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Historical Methods: The European Witch Craze: Scholarly Websites

Research Guide for HIST 350: Historical Methods

 

 

Scholarly Websites

Connected Histories: British Sources, 1500-1900

Connected Histories brings together a range of digital resources related to early modern and nineteenth century Britain with a single federated search that allows sophisticated searching of names, places and dates. We have produced this short video guide to introduce you to the key features.

 

Cornell University Library: Witchcraft Collection

Cornell University Library’s Witchcraft Collection is part of the Library’s Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections. It contains more than 3,000 books, manuscripts, and related materials. More information about the content of the collection is available on the Collection Overview page. An online selection of 104 English language books from the Witchcraft Collection is available to search, browse by title, or browse by author. These titles were digitally scanned from microfilm by Primary Source Media in 1998. The resulting full text scans were later made available to Cornell University Library to enable free public access.

 

The Old Bailey Proceedings Online

The Old Bailey Proceedings Online makes available a fully searchable, digitised collection of all surviving editions of the Old Bailey Proceedings from 1674 to 1913, and of the Ordinary of Newgate's Accounts between 1676 and 1772. It allows access to over 197,000 trials and biographical details of approximately 2,500 men and women executed at Tyburn, free of charge for non-commercial use. In addition to the text, accessible through both keyword and structured searching, this website provides digital images of all 190,000 original pages of the Proceedings, 4,000 pages of Ordinary's Accounts, advice on methods of searching this resource, information on the historical and legal background to the Old Bailey court and its Proceedings, and descriptions of published and manuscript materials relating to the trials covered. Contemporary maps, and images have also been provided.

 

London Lives, 1690-1800

London Lives makes available, in a fully digitised and searchable form, a wide range of primary sources about eighteenth-century London, with a particular focus on plebeian Londoners. This resource includes over 240,000 manuscript and printed pages from eight London archives and is supplemented by fifteen datasets created by other projects. It provides access to historical records containing over 3.35 million name instances. Facilities are provided to allow users to link together records relating to the same individual, and to compile biographies of the best documented individuals.

 

English Broadside Ballad Archive

Making broadside ballads of the seventeenth century fully accessible as texts, art, music, and cultural records. EBBA is the most ambitious project to date of the Early Modern Center in the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

 

National Archives of the UK, Early Modern Witch Trials Collection

This document collection includes various documents relating to the witch craze in 17th century England. It allows students and teachers to develop their own questions and lines of historical enquiry on the nature of beliefs and behaviours, the role of the authorities and legal restraint, attitudes of communities or the role of women in society.

Hanover Historical Texts Collection:

Early Modern Europe Resources

The Witch Hunts Resources

The faculty and students of the Hanover College History Department initiated the Hanover Historical Texts Project in 1995, at a time when few primary sources were available outside of published anthologies. To make primary texts readily available for classroom use, they selected important documents, scanned print versions that were out of copyright, converted the scans into HTML format, proofread the resulting documents to correct OCR errors, edited them to provide page breaks, page numbers, and bibliographical information, and posted them online. We have since expanded the collection to include transcriptions of manuscript material from the Hanover College archives.

 

Project Gutenberg: Witchcraft Bookshelf

Project Gutenberg is a library of over 60,000 free eBooks. The Witchcraft Bookshelf contains a selection of non-fiction books on the history of witchcraft, including contemporary accounts of witchcraft trials.

 

Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project

The Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project lists a series of links that open to a generous array of maps, letters, court documents, sermons, literature, etc. which paint a vivid portrait of this notorious episode of American history. Documents & Transcriptions collects links to court transcripts, records, and miscellaneous files from a variety of regional archives. Users can access such items as digital transcripts of individual case files (depositions, interrogations, indictments, etc.), petitions, expense accounts, and bills. Historical Maps lists links to contemporary maps of Salem Village and neighboring areas.  Archival Collections organizes documents by sources such as the Massachusetts Historical Society and the Boston Public Library. Contemporary Books links to selected literature of the trials and witchcraft in general. Developed by University of Virginia.

 

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