17th and 18th Century Poetry from the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds
This project opens up new opportunities for the reading, study and appreciation of early modern verse and provides valuable source materials for both literary scholars and historians.
- Scholars can now see the way in which manuscript verse was originally recorded, read and circulated
- We can examine the ways in which public and private spheres were defined through such manuscripts - what is said in manuscript but never printed?
- Many different types of manuscript are represented - from elegant presentation volumes to commonplace books and volumes of household accounts - these show the context of the poetry and are valuable sources for social and cultural history
- Sample poets represented include Mary Campbell, John Dryden, George Herbert, Mary Leapor, Andrew Marvell, Alexander Pope, Hester Pulter and Jonathan Swift - but there are also countless songs, riddles and popular tags, which tell us much about contemporary society
The project combines facsimile images of all of the manuscripts in their entirety, linked to new indexing and to the powerful BCMSV database which lists first lines, last lines, attribution, author, title, date, length, verse form, content, bibliographic references, MS and record number for over 6,600 poems within the collection.