Research Guides: Medieval Drama: Finding Articles

Recommended Databases

The study of Medieval Drama reaches beyond simply the study of theatre, so this list of recommended databases includes subject-specific and some inter-disciplinary databases as well.

International Bibliography of Theater & Dance with Full Text This link opens in a new window
The International Index to Performing Arts Indexes journal articles, books, book chapters, dissertations, and monographs in theatre and the performing arts and covers 1984 to present.
Performing Arts Periodicals Database This link opens in a new window
Performing Arts Periodicals Database provides indexing and abstracts for more than 210 international journals in the performing arts dating from 1864 to the near present.
Literature Online (LION) This link opens in a new window
Literature Online includes full text of literary works in English from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. It also includes the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature, together with biographic and bibliographic reference materials for each author.
A fully searchable library of more than 350,000 works of English and American poetry, drama and prose. LION is the single most extensive and wide-ranging online collection of English and American literature.Resources included in this resource are: Bibliographies Biographies Columbia Companion to the 20th Century American Short Story Columbia Dictionary of Modern European Literature Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms Encyclopedia of African Literature Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century Encyclopedia of Latin American and Caribbean Literature, 1900-2003 Encyclopedia of Linguistics (2 vols.) Encyclopedia of the Novel Handbook of African American Literature New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics Oxford Companion to Irish Literature Penguin Classics Introductions Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory Routledge Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English (2nd Edition)
MEMSO: Medieval and Early Modern Sources Online This link opens in a new window
MEMSO is a resource for the study of Britain and its place in the world during the medieval and early modern period (c. 1100-1800). It combines the key printed sources for English, Irish, Scottish and Colonial history with original manuscripts and the latest web technologies...
Bloomsbury Medieval Studies This link opens in a new window
Bloomsbury Medieval Studies is an interdisciplinary digital resource offering a global perspective on the medieval world. It includes access to the Encyclopedia of the Global Middle Ages, an eBook collection, and digitized images of manuscripts, incunabula, and maps from the British Library and Senate House Library.
Cambridge Companions Online This link opens in a new window
Cambridge Companions are lively, accessible introductions to major writers, artists, philosophers, topics and periods. All are collections of specially commissioned essays, shaped and introduced to appeal to student readers. Together the chapters add up to a systematic critical account of, for example Plato, Luther, Jane Austen, Tom Stoppard or Stravinsky, the French Novel or Jewish American Literature, and each title is supported by reference features such as a chronology and guide to further reading.
Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Index This link opens in a new window
Index to journal articles, book reviews, and essays in books about women, sexuality, and gender during the Middle Ages. More than 500 journals are indexed.
Project Muse This link opens in a new window
Provides full-text access to high quality humanities, arts, and social sciences journals from scholarly publishers.
Defining Gender This link opens in a new window
Defining Gender explores the study and analysis of gender, leisure, and consumer culture from 1406 to 1917. This collection of original primary source materials from British archives includes ephemera, pamphlets, college records and exam papers, commonplace books, diaries, periodicals, letters, ledgers, account books, educational practice and pedagogy, government papers from the Home Office and Metropolitan police, illustrated writings on anatomy, midwifery, art and fashion, manuscript journals, poetry, novels, ballads, drama, receipt books, literary manuscripts, travel writing, and conduct and advice literature. This broad range of documents is organized around the following themes: conduct and politeness, domesticity and the family, consumption and leisure, education and sensibility, the body. Manuscripts, printed works, and illustrations combine to address the key issues from both masculine and feminine perspectives.
Middle English Compendium This link opens in a new window
The Middle English Compendium offers access to three major Middle English electronic resources: an electronic version of the Middle English Dictionary, a HyperBibliography of Middle English prose and verse, based on the MED bibliographies, and a Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse, as well as links to an associated network of electronic resources.
JSTOR This link opens in a new window
JSTOR provides access to scholarly journals, primarily in the humanities and social sciences. In addition to journal articles, users can access book chapters, ebooks, and primary source documents.
Medieval Bibliographies This link opens in a new window
Medieval Bibliographies is an essential resource for finding articles in the field of Medieval Studies. Includes International Medieval Bibliography and Bibliography of Medieval Civilisation.
Medieval Family Life This link opens in a new window
This resource contains full colour images of the original medieval manuscripts that comprise these family letter collections along with full text searchable transcripts from the printed editions, where they are available. The original images and the transcriptions can be viewed side by side. Along with the letter collections themselves there are many additional features useful for teaching and research. These include: A chronology, a visual sources gallery, an interactive map, a glossary, family trees and links to other scholarly free to access digital resources useful for researching the medieval period.
Medieval Travel Writing (Adam Matthew Digital) This link opens in a new window
This new collection from Adam Matthew Digital presents manuscripts of some of the most important works of European travel writing from the later medieval period. The chief focus is on journeys to central Asia and the Far East, including accounts of travel to Mongolia, Persia, India, China and South-East Asia. The collection also includes a number of important accounts of travels to or through the Holy Land although in this it makes no claims to full or even broad coverage: a separate collection, covering crusading and pilgrimage narratives, would be required for that. It features a number of medieval maps such as the famous ‘Beatus’ and ‘Psalter’ maps, individual manuscript illuminations, and some modern translations of key travel texts. It should become an indispensable source for scholars of medieval travel, geography, exploration, trade, literature, and the new field of medieval postcolonial studies.
Early English Books Online (EEBO) This link opens in a new window
Early English Books Online (EEBO) contains digital facsimile page images of virtually every work printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and British North America and works in English printed elsewhere from 1473-1700. Searchable full text is also available for a subset of the collection.
Arts & Humanities Database This link opens in a new window
Arts & Humanities Database features hundreds of titles covering Art, Architecture, Design, History, Philosophy, Music, Literature, Theatre and Cultural Studies.
Dissertations & Theses Global This link opens in a new window
Dissertations and Theses Global contains indexes, dissertations and some theses. Full-text is available for many dissertations and theses, including those from NYU.
Iter Bibliography This link opens in a new window
Comprised of secondary source material pertaining to the Middle Ages and Renaissance (400-1700). Citations for books and journal material (articles, reviews, review articles, bibliographies, catalogues, abstracts and discographies) are included, as are citations for dissertation abstracts and essays in books (including entries in conference proceedings, festschriften, encyclopedias and exhibition catalogues).
Bibliography of English Women Writers (1500-1640) This link opens in a new window
The Bibliography of English Women Writers 1500-1640 has evolved into a still-growing list of scholarship about 738 recovered writers and located texts, canonical and non-canonical. It 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.

Journals

Many journals devoted to English Literature and Theatre may include articles on Medieval Drama.

This is a select list of a few of the numerous journals that may contain articles on Medieval Drama:

Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England
Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England is an international volume published annually. Each volume contains essays and studies by critics and cultural historians from both hemispheres as well as substantial reviews of books and essays dealing with medieval and early modern English drama.
Medieval English Theatre
Medieval English Theatre is an international refereed journal publishing articles on medieval and early Tudor theatre and pageantry in all its aspects, together with articles and records of modern survivals or equivalents. Coverage is not confined to England: all comparative material is welcome.
Speculum
Speculum, published quarterly since 1926, was the first scholarly journal in North America devoted exclusively to the Middle Ages. It is open to contributions in all fields studying the Middle Ages, a period ranging from approximately 500 to 1500. Its primary emphasis is on Western Europe, but Arabic, Byzantine, Hebrew, and Slavic studies are also included.
Early Theatre : a journal associated with the Records of Early Drama.
Early Theatre is a peer-reviewed journal that welcomes research in medieval or early modern drama and theatre history, rooted in the records and documents of England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales.