Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature

FindIt@Bham: the University of Birmingham Library Catalogue

All books and ebooks, rare books and books at UoB site libraries can be searched for via the library catalogue FindIt. 

If you are having any problems locating what you need contact a member of staff or message the JustAsk enquiry team.

Image: Shakespeare and his contemporaries by John Faed, 1851 [photoshopped]

• The Shakespeare Quartos Archive
  Digital collection of editions of plays by Shakespeare printed in quarto before the 1642 theatre closures. This website was archived in 2019.  
• Digital Anthology of Early English Modern Drama (Folger Shakespeare Library)
  EMED includes full texts of a number of the plays in the original spelling as well as with some regularized forms. The textually encoded files are available, too. Whether you read the plays, discover new insights through data exploration, devise college and graduate curricula, or work toward scholarly editions, EMED widens our horizon to different plays and to new questions as we consider the drama of Shakespeare's time.
• Internet Shakespeare Editions
  Online editions of Shakespeare’s works with supplementary and related materials. Includes pages on the Life and Times and Performance as well as reliable links to other online sources.
• John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments Online
  Browse and compare the unabridged texts of the four editions of this massive work published in John Foxe’s lifetime (1563, 1570, 1576, 1583). Each edition changed significantly as Foxe sought to incorporate new material, answer his critics, and adjust its polemical force to the needs of the moment.
• Luminarium
  An online anthology of English Literature covering the Medieval to the Restoration period. Contains useful essays and articles on the literature of the period and pages of further study on individual authors.
• Project Gutenberg
  Over 75,000 free ebooks including historic texts.
• Renaissance Electronic Texts
  A series of old-spelling, SGML-encoded editions of early individual copies of English Renaissance books and manuscripts, and of plain transcriptions of such works, published on the World Wide Web as a free resource for students of the period (University of Toronto).
• Richard Brome Online
  An online edition of the Collected Works of the Caroline dramatist, Richard Brome. The edition not only makes the texts accessible to scholars and theatre practitioners, but also begins to explore their theatricality visually, serving as inspiration to encourage more frequent staging of Brome's works.

To find printed books, ebooks, print journals, online articles, DVDs and videos in your subject, go to FindIt@Bham and use either the Simple or the Advanced Search. Search by:

• author;
• title;
• keyword;
• classmark.

The 'Using FindIt@Bham to search for books' video tutorial outlines how to search for books effectively:

There are two ways of finding books on FindIt@Bham:

• If you know the author and title (or at least parts of the title), you can type these into the simple search box – e.g. human resource management beardwell.
• If you are looking for books on a particular subject, you can type in keywords which describe it – e.g. mathematics teaching.

In both cases, if you are only interested in books, we recommend selecting Library Catalogue from the second drop-down menu next to the search box and select the Search button :

This search finds both printed and electronic books. You can use the buttons below the search box to refine the results further. If you are interested in only print books, select the Print Books button. If you are interested in only electronic books, select the eBooks button. For example, to look up whether Human Resource Management (edited by Julie Beardwell and Amanda Thompson) is available in print, you would select the Print Books button: