The Virtual Representation of the Past - Primary Sources - Collections

American Centuries: View from New England
A digital collection of around 1,800 objects and transcribed document pages illustrating the history of New England, U.S.A.

The Auchinleck Manuscript
The Auchinleck Manuscript provides a unique insight into the English language and literature that influenced Chaucer and his generation. The site offers a full transcription and digital facsimile of the manuscript with search facilities and background information on the origins and importance of the manuscript.

The Avalon Project
Online access to primary source documents relating to law, history, economics, politics, diplomacy and government, searchable by keyword or category.

Bodleian Library - Images
Scans of Bodleian Library manuscripts, arranged by century and country of origin.

Britain's Small Wars 1945 - 2005
Digital sources from the various military engagements in which British Forces have played a part in the twentieth century. Includes recollections, images and accounts.

British History Online
A digital library of British historical sources that enables cross-searching of a range of historical sources. Resources date from the 12th century with a comprehensive bibliographic reference for each one.

Byzantine monastic foundation documents
Electronic version of these documents that offers details and translations of Byzantine 'Typika' from the seventh to the fifteenth centuries. Includes over fifty distinct documents with historical introductions.

CELT Corpus of Electronic Texts
Electronic versions of Irish cultural, historical, and literary texts with introductions, translations, scholarly bibliographies and images. Texts can be browsed and searched with an experimental interface.

Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music
Archive of digital images of European sources of medieval polyphonic music, captured directly from the original document and suitable for detailed study.

The Digital Duderstadt Municipal Archive
The full archive of the German city of Duderstadt before 1600, available in digital form.

The Digital Scriptorium
An image database of medieval and renaissance manuscripts that brings together resources from many international institutions into a single tool for teaching and scholarly research.

Digitisation of Renaissance Festival Books in the Collections of the British Library
Access to 253 digitised Renaissance festival books describing festivals and ceremonies that took place in Europe between 1475 and 1700. The books can be read online and searched using indices. Contextual information about festivals is also available from a range of other sources.

Early English Books Online
Digital facsimile page images of nearly all works printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and British North America, and works in English printed elsewhere, from 1473-1700.

Eighteenth Century Collections Online
A comprehensive digital library of Eighteenth-Century printed books covering all subjects. Titles were published in English-speaking countries, or countries under British colonial rule. Requires a subscription.

English Episcopal Acta
All English episcopal acta - bishops’ charters and documents - from 1066 to 1300, or until the beginning of bishops’ registers in each diocese. The acta are available in print and electronically.

A Historical Corpus of the Welsh language
A collection of Welsh texts from the period 1500-1850 made available in an electronically searchable format for use in linguistic, literary and historical research. Includes texts and samples of texts from different stylistic levels and of varying geographical provenance.

The National Archives
The website of the National Archives, the UK government's official archive, containing records over 900 years. Includes military records, migration records, manorial documents register, equity pleadings, and the National Register of Archives.

The Newcastle Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English
A corpus of dialect speech from Tyneside in North-East England. The corpus is Text Encoding Initiative (TEI)-conformant XML-encoded and available as digitized audio, standard orthographic transcription, phonetic transcription, and part-of-speech tagged.

North County Digital History
Digital access to the varied collections of libraries, archives, historical document repositories, museums, and galleries throughout Northern New York.

The Parliament Rolls of Medieval England
Fully searchable texts and translation of the meetings of the English parliament from Edward I to Henry VII with specimen images. Includes new scholarly introductions and previously unavailable information about the documents.

Plebeian Lives and the Making of Modern London, 1690-1800
A digital archive of manuscript and printed sources concerning the lives of ordinary people in eighteenth-century London. The project enables the anaylsis of multiple digital resources focused on poor relief, criminal justice, and medical care.

The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674-1913
A searchable text-base of one of the largest bodies of published text detailing the lives and experiences of non-elite people. The resource contains details of 100,000 trials held at the Old Bailey.

The Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War
A project detailing life in two American communities during the Civil War, one Northern and one Southern. The archive includes letters and diaries, newspapers and speeches and census and church records.