The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 20.0490  Friday, 18 September 2009

From:       Al Magary <
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Date:       Friday, 18 Sep 2009 12:05:14 -0700
Subject:    Holinshed's Chronicles

Forwarded from H-Net List for British and Irish History 
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Posting by Ian Archer <
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Dear Colleagues,

I am pleased to announce a new freely available resource for all those 
interested in historical writing (and much else besides) in the early 
modern period: Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland and Wales.

An Oxford based team comprising myself (History, Oxford), Dr Felicity 
Heal (History, Oxford), Dr Paulina Kewes (English, Oxford), and Dr Henry 
Summerson (The Oxford Holinshed Project Research Assistant) has been 
working on a parallel text electronic edition of Holinshed's Chronicles. 
The Chronicles are best known as the source text for many of 
Shakespeare's plays, but they were a gold mine for other dramatists and 
poets, and for lawyers, politicians, and general readers. We've been 
aware for a long time of the existence of differences between the two 
editions of 1577 and 1587, but systematic analysis has proved elusive 
because of the sheer volume of the texts. What we offer is a means of 
reading the two editions alongside each other, a privilege hitherto only 
available to those in particularly well endowed libraries. Users with 
access to EEBO will be able to move from our edition to the EBO hosted 
facsimiles of the pages.

The edition would have been impossible without the co-operation of 
EEBO-TCP who undertook the keying of the 1577 edition (in addition to 
the 1587 edition already on their site), as well as granting us 
permission to make use of the two texts in our version.

We have also benefited from the assistance of the Research Services Team 
at Oxford University Computing Services who developed the TEI Comparator 
Tool, enabling comparison between the two texts. We think that this tool 
may be of use to other projects. See the link to James Cummings' blog below.

The resource is freely available, and has been funded by Oxford 
University's Fell Fund.

To access the texts go to:

http://www.english.ox.ac.uk/holinshed/

But you can get there from the project website:

http://www.cems.ox.ac.uk/holinshed/

I send you there simply to alert you to the amount of additional 
content, including a comprehensive analysis of the sources behind the 
Chronicles undertaken by Henry Summerson.

http://www.cems.ox.ac.uk/holinshed/chronicles.shtml

There is also a comprehensive Holinshed bibliography, and a number of 
working papers.

To read James Cummings' blog and to find out more about the TEI 
Comparator Tool, go to:

http://blogs.oucs.ox.ac.uk/jamesc/2009/09/04/tei-comparator/

The parallel text edition is one of several outputs envisaged by the 
Oxford Holinshed Project. We have commissioned forty essays which will 
be published by OUP as The Oxford Handbook to Holinshed's Chronicles in 
2011. We also hope to receive funding to enhance the electronic edition 
with scholarly annotation.

All best wishes,
Ian W. Archer
Keble College, Oxford, OX1 3PG
Acting Warden, Keble College
Fellow and Tutor in Modern History
General Editor, Royal Historical Society Bibliography on British History
Literary Director, Royal Historical Society


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