Find Scholarly Articles in Library Databases
- History of Science, Technology and Medicine This link opens in a new window A database covering science, technology, and medicine from prehistoric times to the present, including records of journal articles, books, dissertations, and other materials.
- Historical Abstracts This link opens in a new window Bibliographical coverage of the history of the world (excluding the U.S. and Canada) from 1450 to the present, with article abstracts from over 2,000 journals -- covering 1954 to the present -- plus citations to books and dissertations
- Iter: Gateway to the Middle Ages and Renaissance This link opens in a new window The University of Toronto's online collection of resources for the study of the Middle Ages and Renaissance (400-1700).
- International Medieval Bibliography This link opens in a new window Records of journal articles, conference proceedings, essays, and exhibitions covering Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa during the Middle Ages.
IMB: Click on advanced search tab. Enter keyword under Free Search. Under Thematic Search, you can limit your search to items covering the 17th century. There is also a geographic limiter. Open a record and scroll down for access links.
- MLA International Bibliography This link opens in a new window The Modern Language Association of America's database of journal articles, books, dissertations, working papers, proceedings, and bibliographies covering scholarship on literature, language and linguistics, folklore, literary theory and criticism, dramatic arts, printing, publishing, rhetoric, and composition, with coverage from 1926 to the present.
- JSTOR This link opens in a new window Full-text access to thousands of scholarly journals covering the humanities, social sciences, and sciences, plus monographs and other academic materials.
- Project MUSE This link opens in a new window Project MUSE is a leading provider of digital humanities and social sciences content; since 1995, its electronic journal collections have supported a wide array of research needs at academic, public, special, and school libraries worldwide. MUSE books and journals, from leading university presses and scholarly societies, are fully integrated for search and discovery.modules, designed to help researchers find reliable sources of information by directing them to chapters, books, websites, archives, or data sets.
Example of a Peer-Reviewed Journal: New Literary History, Autumn 2020 issue, Animality/ Posthumanism/ Disability. 
Scholarly journals:
- present original research in a specific discipline
- include in-text citations and bibliographies
- typically contain peer-reviewed articles
No Full-Text at Colby?
In databases, look for Request from ILLiad or Request from another library links when you are directed to a screen that that says full-text is not available. PDFs of some articles can arrive via ILLiad in just a few hours.
Featured E-Books - Early Modern Natural World
Milton and Ecology (2003) by
Ken Hiltner explores the ideological basis of our current environmental crisis by engaging literary, theoretical, and historic approaches. Focusing on Milton's rejection of dualistic theology, metaphysical philosophy, and early-modern subjectivism, Hiltner argues that he anticipated certain essential modern ecological arguments. This study considers how Milton not only sought to tell the story of how Paradise on earth was lost through Humanity's folly, but also how it might be regained.
ISBN: 0521830710
Literature and Nature in the English Renaissance (2019) by
Featuring over two hundred nature-themed texts spanning the disciplines of literature, science and history, this sourcebook offers an accessible field guide to the environment of Renaissance England, revealing a nation at a crossroads between its pastoral heritage and industrialized future. Carefully selected primary sources, each modernized and prefaced with an introduction, survey an encyclopaedic array of topographies, species, and topics: from astrology to zoology, bear-baiting to bee-keeping, coal-mining to tree-planting, fen-draining to sheep-whispering. The familiar voices of Spenser, Shakespeare, Jonson, and Marvell mingle with a diverse chorus of farmers, herbalists, shepherds, hunters, foresters, philosophers, sailors, sky-watchers, and duchesses - as well as ventriloquized beasts, trees, and rivers. Lavishly illustrated, the anthology is supported by a lucid introduction that outlines and intervenes in key debates in Renaissance ecocriticism, a reflective essay on ecocritical editing, a bibliography of further reading, and a timeline of environmental history and legislation drawing on extensive archival research.
ISBN: 9781316510155
Digging the Past (2020) by
A detailed study of seventeenth century farming practices and their relevance for today We are today grappling with the consequences of disastrous changes in our farming and food systems. While the problems we face have reached a crisis point, their roots are deep. Even in the seventeenth century, Frances E. Dolan contends, some writers and thinkers voiced their reservations, both moral and environmental, about a philosophy of improvement that rationalized massive changes in land use, farming methods, and food production. Despite these reservations, the seventeenth century was a watershed in the formation of practices that would lead toward the industrialization of agriculture. But it was also a period of robust and inventive experimentation in what we now think of as alternative agriculture. This book approaches the seventeenth century, in its failed proposals and successful ventures, as a resource for imagining the future of agriculture in fruitful ways. It invites both specialists and non-specialists to see and appreciate the period from the ground up. Building on and connecting histories of food and work, literary criticism of the pastoral and georgic, histories of elite and vernacular science, and histories of reading and writing practices, among other areas of inquiry, Digging the Past offers fine-grained case studies of projects heralded as innovations both in the seventeenth century and in our own time: composting and soil amendment, local food, natural wine, and hedgerows. Dolan analyzes the stories seventeenth-century writers told one another in letters, diaries, and notebooks, in huge botanical catalogs and flimsy pamphlets, in plays, poems, and how-to guides, in adages and epics. She digs deeply to assess precisely how and with what effect key terms, figurations, and stories galvanized early modern imaginations and reappear, often unrecognized, on the websites and in the tour scripts of farms and vineyards today.
ISBN: 9780812297218
The Concept of Nature in Early Modern English Literature (2019) by
The Concept of Nature in Early Modern English Literature traces a genealogy of ecology in seventeenth-century literature and natural philosophy through the development of the protoecological concept of 'the oeconomy of nature'. Founded in 1644 by Kenelm Digby, this concept was subsequently employed by a number of theologians, physicians, and natural philosophers to conceptualize nature as an interdependent system. Focusing on the middle decades of the seventeenth century, Peter Remien examines how Samuel Gott, Walter Charleton, Robert Boyle, Samuel Collins, and Thomas Burnet formed the oeconomy of nature. Remien also shows how literary authors Ben Jonson, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, Margaret Cavendish, and John Milton use the discourse of oeconomy to explore the contours of humankind's relationship with the natural world. This book participates in an intellectual history of the science of ecology while prompting a re-evaluation of how we understand the relationship between literature and ecology in the early modern period.
ISBN: 9781108496810
The Shakespearean Forest (2017) by
The Shakespearean Forest, Anne Barton's final book, uncovers the pervasive presence of woodland in early modern drama, revealing its persistent imaginative power. The collection is representative of the startling breadth of Barton's scholarship: ranging across plays by Shakespeare (including Titus Andronicus, As You Like It, Macbeth, The Two Gentlemen of Verona and Timon of Athens) and his contemporaries (including Jonson, Dekker, Lyly, Massinger and Greene), it also considers court pageants, treatises on forestry and chronicle history. Barton's incisive literary analysis characteristically pays careful attention to the practicalities of performance, and is supplemented by numerous illustrations and a bibliographical essay exploring recent scholarship in the field. Prepared for publication by Hester Lees-Jeffries, featuring a Foreword by Adrian Poole and an Afterword by Peter Holland, the book explores the forest as a source of cultural and psychological fascination, embracing and illuminating its mysteriousness.
ISBN: 9780521573443
The Poetics of Scientific Investigation in Seventeenth-Century England (2016) by
The writing of science in the period 1580-1700 is artfully, diffidently, carelessly, boldly, and above all self-consciously literary. The Poetics of Scientific Investigation in Seventeenth-Century English Literature considers the literary textures of science writing - its rhetorical figures,neologisms, its uses of parody, romance, and various kinds of verse. The experimental and social practices of science are examined through literary representations of the laboratory, of collaborative retirement, of virtual, epistolary conversation, and of an imagined paradise of investigativefellowship and learning.Claire Preston argues that the rhetorical, generic, and formal qualities of scientific writing are also the intellectual processes of early-modern science itself. How was science to be written in this period? That question, which piqued natural philosophers who were searching for apt conventions ofscientific language and report, was initially resolved by the humanist rhetorical and generic skills in which they were already highly trained. At the same time non-scientific writers, enthralled by the developments of science, were quick to deploy ideas and images from astronomy, optics, chemistry,biology, and medical practices. Practising scientists and inspired laymen or quasi-scientists produced new, adjusted, or hybrid literary forms, often collapsing the distinction between the factual and the imaginative, between the rhetorically ornate and the plain. Early-modern science and itsliterary vehicles are frequently indistinguishable, scientific practice and scientific expression mutually involved. Among the major writers discussed are Montaigne, Bacon, Donne, Browne, Lovelace, Boyle, Sprat, Oldenburg, Evelyn, Cowley, and Dryden.
ISBN: 9780191780134
Imperfect Creatures: Vermin, Literature, and the Sciences of Life, 1600-1740 (2016) by
Lucinda Cole s "Imperfect Creatures" offers the first full-length study of the shifting, unstable, but foundational status of vermin as creatures and category in the early modern literary, scientific, and political imagination. In the space between theology and an emergent empiricism, Cole s argument engages a wide historical swath of canonical early modern literary texts alongside other nonliterary primary sources (including under-examined archival materials) from the period, including: William Shakespeare s "Hamlet" and "Macbeth," Christopher Marlowe s "The Jew of Malta," Jonathan Swift s "Gulliver s Travels," Daniel Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe" and "Journal of the Plague Year," Giambattista Della Porta s "Natural Magick," William Harvey s "Anatomical Exercises on the Generation of Animals"; Thomas Willis'"Cerebri Anatome" and "Of the Soul of Brutes," and Robert Boyle s "Free Inquiry into the Vulgarly Receiv d Notion of Nature." As Cole illustrates, human health and demographic problems notably those of feeding populations periodically stricken by hunger, disease, and famine were tied to larger questions about food supplies, property laws, national identity, even the theological imperatives that underwrote humankind's claim to dominion over the animal kingdom. In this context, Cole s study indicates, so-called vermin occupied liminal spaces between subject and object, nature and animal, animal and the devil, the devil and disease even reason and madness. This verminous discourse formed a foundational category used to carve out humankind s relationship to an unpredictable, a-rational natural world, but it evolved into a form for thinking about not merely animals but anything that threatened the health of the body politic humans, animals, and even thoughts. "
ISBN: 9780472072958
Animal Bodies, Renaissance Culture (2013) by
Animal Bodies, Renaissance Culture examines how the shared embodied existence of early modern human and nonhuman animals challenged the establishment of species distinctions. The material conditions of the early modern world brought humans and animals into complex interspecies relationships that have not been fully accounted for in critical readings of the period's philosophical, scientific, or literary representations of animals. Where such prior readings have focused on the role of reason in debates about human exceptionalism, this book turns instead to a series of cultural sites in which we find animal and human bodies sharing environments, mutually transforming and defining one another's lives. To uncover the animal body's role in anatomy, eroticism, architecture, labor, and consumption, Karen Raber analyzes canonical works including More's Utopia, Shakespeare's Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, and Sidney's poetry, situating them among readings of human and equine anatomical texts, medical recipes, theories of architecture and urban design, husbandry manuals, and horsemanship treatises. Raber reconsiders interactions between environment, body, and consciousness that we find in early modern human-animal relations. Scholars of the Renaissance period recognized animals' fundamental role in fashioning what we call "culture," she demonstrates, providing historical narratives about embodiment and the cultural constructions of species difference that are often overlooked in ecocritical and posthumanist theory that attempts to address the "question of the animal."
ISBN: 9780812245363
True Relations (2013) by
In the motley ranks of seventeenth-century print, one often comes upon the title True Relation. Purportedly true relations describe monsters, miracles, disasters, crimes, trials, and apparitions. They also convey discoveries achieved through exploration or experiment. Contemporaries relied on such accounts for access to information even as they distrusted them; scholars today share both their dependency and their doubt. What we take as evidence, Frances E. Dolan argues, often raises more questions than it answers. Although historians have tracked dramatic changes in evidentiary standards and practices in the period, these changes did not solve the problem of how to interpret true relations or ease the reliance on them. The burden remains on readers. Dolan connects early modern debates about textual evidence to recent discussions of the value of seventeenth-century texts as historical evidence. Then as now, she contends, literary techniques of analysis have proven central to staking and assessing truth claims. She addresses the kinds of texts that circulated about three traumatic events--the Gunpowder Plot, witchcraft prosecutions, and the London Fire--and looks at legal depositions, advice literature, and plays as genres of evidence that hover in a space between fact and fiction. Even as doubts linger about their documentary and literary value, scholars rely heavily on them. Confronting and exploring these doubts, Dolan makes a case for owning up to our agency in crafting true relations among the textual fragments that survive.
ISBN: 9780812244854
What Else Is Pastoral? (2011) by
Pastoral was one of the most popular literary forms of early modern England. Inspired by classical and Italian Renaissance antecedents, writers from Ben Jonson to John Beaumont and Abraham Cowley wrote in idealized terms about the English countryside. It is often argued that the Renaissance pastoral was a highly figurative mode of writing that had more to do with culture and politics than with the actual countryside of England. For decades now literary criticism has had it that in pastoral verse, hills and crags and moors were extolled for their metaphoric worth, rather than for their own qualities. In What Else Is Pastoral?, Ken Hiltner takes a fresh look at pastoral, offering an environmentally minded reading that reconnects the poems with literal landscapes, not just figurative ones. Considering the pastoral in literature from Virgil and Petrarch to Jonson and Milton, Hiltner proposes a new ecocritical approach to these texts. We only become truly aware of our environment, he explains, when its survival is threatened. As London expanded rapidly during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the city and surrounding rural landscapes began to look markedly different. Hiltner finds that Renaissance writers were acutely aware that the countryside they had known was being lost to air pollution, deforestation, and changing patterns of land use; their works suggest this new absence of nature through their appreciation for the scraps that remained in memory or in fact. A much-needed corrective to the prevailing interpretation of pastoral poetry, What Else Is Pastoral? shows the value of reading literature with an ecological eye.
ISBN: 9780801449406
Ecocritical Shakespeare (2011) by
Can reading, writing about, and teaching Shakespeare contribute to the health of the planet? To what degree are Shakespeare's plays anthropocentric or ecocentric? What is the connection between the literary and the real when it comes to ecological conduct? This collection, engages with these pressing questions surrounding ecocritical Shakespeare, in order to provide a better understanding of where and how ecocritical readings should be situated. The volume combines multiple critical perspectives, juxtaposing historicism and presentism, as well as considering ecofeminism and pedagogy; and addresses such topics as early modern flora and fauna, and the neglected areas of early modern marine ecology and oceanography. Concluding with an assessment of the challenges-and necessities-of teaching Shakespeare ecocritically, Ecocritical Shakespeare not only broadens the implications of ecocriticism in early modern studies, but represents an important contribution to this growing field.
ISBN: 9780754669197
Back to Nature (2006) by
Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title Sweeping across scholarly disciplines, Back to Nature shows that, from the moment of their conception, modern ecological and epistemological anxieties were conjoined twins. Urbanization, capitalism, Protestantism, colonialism, revived Skepticism, empirical science, and optical technologies conspired to alienate people from both the earth and reality itself in the seventeenth century. Literary and visual arts explored the resulting cultural wounds, expressing the pain and proposing some ingenious cures. The stakes, Robert N. Watson demonstrates, were huge. Shakespeare's comedies, Marvell's pastoral lyrics, Traherne's visionary Centuries, and Dutch painting all illuminate a fierce submerged debate about what love of nature has to do with perception of reality.
ISBN: 0812239059
Wonders and the Order of Nature 1150-1750 (1998) by
Wonders and the Order of Nature is about the ways in which European naturalists from the High Middle Ages through the Enlightenment used wonder and wonders, the passion and its objects, to envision themselves and the natural world. Monsters, gems that shone in the dark, petrifying springs, celestial apparitions -- these were the marvels that adorned romances, puzzled philosophers, lured collectors, and frightened the devout. Drawing on the histories of art, science, philosophy, and literature, Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park explore and explain how wonder and wonders fortified princely power, rewove the texture of scientific experience, and shaped the sensibility of intellectuals. This is a history of the passions of inquiry, of how wonder sometimes inflamed, sometimes dampened curiosity about nature's best-kept secrets. Refracted through the prism of wonders, the order of nature splinters into a spectrum of orders, a tour of possible worlds.
ISBN: 0942299906
Shakespeare's Ocean (2012) by
Study of the sea--both in terms of human interaction with it and its literary representation--has been largely ignored by ecocritics. In Shakespeare's Ocean, Dan Brayton foregrounds the maritime dimension of a writer whose plays and poems have had an enormous impact on literary notions of nature and, in so doing, plots a new course for ecocritical scholarship. Shakespeare lived during a time of great expansion of geographical knowledge. The world in which he imagined his plays was newly understood to be a sphere covered with water. In vital readings of works ranging from The Comedy of Errors to the valedictory The Tempest, Brayton demonstrates Shakespeare's remarkable conceptual mastery of the early modern maritime world and reveals a powerful benthic imagination at work.
ISBN: 9780813932262
Global Crisis (2013) by
Revolutions, droughts, famines, invasions, wars, regicides - the calamities of the mid-seventeenth century were not only unprecedented, they were agonisingly widespread. A global crisis extended from England to Japan, and from the Russian Empire to sub-Saharan Africa. North and South America, too, suffered turbulence. The distinguished historian Geoffrey Parker examines first-hand accounts of men and women throughout the world describing what they saw and suffered during a sequence of political, economic and social crises that stretched from 1618 to the 1680s. Parker also deploys scientific evidence concerning climate conditions of the period, and his use of 'natural' as well as 'human' archives transforms our understanding of the World Crisis. Changes in the prevailing weather patterns during the 1640s and 1650s - longer and harsher winters, and cooler and wetter summers - disrupted growing seasons, causing dearth, malnutrition, and disease, along with more deaths and fewer births. Some contemporaries estimated that one-third of the world died, and much of the surviving historical evidence supports their pessimism. Parker's demonstration of the link between climate change and worldwide catastrophe 350 years ago stands as an extraordinary historical achievement. And the contemporary implications of his study are equally important: are we at all prepared today for the catastrophes that climate change could bring tomorrow?
ISBN: 9780300153231
Fallen Forests (2013) by
In 1844, Lydia Sigourney asserted, ""Man's warfare on the trees is terrible."" Like Sigourney many American women of her day engaged with such issues as sustainability, resource wars, globalization, voluntary simplicity, Christian ecology, and environmental justice. Illuminating the foundations for contemporary women's environmental writing, Fallen Forests shows how their nineteenth-century predecessors marshaled powerful affective, ethical, and spiritual resources to chastise, educate, and motivate readers to engage in positive social change. Fallen Forests contributes to scholarship in American women's writing, ecofeminism, ecocriticism, and feminist rhetoric, expanding the literary, historical, and theoretical grounds for some of today's most pressing environmental debates. Karen L. Kilcup rejects prior critical emphases on sentimentalism to show how women writers have drawn on their literary emotional intelligence to raise readers' consciousness about social and environmental issues. She also critiques ecocriticism's idealizing tendency, which has elided women's complicity in agendas that depart from today's environmental orthodoxies. Unlike previous ecocritical works, Fallen Forests includes marginalized texts by African American, Native American, Mexican American, working-class, and non-Protestant women. Kilcup also enlarges ecocriticism's genre foundations, showing how Cherokee oratory, travel writing, slave narrative, diary, polemic, sketches, novels, poetry, and exposé intervene in important environmental debates.
ISBN: 9780820332864
Our Beloved Kin (2018) by
Winner of the 2019 Bancroft Prize: A compelling and original recovery of Native American resistance and adaptation to colonial America "By making what we thought was a small story very large indeed--Ms. Brooks really does give us 'A New History of King Philip's War.'"--The Wall Street Journal "Provides a wealth of information for both scholars and lay readers interested in Native American history."--Publishers Weekly With rigorous original scholarship and creative narration, Lisa Brooks recovers a complex picture of war, captivity, and Native resistance during the "First Indian War" (later named King Philip's War) by relaying the stories of Weetamoo, a female Wampanoag leader, and James Printer, a Nipmuc scholar, whose stories converge in the captivity of Mary Rowlandson. Through both a narrow focus on Weetamoo, Printer, and their network of relations, and a far broader scope that includes vast Indigenous geographies, Brooks leads us to a new understanding of the history of colonial New England and of American origins. Brooks's pathbreaking scholarship is grounded not just in extensive archival research but also in the land and communities of Native New England, reading the actions of actors during the seventeenth century alongside an analysis of the landscape and interpretations informed by tribal history.
ISBN: 9780300231113
John Donne in Context (2019) by
John Donne was a writer of dazzling extremes. He was a notorious rake and eloquent preacher; he wrote poems of tender intimacy, and lyrics of gross misogyny. This book offers a comprehensive account of early modern life and culture as it relates to Donne's richly varied body of work. Short, lively, and accessible chapters written by leading experts in early modern studies shed light on Donne's literary career, language and works as well as exploring the social and intellectual contexts of his writing and its reception from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century. These chapters provide the depth of interpretation that Donne demands, and the range of knowledge that his prodigiously learned works elicit. Supported by a chronology of Donne's life and works and a comprehensive bibliography, this volume is a major new contribution to the study and criticism on the age of Donne and his writing.
ISBN: 9781107043503
Immateriality and Early Modern English Literature (2020) by
Examines literary engagement with immateriality since the 'material turn' in early modern studies Provides six case studies of works by Shakespeare, Donne, and Herbert, offering new readings of important literary texts of the English Renaissance alongside detailed chapters outlining attitudes towards immateriality in works of natural philosophy, medicine, and theology Employs an innovative organization around three major areas in which problem of immaterial was particularly pitched: Ontology, Theology, and Psychology (or Being, Believing, and Thinking) Includes wide-ranging references to early modern literary, philosophical, and theological texts Demonstrates how innovations in natural philosophy influenced thought about the natural world and how it was portrayed in literature Engages with current early modern scholarship in the areas of material culture, cognitive literary studies, and phenomenology Immateriality and Early Modern English Literature explores how early modern writers responded to rapidly shifting ideas about the interrelation of their natural and spiritual worlds. It provides six case studies of works by Shakespeare, Donne and Herbert, offering new readings of important literary texts of the English Renaissance alongside detailed chapters outlining attitudes towards immateriality in works of natural philosophy, medicine and theology. Building on the importance of addressing material culture in order to understand early modern literature, Knapp demonstrates how the literary imagination was shaped by changing attitudes toward the immaterial realm.
ISBN: 9781474457101
17th-century stone bridge crossing the River Wye in Derbyshire. Photo by Billy Wilson, (Flickr CC by-NC 2.0).
Archival Material
Archival collections contain artifacts of a particular time (manuscripts, illustrations, letters, diaries, etc.) that can be used as primary sources. But they can also sometimes contain information that could be used for reference (background information, context, definitions, facts and overviews).
LIBRARY DATABASES
- Early English Books Online This link opens in a new window A searchable collection of digitized early English-language books, including virtually every such work published in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and British North America from from 1473 to 1700.
- 17th and 18th Century Burney Collection Newspapers This link opens in a new window A large digital collection of early English news media, consisting of about 1,270 titles and one million pages gathered by the Reverend Carles Burney in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
- British Periodicals Collections This link opens in a new window Scanned versions of the full texts of over 500 British periodicals dating from the 17th century to the early 20th, with coverage of topics such as literature, science, and the arts.
- Artstor This link opens in a new window Over 500,000 digital images of creative works from all historical periods and world cultures, including architecture, painting, prints, sculpture, photography, decorative arts, and more.
WEB RESOURCES
- British Book Illustrations: Extending Access to 17th-century Visual Culture, Folger Library A project of the Folger Shakespeare Library, funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), to digitize and index 10,000 woodcut and engraved illustrations in British and English-language books.
- Luna, Digital Image Collection, Folger Library Online access to over 100,000 images from the Folger Shakespeare Library, including books, theater memorabilia, manuscripts, and art. Users can show multiple images side-by-side, zoom in and out, view cataloging information when available, export high-resolution images up to 1536 pixels, and construct persistent URLs linking back to items or searches. Users who create accounts can also save groups of images.
- EMMO Early Modern Manuscripts Online, Folger Library EMMO provides high-quality images and consistent transcriptions for a variety of manuscripts, such as letters, diaries, wills, coats of arms, literary pieces, recipe books, miscellanies, and more from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
- EBBA, English Broadside Ballad Archive EBBA is the most ambitious project to date of the Early Modern Center in the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. There are a multitude of diverse and extraordinary contributors—professors, postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, undergraduates, and independent experts from many fields—that collaboratively make up the EBBA Team.
- English Broadside Ballad Archive Twitter Spotlight Broadside ballads of the seventeenth century fully accessible as texts, art, music, and cultural records.
- Making Marvels: Science & Splendor at the Courts of Europe (Met Exhibition) Between 1550 and 1750, nearly every royal family in Europe assembled vast collections of valuable and entertaining objects. Such lavish public spending and display of precious metals was considered an expression of power. Many princes also believed that the possession of artistic and technological innovations conveyed status, and these objects were often prominently showcased in elaborate court entertainments, which were characteristic of the period.
- Illustrating Paradise Lost, from "Darkeness Visible" Browse the 1688 illustrations in the picture gallery. Darkness visible was composed by members of Christ's College, Cambridge, where Milton studied from 1625 to 1632. It was commissioned as part of the college's year-long celebration of the poet's 400th birthday.
- Botanical Art and Artists Botanical art and illustration combine art and science. Artists aim to record accurate information about the shapes, structures, colours, life cycle and habits of unique species of plants and flowers while also providing a pleasing image.
- Wellcome Collection, London, England Wellcome Collection is a free museum and library that aims to challenge how people think and feel about health. It has extensive holdings on witchcraft.
- Memoirs for the ingenious: Containing several curious observations in philosophy, mathematicks, physick, philology, and other arts and sciences. In miscellaneous letters. / By J. De La Crose, E. A. P. January, 1693.A journal of letters about observations on nature in the late 17th century. Keyword searching should be done in British Periodicals Collections, however. (It's linked above under Library Databases.) Come back here to see the "letter" in context.
- Furnace and Fugue: A Multimedia Digital Edition of Michael Maier's Atalanta fugiens (1618)Reinterprets Ovid’s legend of Atalanta as an alchemical allegory on the secrets of nature. Click on "Atalanta fugiens: read and play the digital edition" then click on the "Emblem" tab to move through the pages. Scroll down to see the score (and hear the music) and read the epigram text and discourse. The digital edition has an English translation. In addition to the comparative view, one can view the original and digital editions separately. Click on "Scholarly Essays" to find out more about the work and its "chymical emblems relating to the secrets of nature."
- Google Advanced SearchUse Google Advanced Search to find archival material. Including specific descriptive terms is key (e.g. "digital collections"). One can also specify an .edu domain to find academic archives.
Searching Tips: Keyword Searches
KEYWORD SEARCHES
In many library catalogs and databases, keyword searches only look for the exact sequence of letters entered.
Experiment with different synonyms and search combinations. Look for new terms to try in search results.
An ASTERISK is a wild card that stands in for different endings of a word. ideal* = ideal, ideals, idealism, idealistic
To narrow results, try using QUOTATION MARKS to glue together words in phrases, titles or an author's name. "Paradise Lost"
Not very many search results? Look for broader subject headings in item records. Browse these areas in Miller Library's bookstacks. Books covering broader topics may include chapters or significant passages on the author you're interested in. Check a book's table of contents and index.
Searching Tips: Subject Searches
SUBJECT SEARCHES
Subject searches take you to books that have been tagged as being about that person or subject. Identify SUBJECT HEADINGS by checking the item records found in a keyword search. Sample subject headings:
- Human-animal relationships
- Human-animal relationships in art
- England Social life and customs 17th century
- Domestic animals England History
- Animals Mythical
- Botany Medical
- Literature and medicine Great Britain
- Material culture Europe History
- Material culture England History
- Illustration of books
- Printing History
- Wood-engraving
- Environmental protection in literature
- Ecology in literature
- Nature in literature
- Sea in literature
- Ecocriticism
- Philosophy of nature in literature
- Human ecology in literature
To find subject headings for an author, do a Subject Search using the author’s name (last name first): Milton, John (Select Subject from first drop-down option in CBBcat.) You can use the 2nd drop-down to specify books, e-books or another type of material.
Not very many search results? Look for broader subject headings in item records. Browse these areas in Miller Library's bookstacks. Books covering broader topics may include chapters or significant passages on the author you're interested in. Check a book's table of contents and index.
Following a Citation Trail
Check the works cited, notes, references and bibliographies of every relevant article or book. You may discover a book or article perfect for your topic.
Borlik, Todd Andrew, 2019 - Literature and Nature in the English Renaissance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. (link to bibliography)
One good source can lead to another!
Look for a Cited Work using:
- OneSearch (articles)
- Google Scholar (articles)
- CBBcat (books, media available through Colby)
- MaineCat (books, media available regionally)
- Hathi Trust (sometimes has full-text digital versions of older books or articles)
- WorldCat (if can't find resource locally)
OneSearch
OneSearch searches multiple resources at once. It's most useful for precise, controlled searches.
Use Advanced Search and limit by format.
To find an article listed in a bibliography, enter title of article in top row search box. You may need to also add the last name of the author in the second box.
To find book chapters on a topic, enter your keywords and check the box Book Chapter in the "Show Content Type" limiter.
MLA Citation Help
- OWL Purdue MLA Formatting & Style Guide The OWL Purdue citation guides provide clear instructions and examples of the correct formatting of citations.
MLA Handbook by
The Modern Language Association, the authority on research and writing, takes a fresh look at documenting sources in the eighth edition of the MLA Handbook. Works are published today in a dizzying range of formats. A book, for example, may be read in print, online, or as an e-book--or perhaps listened to in an audio version. On the Web, modes of publication are regularly invented, combined, and modified. Previous editions of the MLA Handbook provided separate instructions for each format, and additional instructions were required for new formats. In this groundbreaking new edition of its best-selling handbook, the MLA recommends instead one universal set of guidelines, which writers can apply to any type of source. Shorter and redesigned for easy use, the eighth edition of the MLA Handbook guides writers through the principles behind evaluating sources for their research. It then shows them how to cite sources in their writing and create useful entries for the works-cited list. More than just a new edition, this is a new MLA style.
Call Number: LB2369 .G53 2016 Colby Miller 1st Floor Reading Room Reference. Also Colby Miller 1st Floor Research Librarians AlcoveISBN: 9781603292627Publication Date: 2016, 8th Edition
Older editions of the MLA handbook are also available. Many databases still use the 7th edition. OWL uses the 8th edition. Note the differences! Be consistent.
MLA 7th Edition: Falk, Cynthia G. "'The Intolerable Ugliness Of New York': Architecture And Society In Edith Wharton's The Age Of Innocence." American Studies 42.2 (2001): 19-43. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 19 Jan. 2017.
MLA 8th Edition: Falk, Cynthia G. "'The Intolerable Ugliness Of New York': Architecture And Society In Edith Wharton's The Age Of Innocence." American Studies, vol. 42, no. 2, 2001, pp. 19-43. EBSCO, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40643250. Accessed 19 Jan. 2017.
Reference Sources
Book by Lalena Jaramillo, Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
- Oxford English Dictionary This link opens in a new window The full text online version of the Oxford English Dictionary contains both the complete Second Edition and the New Edition in progress.
- Credo General Reference This link opens in a new window A search engine covering hundreds of reference works, including dictionaries, encyclopedias, thesauruses, and books of quotations, plus subject-specific titles covering topics such as arts, business, history, law, literature, medicine, music, philosophy, psychology, religion, science, and technology.
- HathiTrust This link opens in a new window A digital library containing assets from over 100 research libraries, with document types including books, images, images, music scores, newspapers, and videos. Use the yellow "Log In" button to find and select Colby College, then follow the login prompts.
- Environment and the Natural World (Oxford Bibliographies: Renaissance & Reformation) Comprehensive listings and descriptions of sources with sections on primary sources, society and association resources and topics such as History and Climate, Art and Landscape, and Humans and Animals.
- Folgerpedia Founded on 9 July 2014, Folgerpedia is the Folger Shakespeare Library's collaboratively-edited, search-based encyclopedia of all things "Folger." Content of the articles has been contributed by various departments within the institution, as well as Folger readers and other scholars. The articles address each topic as it relates to the Folger and the Folger collection. There is a variety of article types that can be found on Folgerpedia, including: lists; how tos; and encyclopedic entries concerning items in the collection, Shakespeare's works and characters, and his works in performance.
- Darkeness Visible: Milton's Paradise Lost Darkness Visible was composed by members of Christ's College, Cambridge, where Milton studied from 1625 to 1632. It was commissioned as part of the college's year-long celebration of the poet's 400th birthday.
- Poetry Foundation The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine, is an independent literary organization committed to a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture. It exists to discover and celebrate the best poetry and to place it before the largest possible audience. Try the Poetry Tool: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poetrytool.html
- Keywords for Environmental Studies Central terms and debates in and across environmental studies, including the environmental humanities, environmental social sciences, sustainability sciences, and the sciences of nature.
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A book of literary criticism can be by a single author or can be an edited anthology with chapters ("book articles") on different aspects of the book's general theme.
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Librarian
Other E-Books
What Is Landscape? (2015) by
A lexicon and guide for discovering the essence of landscape. From the old Frisian language, landscape meant shoveled land: landschop. Sixteenth-century Englishmen misheard or mispronounced this as landskep, which became landskip, then landscape, designating the surface of the earth shaped for human habitation. Stilgoe maps the discovery of landscape through such sources as children's picture books, folklore, deeds, antique terminology, and out-of-print dictionaries.
ISBN: 9780262029896
Climate and Literature (2019) by
Leading scholars examine the history of climate and literature. Essays analyse this history in terms of the contrasts between literary and climatological time, and between literal and literary atmosphere, before addressing textual representations of climate in seasons poetry, classical Greek literature, medieval Icelandic and Greenlandic sagas, and Shakespearean theatre. Beyond this, the effect of Enlightenment understandings of climate on literature are explored in Romantic poetry, North American settler literature, the novels of empire, Victorian and modernist fiction, science fiction, and Nordic noir or crime fiction. Finally, the volume addresses recent literary framings of climate in the Anthropocene, charting the rise of the climate change novel, the spectre of extinction in the contemporary cultural imagination, and the relationship between climate criticism and nuclear criticism. Together, the essays in this volume outline the discursive dimensions of climate. Climate is as old as human civilisation, as old as all attempts to apprehend and describe patterns in the weather. Because climate is weather documented, it necessarily possesses an intimate relationship with language, and through language, to literature. This volume challenges the idea that climate belongs to the realm of science and is separate from literature and the realm of the imagination.
ISBN: 9781108422529
The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism (2014) by
The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism provides a broad survey of the longstanding relationship between literature and the environment. The moment for such an offering is opportune in many respects: multiple environmental crises are increasingly inescapable at both transnational and local levels;the role of the humanities in addition to technology and politics is increasingly recognized as central for exploring and finding solutions; and the subject of ecocriticism has reached a kind of critical mass, both within its Anglo-American heartlands and beyond.From its origins in the study of American Nature Writing and British Romanticism, ecocriticism has developed along numerous theoretical, historical, cultural and geographical axes, the most contemporary and exciting of which will be represented in the Handbook. The contributors include eminentfounders of the field, including Cheryll Glotfelty and Jonathan Bate, a number of key "second-wave" ecocritics, and the best up-and-coming scholars. Topics covered include: Green Shakespeare-the Bard's subversive uses of the pastoral; John Clare's sacred relationship with the land; Thoreau'sprofound political passion; the natural landscape as symbol of postcolonial resistance in works by Lessing, Naipaul, and Coetzee; the relation between feminism and environmentalism; language and the concept of biosemiotics; and concerns over pollution and toxicity in films like Erin Brockovitch,Michael Clayton, and Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth.
ISBN: 9780199742929
The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Environment (2013) by
The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Environment is an authoritative guide to the exciting new interdisciplinary field of environmental literary criticism. The collection traces the development of ecocriticism from its origins in European pastoral literature and offers fifteen rigorous but accessible essays on the present state of environmental literary scholarship. Contributions from leading experts in the field probe a range of issues, including the place of the human within nature, ecofeminism and gender, engagements with European philosophy and the biological sciences, critical animal studies, postcolonialism, posthumanism, and climate change. A chronology of key publications and bibliography provide ample resources for further reading, making The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Environment an essential guide for students, teachers, and scholars working in this rapidly developing area of study.
ISBN: 9781107029927
Ecocriticism (2011) by
Ecocriticism explores the ways in which we imagine and portray the relationship between humans and the environment in all areas of cultural production, from Wordsworth and Thoreau through to Google Earth, J.M. Coetzee and Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man. Greg Garrard's animated and accessible volume traces the development of the movement and explores its key concepts, including: pollution wilderness apocalypse dwelling animals earth. Featuring a newly rewritten chapter on animal studies, and considering queer and postcolonial ecocriticism and the impact of globalisation, this fully updated second edition also presents a glossary of terms and suggestions for further reading in print and online. Concise, clear, and authoritative, Ecocriticism offers the ideal introduction to this crucial subject for students of literary and cultural studies.
ISBN: 9780203806838
Colors of Nature (2011) by
"An anthology of nature writing by people of color, providing deeply personal connections to--or disconnects from--nature." --NPR From African American to Asian American, indigenous to immigrant, "multiracial" to "mixed-blood," the diversity of cultures in this world is matched only by the diversity of stories explaining our cultural origins: stories of creation and destruction, displacement and heartbreak, hope and mystery. With writing from Jamaica Kincaid on the fallacies of national myths, Yusef Komunyakaa connecting the toxic legacy of his hometown, Bogalusa, LA, to a blind faith in capitalism, and bell hooks relating the quashing of multiculturalism to the destruction of nature that is considered "unpredictable"--among more than thirty-five other examinations of the relationship between culture and nature--this collection points toward the trouble of ignoring our cultural heritage, but also reveals how opening our eyes and our minds might provide a more livable future. Contributors: Elmaz Abinader, Faith Adiele, Francisco X. Alarcón, Fred Arroyo, Kimberly Blaeser, Joseph Bruchac, Robert D. Bullard, Debra Kang Dean, Camille Dungy, Nikky Finney, Ray Gonzalez, Kimiko Hahn, bell hooks, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, Pualani Kanaka'ole Kanahele, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Jamaica Kincaid, Yusef Komunyakaa, J. Drew Lanham, David Mas Masumoto, Maria Melendez, Thyllias Moss, Gary Paul Nabhan, Nalini Nadkarni, Melissa Nelson, Jennifer Oladipo, Louis Owens, Enrique Salmon, Aileen Suzara, A. J. Verdelle, Gerald Vizenor, Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, Al Young, Ofelia Zepeda "This notable anthology assembles thinkers and writers with firsthand experience or insight on how economic and racial inequalities affect a person's understanding of nature . . . an illuminating read." --Bloomsbury Review "[An] unprecedented and invaluable collection." --Booklist
ISBN: 1571318143
Different Shades of Green (2014) by
Engaging important discussions about social conflict, environmental change, and imperialism in Africa, Different Shades of Green points to legacies of African environmental writing, often neglected as a result of critical perspectives shaped by dominant Western conceptions of nature and environmentalism. Drawing on an interdisciplinary framework employing postcolonial studies, political ecology, environmental history, and writing by African environmental activists, Byron Caminero-Santangelo emphasizes connections within African environmental literature, highlighting how African writers have challenged unjust, ecologically destructive forms of imperial development and resource extraction. Different Shades of Green also brings into dialogue a wide range of African creative writing--including works by Chinua Achebe, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Bessie Head, Nadine Gordimer, Zakes Mda, Nuruddin Farah, Wangari Maathai, and Ken Saro-Wiwa--in order to explore vexing questions for those involved in the struggle for environmental justice, in the study of political ecology, and in the environmental humanities, urging continued imaginative thinking in effecting a more equitable, sustain¬able future in Africa.
ISBN: 9780813936055
Latinx Environmentalisms (2019) by
The whiteness of mainstream environmentalism often fails to account for the richness and variety of Latinx environmental thought. Building on insights of environmental justice scholarship as well as critical race and ethnic studies, the editors and contributors to Latinx Environmentalisms map the ways Latinx cultural texts integrate environmental concerns with questions of social and political justice. Original interviews with creative writers, including Cherríe Moraga, Helena María Viramontes, and Héctor Tobar, as well as new essays by noted scholars of Latinx literature and culture, show how Latinx authors and cultural producers express environmental concerns in their work. These chapters, which focus on film, visual art, and literature--and engage in fields such as disability studies, animal studies, and queer studies--emphasize the role of racial capitalism in shaping human relationships to the more-than-human world and reveal a vibrant tradition of Latinx decolonial environmentalism. Latinx Environmentalisms accounts for the ways Latinx cultures are environmental, but often do not assume the mantle of "environmentalism."
ISBN: 9781439916681
Environmental Criticism for the Twenty-First Century (2011) by
Environmental Criticism for the Twenty-First Century showcases the recent explosive expansion of environmental criticism, which is actively transforming three areas of broad interest in contemporary literary and cultural studies: history, scale, and science. With contributors engaging texts from the medieval period through the twenty-first century, the collection brings into focus recent ecocritical concern for the long durations through which environmental imaginations have been shaped. Contributors also address problems of scale, including environmental institutions and imaginations that complicate conventional rubrics such as the national, local, and global. Finally, this collection brings together a set of scholars who are interested in drawing on both the sciences and the humanities in order to find compelling stories for engaging ecological processes such as global climate change, peak oil production, nuclear proliferation, and food scarcity. Environmental Criticism for the Twenty-First Century offers powerful proof that cultural criticism is itself ecologically resilient, evolving to meet the imaginative challenges of twenty-first-century environmental crises.
ISBN: 9780415886307
Re-Imagining Nature (2013) by
Re-Imagining Nature: Environmental Humanities and Ecosemiotics explores new horizons in environmental studies, which consider communication and meaning as core definitions of ecological life, essential to deep sustainability. It considers landscape as narrative, and applies theoretical frameworks in eco-phenomenology and ecosemiotics to literary, historical, and philosophical study of the relationship between text and landscape. It considers in particular examples and lessons to be drawn from case studies of medieval and Native American cultures, to illustrate in an applied way the promise of environmental humanities today. In doing so, it highlights an environmental future for the humanities, on the cutting edge of cultural endeavor today.
ISBN: 9781611485240
This Contentious Storm: an Ecocritical and Performance History of King Lear by ISBN: 9781474289054Publication Date: 2017-08-24
