Early English Books and Manuscripts: Internet Resources

More than 25,000 early English texts from 1473-1700 have been released online to members of the public as part of a collaborative initiative led by the University of Oxford's Bodleian Libraries and the University of Michigan Library

Hathi Trust Digital Library has some titles from the 1700-1900s in pdf format.

Internet Archive is “a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form.” It has various resources, including pdf formats.

Project Gutenberg is a library of over 60,000 free eBooks. Choose among free epub and Kindle eBooks, download them or read them online. You will find the world's great literature here, with focus on older works for which U.S. copyright has expired. Thousands of volunteers digitized and diligently proofread the eBooks, for enjoyment and education.

Translations of almost 79% of all extant Old English poetry can be found here (that’s 23,662 lines out of about 30,000 extant lines).

The Camelot Project is designed to make available a database of Arthurian texts, images, bibliographies, and basic information. The project, begun in 1995, is sponsored by the University of Rochester and prepared in The Rossell Hope Robbins Library, located in Rush Rhees Library.

The Beinecke Library at Yale University has digitized more than a million images of collection material and made them available to the public. The Library also hosts digitized exhibitions.

BHO was founded by the Institute of Historical Research and the History of Parliament Trust in 2003. Our collection currently contains over 1,270 volumes and is always growing.
To 30 September 2020 we're making all transcribed BHO content freely available for individual users. This adds 200 volumes of primary materials. As a result, BHO's full complement of 1280 volumes is now available for research.

The Digitised Manuscripts site contains many different kinds of manuscripts, archives and documents. Much of the content available here has been digitised as part of the British Library’s digitisation projects. Included is the St. Cuthbert Gospel, the Book of Margery Kempe, Beowulf, and many other medieval manuscripts. Many of their most important medieval manuscripts are being digitized and added to the website on an ongoing basis, as part of the Library’s commitment to the preservation and conservation of these manuscripts, and to providing access to all who would like to do research on them.

"Cambridge University Library collections represent an invaluable contribution to world heritage spanning four thousand years of human thought. Cambridge Digital Library seeks to open up this knowledge to the widest possible global audience, for research, for education or for simple curiosity and wonder.”

Digitized Collections from the Harry Ransom Center including the Medieval and Early Modern Manuscripts Collection
Medieval and Early Modern Manuscripts Collection which contains more than 300 manuscripts and fragments of manuscripts made by Europeans between the eleventh and seventeenth centuries.

This site provides materials for Harvard University's Chaucer classes in the Core Program, the English Department, and the Division of Continuing Education. (Others of course are welcome to use it.) It provides a wide range of glossed Middle English texts and translations of analogues relevant to Chaucer's works, as well as selections from relevant works by earlier and later writers, critical articles from a variety of perspectives, graphics, and general information on life in the Middle Ages. At the moment the site concentrates on the Canterbury Tales, but the longer-term goal is to create a more general Chaucer page.

The Folger Shakespeare Library, established on Capitol Hill in 1932 as a gift to the American people, is home to the world’s largest collection of First Folios, the book that gave us Shakespeare. In addition to the digitized version of Shakespeare's plays, you can learn more about the First Folio and see other treasures from the Shakespeare collection.

The John Milton Reading Room at Dartmouth College contains the complete poetry and selected prose of John Milton, with introductions, research guides, and hyperlinked annotations.

Full text and translation of the meetings of the English parliament from Edward I to Henry VII, covering the years from 1272 to 1504. All surviving records of the parliaments, including many texts never before published, are given in full, with new scholarly introductions to each parliament.