Renaissance Studies – Resources

↓ ↓ ↓ Skip to Useful Links on this subject ↓ ↓ ↓

Medieval and Renaissance studies tend to be a somewhat boring subject for most people, but if you dive deeper and really learn the importance of it, you’ll enter an entirely new world. When the dark and frightening medieval times came to pass, it gave rise to a new world of greater morality and human creativity.

Escaping Dark Times

The Middle Ages began shortly after the fall of Rome. Tragically, a very large portion of all the ancient Greek and Roman knowledge was lost during this time.

Remembering the great giants of the ancient world, amazing thinkers of the renaissance began a quest to find and revive the many lost sciences of the past.

A Rebirth of the Human Intellect

Unlike the Middle Ages where only a select group of people were deemed worthy enough to partake of receiving education and expanding knowledge, the Renaissance period began to flip this way of thinking upside down. With the rise of a philosophy called Humanism, all people that made up the society for renaissance times were deemed worthy to receive both basic and higher education.

Paving the Way To Modern Civilization

After this vital time period, renaissance teaching paved the way to early modern civilization. Our world’s everyday life is built upon the work of this period’s artists, architects, and philosophers. Most people take their freedom for granted to be able to read, write, and have virtually unlimited access to expand their knowledge. This is all possible because of the giants in the Renaissance that fought for the rights of future generations.

Whether you are a student or late night browser, studying this time period of the world will help you to understand our world today and how we got here, to begin with. If you are an artist (painter or musician) or love science, you’ll receive incredible benefits from your renaissance and medieval studies. You’ll be absorbed into this incredible new world in no time.

Check our useful sources for Renaissance Studies subject:

• • Gateways
    Backstage

    http://www.backstage.ac.uk/

    a performing arts gateway for the UK – funded as part of the Research Support Libraries Programme

    Intute: Humanities

    http://www.intute.ac.uk/humanities/

    Medieval and Renaissance Studies Web

    http://wess.lib.byu.edu/index.php/Medieval_and_Renaissance_Studies

    Renaissance History

    http://www.academicinfo.net/histren.html

    and Renaissance Literature from Academic Info

    Voice of the Shuttle: Literature in English

    http://vos.ucsb.edu/browse.asp?id=3
• • Discussion groups
    JISCmail

    http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/index.htm

    national academic mailing list service facilitating discussion, collaboration and communication within the UK academic community and beyond
• • Organisations
    Arts and Humanities Research Council

    http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/Pages/default.aspx

    supporting research into the arts and humanities

    British Academy

    http://www.britac.ac.uk/

    the national academy for the humanities and the social sciences

    English Subject Centre

    http://www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/

    part of the Higher Education Academy – supports the teaching of English literature, language and creative writing in UK Higher Education

    Society for Renaissance Studies

    http://www.rensoc.org.uk/

    founded in 1967 to provide a forum for those interested in any aspect of the study of the Renaissance
• • Other sites of interest
    A2A

    http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/a2a/

    Access to archives contains catalogues describing archives held throughout England and dating from the 900s to the present day.

    British History Online

    http://www.british-history.ac.uk/

    from the Institute of Historical Research and the History of Parliament Trust

    Cambridge English Renaissance Electronic Service (CERES)

    http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/ceres/main.htm

    hosted by the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge and aimed at those working in the area of English Renaissance literature.

    Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies

    http://www.crrs.ca/

    the CRRS is a library and research centre devoted to the study of the period from approximately 1350 to 1700, from the University of Toronto

    Early Modern Cartographic Resources on the World Wide Web

    http://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/04-2/sanfinte.htm

    from Rhonda Lemke Sanford at the University of Colorado

    Early Modern England Source: Research Resources

    http://www.quelle.org/emes/research.html

    Many links to archives, bibliographies, libraries, Public Records Offices, e-journals and e-texts

    Elizabethan authors

    http://www.elizabethanauthors.com/

    texts, resources and authorship studies from Robert Brazil and Barboura Flues

    English handwriting 1500 – 1700

    http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/ceres/ehoc/

    an online course

    Gombrich Archive

    http://www.gombrich.co.uk/index.php

    articles and more from the art historian Professor Sir Ernst Gombrich

    John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs

    http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/foxe/index.html

    This Variorum Edition concentrates on the four English editions of Foxe’s martyrology published in London during his own lifetime: those of 1563 ; 1570 ; 1576 and 1583.

    Literary Resources – Renaissance

    http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Lit/ren.html

    part of the Literary Resources collection maintained by Jack Lynch, English Department, Rutgers University, Newark.

    Luminarium

    http://www.luminarium.org/renlit/

    16th Century Renaissance English Literature (1485-1603) – combines three sites first created in 1996 to provide a starting point for students and enthusiasts of English Literature.

    History of Medieval & Renaissance Europe

    http://eudocs.lib.byu.edu/index.php/History_of_Medieval_%26_Renaissance_Europe:_Primary_Documents

    Primary Historical Documents links to full text sites

    Online Literary Criticism Collection

    http://www.ipl.org/div/litcrit/

    From the Internet Public Library (IPL), can be browsed by author, by title, or by nationality and literary period.

    Perseus Renaissance Collection

    http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cache/perscoll_Renaissance.html

    A growing compilation of texts and resources pertaining to the early modern period in England. Begun with an electronic edition of the complete works of Christopher Marlowe, it now includes a facsimile of the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays and several resources from the period.

    Renaissance Electronic Texts

    http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/ret/ret.html

    A series of old-spelling, SGML-encoded editions of early individual copies of English Renaissance books and manuscripts, and of plain transcriptions of such works, published on the World Wide Web as a free resource for students of the period.

    Renaissance Festival books

    http://www.bl.uk/treasures/festivalbooks/homepage.html

    view 253 (selected from the British Library’s collection) that describe the magnificent festivals and ceremonies that took place in Europe between 1475 and 1700.

    Renaissance secrets

    http://www.open2.net/renaissancesecrets/

    (based in part on a television series) Open University/BBC, this site addresses four different historical questions, along with providing material on the practice and art of writing about and understanding history.

    Shakespeare in Quarto

    http://www.bl.uk/treasures/shakespeare/homepage.html

    the British Library’s 93 copies of the 21 plays by William Shakespeare printed in quarto before the theatres were closed in 1642.

    Sites on Shakespeare and the Renaissance

    http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Annex/links/index.html

    from Internet Shakespeare Editions

    Thomas Middleton: the collected works

    http://thomasmiddleton.org/index.php

    Touchstone

    http://www.touchstone.bham.ac.uk/welcome.html

    a research tool for Shakespeare research in the United Kingdom.