volumes of ballads collected by Samuel Pepys held at Magdalene College, Cambridge. With seed monies and then more substantial funding, the full archiving of the Pepys Collection of over 1,800 ballads was completed. Our next undertaking, with continued funding, was to archive the second largest collection of English 17th century black-letter ballads: the four volumes (in five books) of Roxburghe Ballads held at the British Library, London, some 1,500 broadside ballads. In 2010, EBBA began archiving the Euing collection of 408 black-letter ballads held at the University of Glasgow as well as the approximately 600 early broadside ballads at the Huntington Library in Pasadena (including the many broadside ballads collected in the 17th century by Narcissus Luttrell and later bound in what is known as the Bindley collection; the invaluable Britwell collection of some 90 loose black-letter ballads of the 16th century; and many other bound and loose sheets not in named collections). Between 2012 and 2014, we fully archived the broadside ballad collections from the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh, including the important Crawford Collection. We are currently archiving the more than 1,150 broadside ballads in the collections of Harvard University's Houghton Library.

The Digital Splitleaf was made possible by recent advances in web-based music technology, allowing dynamic musical content to be displayed directly in your browser. Unlike many image-based music apps, this platform is lightweight and accessible—no high-speed internet or large downloads required. It also offers unmatched flexibility in pairing psalm texts with tunes, something static formats cannot support. Built using open-source software maintained by active scholarly and developer communities, the Digital Splitleaf adheres to current standards of preservation for both text and music. It is designed not only for ease of use, but also for long-term sustainability and accessibility.

A multisensory work of the past is explored through multimedia technologies of the present. A team of experts headed by Volker Schier and Corine Schleif opens the Geese Book to scholars and provides a window for broader audiences. Completed in 1510 for the parish of St. Lorenz in Nuremberg, this large-format gradual preserves the mass liturgy that was sung by choir boys until the Reformation was introduced in 1525. Provocative and satirical illuminations include the one from which the book takes its name. Many medieval manuscripts are too valuable and vulnerable to be handled. Digitally, however, these 2 volumes can now be touched by everyone.

The Répertoire International des Sources Musicales (RISM) - International Inventory of Musical Sources - is an international, non-profit organization that aims to comprehensively document extant musical sources worldwide: manuscripts, printed music editions, writings on music theory, and libretti that are found in libraries, archives, churches, schools, and private collections. RISM Online, a service from the RISM Digital Center provides access to these musical sources through extensive search and browse functions. Multiple entry points, with extensive Source, Person, and Institution search interfaces, provide users with the ability to quickly narrow down relevant results using several different approaches, including keyword searches, filters, and relationship information.

"Polish Digital Scores is part of a larger project entitled Polish Music Heritage in Open Access run by the Fryderyk Chopin Institute, which seeks to provide access to “the most important and representative works of Polish music from the 16th to 19th centuries.”12 Between August 2019 and July 2022, the project generated high-resolution images of over 25,000 musical sources, making them available for download as JPEG, TIFF and PDF files. It also created or updated the records of nearly 34,000 Polish musical sources in the Répertoire International des Sources Musicales(RISM) database (rism.info).This represents a dramatic expansion and improvement of Polish representation in RISM, as almost one-third of the nearly 98,000 Polish records in the database have been added or edited by this project. Such a collaboration of digitization units and cataloguers would be impressive in any three-year span, but it is even more so considering the limited access that project workers had to musical sources during COVID-19 lockdowns." (Reviewed by Timothy Duguid)

The aim of Early Music Sources is to simplify the access to the vast amount of online early music sources. The sources database as well as the iconography database enable quick search and gateway to sources according to various categories. For further research you may refer to RISM (sources) and RIDIM (iconography). In addition to the databases, Early Music Sources also features a youtube series dealing with various topics relating to early music and Early Music Sources PIE (=please in English), that supports the translations and online free publication of sources that were never translated or published in our times. 

Before Shakespeare explores the beginnings of playhouses and theatrical culture in England. We champion an expansive and collaborative theatre history: join us to think about how and why we can learn about our theatrical past via a range of approaches, from social history to twenty-first century performance. This website includes years’ of resources, blogs, and conversations about sixteenth-century theatrical culture. It includes first-hand research-in-progress reports, images and transcriptions of archival documents, and performance reviews of plays to commentary on authorship. We are also working with theatremaker Emma Frankland on her production of John Lyly’s brilliant play, Galatea (1584).

The Making and Knowing Project, founded in 2014 by Pamela H. Smith, and involving hundreds of collaborators, is a research and pedagogical initiative in the Center for Science and Society at Columbia University. The Project explores the intersections between historical craft making and scientific knowing. Drawing on techniques from both laboratory and archival research as well as studio practice and the digital humanities, the Making and Knowing Project aims to cross the science/humanities divide. The creation of Secrets of Craft and Nature in Renaissance France has been the Project’s primary endeavor since 2014. This goal has shaped the Project’s methodology of fusing pedagogy with research, using a focused research object (Ms. Fr. 640) to teach historical, hands-on, and digital research methods while generating research outputs.

Digital Dante offers original research and ideas on Dante: on his thought and work and on various aspects of his reception. Though our editorial structure is that of an academic journal, we do not publish prose essays, instead showcasing work that intersperses prose with visual components. We accept contributions from scholars and Dante lovers around the world. We feature original scholarship on Dante in three different contexts: 1) The Commento Baroliniano is the first online commentary to the Divine Comedy. The Commento is an original work written expressly for Digital Dante and it distills a lifetime of scholarship. 2) Intertextual Dante is a vehicle for intertextual study of the Divine Comedy developed by Julie Van Peteghem and featuring her original scholarship on Dante and Ovid. 3) Image, Sound, History and Text are the categories through which we present original pieces contributed by artists, philosophers, and scholars from around the world.

The King’s Women project explores the lives and socio-familial networks of the women who were connected to Shakespeare’s acting company. The mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters of members of the Lord Chamberlain’s, later the King’s, Men (1594-1642) have received scant scholarly attention, and frequently remain peripheral in the historical record. We draw on a variety of sources and employ collaborative methodology to reconstruct and better understand the women’s experiences and contributions. By scrutinising evidence found in wills, token books, parish registers, legal documentation, and miscellaneous other sources, we reconstruct previously overlooked aspects of the women's lives and deaths, encounter new information about them, and challenge some existing scholarly assumptions.