History 191C-3

A Golden Age? Assessing Elizabethan England

Fall 2006

 

Library Research Guide

 

Ellen Broidy

Librarian for Anglo-American History

ejbroidy@library.ucla.edu

825-1324

 

This guide is designed as an introduction to print ("real") and online ("virtual") resources critical for accessing materials on topics in Elizabethan history at the UCLA Library, especially those useful for completing the third paper assignment for History 191C. It is extremely selective, both in terms of the sources cited and the research strategies recommended. In other words, there is a lot more out there

 

I.                   Primary Sources

 

Your assignment requires you to identify and analyze a primary source on any aspect of Elizabethan England that interests you. This is a two-step process: first, selecting a topic and then identifying a primary source on that topic.

 

Primary sources increasingly appear in digital as well as print (hardcopy) formats. Here are some suggested strategies for identifying primary documents as well as actual “repositories” of these materials.

 

a.      Using the UCLA Online Catalog

http://catalog.library.ucla.edu

 

The online catalog (or OPAC) is the front door to UCLA’s vast collections. It lists our holdings by author, title, keyword(s) and Library of Congress Subject Headings.

 

Try these keywords to locate primary materials on Elizabethan England:

 

Elizabethan England sources

 

Queen Elizabeth I sources

 

England 16th century sources

 

Tudor documents

 

Public record office

 

In fact, adding the terms “sources” or “documents” to any keyword search is a good way to identify/retrieve primary materials.

 

You might also want to search by Library of Congress Subject Headings: Here are some examples:

 

Great Britain – history – Elizabeth, 1558-1603 – sources

 

England – civilization – 16th century – sources

 

Great Britain – history – Tudors – sources

 

Remember, I said the guide was selective so experiment!

 

b.      Significant print collection

 

Statutes of the Realm

**K24 .G79s (double oversize; shelved at north end of the 4th floor)

 

Volumes contain all Acts of Parliament for England, Wales and Scotland from 1235 (the Magna Carta) to 2004. Elizabeth I is covered in vol. IV, parts 1 and 2. Vol. 10 is an alphabetical index and vol. 11 is a chronological index.

 

Calendars of State Papers, Domestic series, of the reigns of Edward VI, Mary, Elizabeth preserved in the State Paper department of Her Majesty’s Public Record Office.

*DA25 .C1 D65 (oversize)

 

Volumes 1-5 cover Elizabeth’s reign.

 

c.       Digital Primary Sources

 

The UCLA Library provides access to extraordinary digital resources, some of which are digitized (and fully searchable) versions of important primary materials. Among the most useful for this course are:

 

Early English Books Online (EEBO)

http://eebo.chadwyck.com/home

 

Early English Books Online (EEBO) contains digital facsimile page images of virtually every work printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and British North America and works in English printed elsewhere from 1473-1700 - from the first book printed in English by William Caxton, through the age of Spenser and Shakespeare and the tumult of the English Civil War.

 

EuroDocs Primary Historical Documents from Western Europe: Selected Transcriptions, Facsimiles and Translations

http://eudocs.lib.byu.edu/index.php/Main_Page

 

British History Online

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

 

This is a gateway site to primary and secondary source materials on Medieval and Early Modern Britain. It is organized both topically and geographically. It includes primary source material published by the History of Parliament Trust, the Centre for Metropolitan History and the Institute of Historical Research, among others.

 

II.                Secondary Sources

 

The assignment also requires you to produce a short bibliography of secondary works on your chosen topic.  Here, too, you will be able to make use of print and digital resources.

 

a.       Books and other print sources

 

For books (monographs), return to the UCLA Catalog and once again try using keyword and/or subject searching to identify relevant materials. If you have already read something by a particular author, you might want to do an author search to see if that author has written anything else on your topic.

 

If you choose the subject heading route, here are some possible headings:

 

Great Britain – history – Elizabeth, 1558-1603

Great Britain – history - Tudors

England – civilization – 16th century

Catholics – England – history

Elizabeth I – queen of England

Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616 – authorship

 

Note: although I used upper case letters, it’s far easier (and faster) to type everything in lower case when searching the OPAC.

 

b.      Scholarly articles

 

Historical Abstracts

http://uclibs.org/PID/12775

 

The "world's leading historical bibliography" covers the history of the world from 1450 to the present.  Database contains citations to over 1,700 journals as well as books, and dissertations.

 

JSTOR

http://www.jstor.org/

 

Full text of core scholarly journals from their beginning to approximately five years ago. Browsable by discipline and full-text searchable across all disciplines.

 

 

History Cooperative

http://www.historycooperative.org

 

Fully indexed, searchable digital versions of key journals in History, including American Historical Review, Journal of Social History, Journal of World History.

 

Project Muse

http://muse.jhu.edu/index.html

 

Project MUSE is a unique collaboration between libraries and publishers providing 100% full-text, user-friendly online access to over 300 high quality humanities, arts, and social sciences journals from 60 scholarly publishers. You can search by subject or browse a journal title.

 

Journals of interest in Muse include:

 

English Literary History (ELH)

Journal of Interdisciplinary History

Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies

Journal of the History of Ideas

Shakespeare Quarterly

 

 

 

 

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