Access is available on and off campus to current McMaster University students, faculty and staff.
Coverage: 1500 to1640
A still-growing list of scholarship about 738 recovered writers and located texts, canonical and non-canonical. The bibliography identifies many hitherto unknown writers, including among them not only already familiar figures, but also women refugees such as the recusants, women in the colonies, Marrano women (Anusot), women translators, and English women writers in French, Greek, Latin, Spanish, Irish Gaelic, Scottish Gaelic and Welsh. While "comprehensiveness" remains the ideal goal of the bibliography, in the case of some particularly famous women, like Elizabeth Tudor and Mary Stuart, listings are limited to materials connected to these women's writings, rather than their lives.
Preliminaries consist of bibliographies and catalogues, contextual studies (i.e., studies providing extended narrative or analysis), reference works (i.e., compendia of entries), anthologies of essays, special issues of journals, genre studies, handbooks and pedagogical tools, compilations containing primary sources, and dissertations. Individual listings, the bulk of the bibliography, begin with a main heading supplying the writer's name and dates and contain lists of texts (along with English Short Title Catalogue numbers or locations of manuscripts), of editions, of compilations containing texts, and of both historical and analytical scholarship. Within these individual listings, added entries identify variants of names and of titles and notes provide further information essential to identifying the writers and texts.
