Digitisation of Renaissance Festival Books in the Collections of the British Library

"Festival books are a rich resource for the history of modern Europe, of interest to social, political and cultural historians and to historians of the book. The aim of this project, and others related to it, is to provide greater access to these books.

The Festival Books Digitisation Project, funded by the AHRC, is the result of collaboration between the AHRC Centre for the Study of Renaissance Elites and Court Cultures at the University of Warwick and the British Library. The Centre is home to a number of inter-disciplinary projects concerned with the study of court culture and festival entertainments in Renaissance and Early Modern Europe. The Festival Books Project is an offshoot of one of these in particular, the AHRC-funded Europa Triumphans (Directors: Professor Ronnie Mulryne and Professor Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly) which, among other things, has published a two-volume collection of festival texts with an extensive scholarly apparatus (J.R. Mulryne, Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly and Margaret Shewring (eds.), 'Europa Triumphans': Court and Civic Festivals in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot and Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2004).

We have drawn on the expertise and work of those involved in the Europa Triumphans project to make possible an even wider dissemination of festival texts by means of digitisation.

In all, 253 festival books, many of them illustrated, were catalogued, indexed and photographed. Over 14,000 images (pages) are hosted on the site. The books are presented in their original languages, and include bindings, preliminary material, title pages and dedications. The texts are fully searchable using a wide range of search terms, covering such areas as participants (named in the titles of the books), places, topics, bibliographical details, and elements of the visual and performing arts" (from project web site; please see for more details).

Project

Academic field
History
Community Arts (including Art and Health)
Visual Arts
Affiliation
University of Warwick
British Library
Project link
Digitisation of Renaissance Festival Books in the Collections of the British Library
Funders
Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)

arts-humanities.net

Principal investigator
Professor James Ronald Mulryne
Principal project staff
Professor Ronnie Mulryne; Dr Margaret Shewring; Dr Kristian Jensen; Dr Sarah Cusk; Dr Alexander Samson
Start date
Saturday, July 1, 2000
Completion date
Monday, December 1, 2003
Era
Modern
Place
Western Europe
Source material
"Our aim was to build a resource that can be searched not only by author or title, but using a series of keywords, available in the thesaurus, to provide access to proper names, types of festival entertainment and festival architecture, iconography, chronology and geography. Each festival book on the website is described on three different levels: * On one level, the electronic resource functions as a traditional library catalogue, providing detailed bibliographical descriptions of each book, along with information about the specific copy in the British Library * We also provide, as an introduction to each book, a brief description of the festival it recounts, the names of those involved and any relevant historical background * Finally, our page-level description, using a thesaurus of indexing terms, allows the specific textual and visual content of each book to be searched using both keywords and our thesaurus. In this way, the electronic format allows the books to be searched and interrogated in specific ways. Over the course of two years the British Library digitally captured each page to a very high resolution. In total 14,318 images were created". (see project web site for more details).
Data formats
Extensible Markup Language (XML)