A list of projects and websites of potential interest to scholars of early modern translation and print culture
General catalogues and databases
The English Short Title Catalogue provides the backbone for the CCC. The catalogue has not been directly available for many months following a cyber-attack at the British Library. A provisional version has been made accessible online by the University of California at San Diego and the Carnegie Mellon University.
Early English Books Online—Text Creation Partnership (EEBO-TCP), a text-encoding initiative that makes available a corpus of over 125,000 volumes, including newsbooks, pamphlets, and ephemera published between 1473 and 1800.
The Universal Short Title Catalogue (1450–1650) brings together the collections of a wide array of European libraries. Translations are tagged as such in the metadata, but can only be identified through keyword search.
The Private Libraries in Renaissance England database lists the contents of a number of early modern English private collections. Translations are well represented, although not directly identified as such. Hosted by the Folger Shakespeare Library.
The Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts 1450–1700 contains a good number of translations, only findable through keyword search. Project developed at King’s College London, currently hosted by the Folger Shakespeare Library.
The Perdita Manuscripts database also contains manuscript translations, but unfortunately it is not freely accessible.
Early modern translation catalogues and databases
The Renaissance Cultural Crossroads Catalogue documents all translations printed in Britain (as well as all translations into English printed on the Continent) for the years 1473–1640. Originally developed at the University of Warwick, currently hosted by the University of Sheffield.
The Early Modern Spanish-English Translation Database, 1500–1640 contains comprehensive bibliographical descriptions of all the translations from Spanish published in English in the early modern period. Project developed at King’s College London.
Writing Bilingually, 1465-1700: Self-translated Books in Italy and France. This research project at the Warburg Institute documents prose self-translations produced in Italy and France from 1465 to 1700.
The Catálogo Hipertextual de Traducciones Anónimas al Castellano (“Catalogue of Anonymous Translations into Spanish”) covers the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries. Developed at the University of Alcalà.
The Marburger Repertorium zur Übersetzungsliteratur im Deutschen Frühhumanismus (“Marburger Repertoire of Literary Translations in Early German Humanism”), developed at the University of Marburg.
The Online-Repertorium Deutsche Antikenübersetzung 1501–1620 (“Online Repertory of German Translations of Classical Antiquity 1501–1620”), at the University of Munich.
The Radical Translations database includes translations involved in the circulation of revolutionary culture between France, England and Italy (1789-1815). The corpus extends to the modern period but early modern authors and texts are also represented in the data. Project developed at King’s College London.
Other projects
RECIRC—The Reception and Circulation of Early Modern Women’s Writings, 1550-1700. The project developed at the University of Galway documents the early modern circulation of women’s writings. Translation is recognized as a distinct type of reception and translated texts are therefore easily identifiable. The website offers visualizations of circulation networks.
The Six Degrees of Francis Bacon initiative offers visualizations of social networks in early modern Britain and beyond, as documented in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online and other sources. Hosted by Carnegie Mellon University.
The Early Modern Letters Online project at the University of Oxford can be useful to establish connexions between translators and their entourage or trace the reception of translated texts.
The Fifteenth-Century Book Trade interface, also hosted by the University of Oxford, can be useful to situate translations within wider circuits of book production and circulation.
The British Book Trade Index (BBTI) Archive is hosted by the Grub Street Project (University of Saskatchewan) and made available via the Oxford University Research Archive. It offers useful information on early modern English stationers. The Scottish Book Trade Index (STBI) is maintained separately by the National Library of Scotland.