Days of wine and roses

As this blog's last few readers will have noted, there is little news these days. I'm 60 and nearing retirement, and none too soon; my work suffers from reduced vision, short-term memory loss, chronic non-sequitur syndrome (I made that up, but it fits) and an inability to sit for long hours creating and proofing a text. RE as a premier Early Modern text site is slipping into history. The original home page is now down to about 150 visitors per day, a considerable drop from the traffic that totaled over 15 million hits in former times. Online availability of Google Books and Early English Books Online has led to a new era in text recovery.

To see these works at the original location, you will need Acrobat Reader, or any PDF reader. The linked titles on the site point to PDF files adapted from the HTML originals, hosted on the Scholars Bank archive at the University of Oregon Libraries. A link from a lowercase "[m]" within brackets, associated with each item, takes you to the metadata record for that item. The HTML files previously referenced here will disappear from the UO server in, probably, 2011, and only the PDFs will remain. Mirror sites may continue to present the HTML versions indefinitely; the official mirror lives in a new folder at Anniina Jokinen's wonderful site, Luminarium. Meanwhile, links to the known and approved mirrors (there are others) will be maintained in the header and footer of the RE contents page for as long as the original site remains available.

My current passion is passing on low impact small farm/homestead skills to those willing to equip themselves for an age of economic/energy/climate instability, in which small farming may be the most viable food solution. For those interested, see the Stony Run Farm blog.

Thank you,

risa b

Upgrade completed!

Scholar's Bank has completed the upgrade and you may wish to go to the Renascence Editions home page there and hit refresh/reload.

On RE's original TOC page, titles of works are now links to those works in PDF, and the link to the metadata page for each title is represented by a hyperlinked letter "m" within square brackets, following the title, thus:

The Countesse of Pembroke's Arcadia [m] Risa Bear

For those interested, the site where I do my "day job" is also on SB and it has its own home page now:

Local and Regional Documents Archive

I'm the submitter of city and county documents, and the proofreader for my colleague who does federal documents.

Risa B

Server upgrade

Previously, this post anounced this upgrade for Monday night.

Due to unforeseen technical issues, the DSpace upgrade will take place Tuesday night and Wednesday during the day. Renascence Editions in the PDF format will be unavailable during that time; everyone is referred to the mirror sites referenced in the preceding post. We apologize for any inconvenience.Scholars' Bank will be available for the public in the meantime.

Ta for now ...

We have removed the HTML hyperlinks from the RE home page but the files are still on the server; if you are using them over the next two years in syllabi and the like, the links should still work.

The PDF links are now the only ones directly linked from the Table of Contents or referenced in the search engines. To point to "official" HTML versions of these files in the future, you may wish to 1) go to the Mirror at Early Mondern Literary Studies or the Mirror at Project Gutenberg or the one that will be maintained at Luminarium, or 2) download them now, while they remain available at UO, and republish them (with attribution, of course!).

You may acquire the entire set of 222 works, with the TOC, as a zipfile:

http://uoregon.edu/~rbear/renascence.7z

Note that as the site grew over the years, many links were hardlinked, and will need to be reformatted in order for the site to work properly from any subdirectory on your server. If anyone would like to make it more portable, and send me the improved zipfile, I'd greatly appreciate it!

Thanks to everyone for the support and enthusiasm over the years. The HTML version of RE on the UO server garnered more than 15,000,000 page views between 1994 and 2008!

-- risa b

Change is in the air

This familiar text in RE's Table of Contents page has had a couple of sentences added, bolded below.

Need it paginated? Need metadata? if you have Acrobat Reader, get the PDF files instead. The links on this site marked [PDF] point to metadata for each item as found on the Scholars Bank archive at the University of Oregon Libraries. To get to the PDF version of the item, scroll to the bottom of the metadata record and click view/open. The URL for each metadata page and its associated PDF file is a PURL. The HTML files currently referenced here will disappear from the server in, probably 2011, and only the PDFs will remain. Mirror sites may continue to present the HTML versions indefinitely.

Our editor, yours truly, will be retiring soon, and will be pursuing other interests than RE, to which she has devoted more than fifteen years of her "spare" time. There will be three mirrors of the HTML files: one at Early Modern Literary Studies, one at Project Gutenberg, and one to be announced (at yet another well known and quite popular site). By 2011, if not sooner, links to HTML texts at UO will be deleted from the TOC page and only links to the PDFs in Scholar's Bank will be provided. We will post developments here as they occur.

Thomas Ellwood in PDF

The Life of Thomas Ellwood is now also available on Scholars Bank:

http://hdl.handle.net/1794/5807

The History of the Life of Thomas Ellwood (HTML)

We have added to RE The History of the Life of Thomas Ellwood.

The text was transcribed by Risa Stephanie Bear from the Ellwood-authored portion of the Friends Book Store edition of 1865, which was taken from The history of the life of Thomas Ellwood, or, An account of his birth, education, &c. With divers observations on his life and manners when a youth: and how he came to be convinced of the truth; with his many sufferings and services for the same. Also several other remarkable passages and occurrences. By Thomas Ellwood; Joseph Wyeth; George Bowles; Elizabeth Richardson; Richard Vivers. London : Printed and sold by the assigns of J. Sowle, 1714.

Journal of the Plague Year (PDF)

Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year is now available in PDF from Scholars Bank at the University of Oregon Libraries.

A matter of interest: often described as a novel (Defoe was about age five at the time of the events his "author," a sadler from Southwark, describes). I would describe it as more like a mockumentary (albeit of the serious type). I could envision selecting Ken Burns as the best choice for a director of a "movie version." The use of, and analysis of, the actual death bills and city regulations from 1664 make this a more than usually historic document than one might expect from approaching it as a novel.

In the spirit of the original, I have dedicated this transcription to Rebecca and Robert, two of the vivid (but alas, fictional) characters whose moving circumstances are so vividly and memorably presented in the story.

risa b

A Journal of the Plague Year (HTML)

We have added A Journal of the Plague Year, by Daniel Defoe.

The text was transcribed by Risa Stephanie Bear, February, 2008, from the text as found in A Journal of the/Plague Year/Being Observations or Memorials/of the most Remarkable Occurences, as/well Publick as Private, which/happened in London during/the last Great Visitation in 1665/Written by a Citizen who continued all the/while in London. Never made publick before. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Publisher to the Shakespeare Head Press of Stratford-upon-Avon, 1928 [Which is taken from the edition of 1722].

A Kicksey Winsey (PDF)

A Kicksey Winsey: Or, a Lerry Come-Twang by John Taylor, the King's Water-Poet, has been added to Scholars Bank, see http://hdl.handle.net/1794/5443.

A Kicksey Winsey (HTML)

We have added

A Kicksey Winsey: Or, a Lerry Come-Twang,

John Taylor's pamphlet excoriating subscribers who failed to pay for the subscriptions to his Pennilesse Pilgrimage.

The text was transcribed by Risa Stephanie Bear, January, 2008, from the text as found in Works of John Taylor, The Water Poet, Ed. Charles Hindley, London: Reeves & Turner, 1876.

The Penniless Pilgrimage (PDF)

The penniless pilgrimage , or, The pennyles pilgrimage, or the money-lesse perambulation, of Iohn Taylor, alias the king's majesties water-poet.... Taylor, John, 1580-1653, is now available in PDF.