• Introduction
• Journals, Texts & Collections
• blogs
• Elizabethan and Jacobean Ideas

Related Linked Pages:

• Shakespeare's Contemporaries

Introduction

Top

• A List of Pre-eminent Ethical Treatises of the 16th Century in conjectural order of importance. Compiled by Ben Schneider.
• The Age of Shakespeare, by Algernon Charles Swinburne.
• The Annenberg/CPB Renaissance Project
• Bartlett's Famous Quotations (1901) will contain brief yet memorable (or perhaps not so memorable, thus the need for the work) quotes from many of Shakespeare's contemporaries.
• Cahiers Elisabethains.  A Biannual Journal of Enlish Renaissance Studies, with archives in abstract in PDF.
• Canons of Renaissance Poetry, from the Wikipedia.
• Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies.
• Centre for Research in Early English Drama  (U of Toronto).
• The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy by Jacob Burckhardt.
• Computers and Texts is the journal/newsletter of the CTI Centre for Textual Studies.  
• Connotations A Journal for Critical Debate
• CERES: Cambridge English Renaissance Electronic Service, including a large set of links, the CERES newsletter along with archives, and an under construction bulletin board which will contain notices, conferences, and seminar programmes.  An outstanding guide to Renaissance related sites and happenings.
• Early Modern Culture, an electronic seminar, conducted by Crystal Bartolovich and David Siar.  "With Early Modern Culture, we have tried to create an on-line space for something like the active and on-going inquiry of a good seminar. Hence, what you will find at this site are four works-in-progress by major scholars in early modern studies, along with a set of responses from readers--some junior, some senior--working on similar topics. With this format, our desire is to open a conversation, and make explicit how much all our work depends upon such opportunities for careful reading, as well as critical (in the best sense of that word) exchange."   
• Early Modern Literary Studies: Electronic Texts: This is an outstanding resource with links to lots of primary documents. Jonson, Marlowe, Lyly, Nashe, Daniel, Sidney, Spenser, Raleigh, Montaigne--all the usual suspects are here. 
• The Early Modern Italian Renaissance (Washington State).
• The equally wonderful Electronic Text Center for the English Drama at the University of Virginia .
• The Elizabethan Review.   An on-line journal with as yet a very limited offering.
• Exemplaria: A Journal of Theory in Medieval and Renaissance Studies.
• The English Renaissance in Context, from the Furness Shakespeare Library.
• The Furness Shakespeare Library at the University of Pennsylvania.  With prefatory materials and notes by Dr. Rebecca Bushnell.  A spectacular, must see sight unique for high quality scans of primary documents.
• General Characteristics of the Renaissance, adapted from A Guide to the Study of Literature: A Companion Text for Core Studies 6, Landmarks of Literature, English Department, Brooklyn College, by Lilia Melani.
• Jack Lynch's searchable index of literary resources on the Internet. A five diamond site if there ever was one.
• The Luminarium Encylcopedia Project.
• Major English Poets of the 17th Century.
• The Oxford Text Archive.
• The Perdita Project - Early Modern Women's Manuscript Compilations.
• The Plague and Public Health in Renaissance Europe.
• Renascence Editions.  "An online repository of works printed in English between the years 1477 and 1799."  Over 200 transcribed editions of Renaissance works in PDF and HTLM formats.
• Records of Early English Drama (REED).
• Renaissance Electronic Texts: Some good related html texts.
• Renaissance: The Elizabethan World, with special features on:
  • Heralds and Heraldry in Elizabethan England
  • Blazons of the Ancient Paternal Arms of the Peers of England
  • A Primer of Blazonry: A Visual Introduction to Heraldry

This is a well designed, useful, even exciting (not to say too much for non-afficianados) site.

• The excellent Renaissance Forum.
• A very comprehensive page of links to on-line Renaissance texts.
• The Richard III Society. Regardless whether you think him the rough beast who snuffed the innocents in the Tower, or a man more sinned against than sinning, you will want to visit this site. It has become one of the best on the web for content and scholarly standards. Definitely a five diamond site. Of particular interest is the Ricardian Online Bookshelf.
• Saintsbury, George. Elizabethan & Jacobean Pamphlets. New York: Macmillan, 1892.   A full view book from Google Book Search without accompanying downloadable PDF, 288 pages.
• Seventeenth Century Literary Texts, some Donne and Milton of interest.
• The Shakespeare Bulletin.  Tables of contents from all editions, and selected full text of the high quality articles articles online.
• Shakespeare Magazine.
• SHAKSPER, The Global Electronic Shakespeare Conference: "SHAKSPER is the international electronic conference for Shakespearean researchers, instructors, students, and those who share their academic interests and concerns. It currently includes approximately 1,300 SHAKSPEReans..."  An indispensable resource!
• Links to many texts related to Sixteenth & Seventeenth Century authors.
• Much of the work of this section has already been done by Anniina Jokinen in Sixteenth Century Renaissance English Literature. This is the best compilation of texts of which I am aware. Links will be found here to texts by Sir Thomas More, John Skelton, Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder, Henry Howard, Sir Philip Sidney, Spenser, Marlowe, Elizabeth I, Lyly, Nashe, Richard Hooker, Raleigh, Thomas Hariot, Thomas Campion, Daniel, Drayton, Aemilia Lanyer (dark lady detectives, take note), and others. 
• The Society for Renaissance Studies.
• Subject Index to Articles, Review Articles, and Notes published in Cahiers Elisabethains Numbers 1-40 (1972-91). Compiled by Angela R. Maguin.
• The Universite Paul Valery at Montpellier will lead you to the Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches sur la Renaissance Anglaise, and eventually to the Cahiers Elisabethains.
• The wonderful Voice of the Shuttle Renaissance & 17th Century texts. 

• The EMLS WWW Accessible Sites list.

• Mr. William Shakespeare and the Internet: the blog, the companion blog to this web site.
   
• Blogging the Renaissance
• Carnivalesque, the blog dedicated to early modern history.
• Early Modern Notes, by Sharon Howard.
• News from Renascence Editions by Risa Bear.
• Renaissance Lit, by Adam Smyth.
• Textual Studies, 1500-1800, by Kevin Curran.
• TudorHistory.org blog, by Lara Eakins, with consistently useful information and links.
• TudorStuff: Tudor History from the Heart of England, by Andrew Walsh and Victoria Taylor.
• Wynken De Worde, maintained by Sarah Werner, director of the undergraduate program at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

The Great Chain of Being

• Wikipedia article on The Great Chain of Being.
• "How We Think, or The Great Chain of Being," by Donna Moran.
• "The Chain of Being: Tillyard in a Nutshell," by L. Kip Wheeler.  The web site may have problems loading, so here is the same summary in PDF [130K] which is slow but seems to be more reliable.
• Alexander Pope's An Essay on Man, from Google Book Search, full view and PDF.  This is going rather far afield from the Renaissance, but the idea of the Great Chain of Being held sway from Aristotle through Pope, in whom it reached its most elegant summarizer.
• The Chain of Being in the context of King Lear, by Jami Rogers, from the RSC.
• The Great Chain of Being, from Dr. Herman Asarnow at the University of Portland.
• FAIRIES, PORTENTS, AND THE GREAT CHAIN:PRETERNATURAL PHENOMENA AND ITS MEANING IN THREE SHAKESPEARE PLAYS by Patrick Galloway.
• "His Nature Is Too Noble for the World" by Diana Major Spencer writing for the Utah Shakespeare Festival.

Important Modern Books on the Great Chain of Being

• The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea, by Arthur O. Lovejoy.
• The Elizabethan World Picture, by E. M. W. Tillyard.

Purgatory

• Fernie, Ewan.  "Greenblatt in Purgatory," a review of Greenblatt's Hamlet in Purgatory, in Renaissance Forum, 6.1.
• Rist, Thomas.  "Religion, Politics, Revenge: The Dead in Renaissance Drama," in EMLS 9.1.
• Introduction to The Gast of Gy, edited by Edward E. Foster, originally published in Three Purgatory Poems, Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications, 2004.  Though of 14th century origin the doctrines of purgatory related in the Gast are important for an understanding of the Renaissance understanding.
• Text of The Gast of Gy, edited by Edward E. Foster, originally published in Three Purgatory Poems, Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications, 2004, with extensive explanatory notes.
• A Supplicacyon for the Beggers written about the year 1529, and (as is believed) by Simon Fish, "now re-edited by Frederick J. Furnivall, from Google Book Search, full view and PDF.  Fish's reformist attack on the Catholic doctrine of purgatory was influential with Henry VIII in his eventual break with the Roman Church.

Important Modern Book on Purgatory

• Hamlet in Purgatory, by Stephen Greenblatt.