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The Texts

The texts listed below represent only a very small sample of early modern engagements with national identity, historiography, and sovereignty. However, these seventeenth-century national histories have a particularly high concentration of the phenomena that Making Room in History is designed to examine and so they are useful in testing and refining the project’s encoding. In the future, I will extend the both genres and the temporal scope of encoded texts; increasing the representation of texts authored by women will be a high priority.

TEI P5 transcriptions of these texts were made available through the public release of Phase I of the EEBO-TCP partnership; links below are to the Oxford Text Archive web editions. Making Room in History is profoundly indebted to EEBO-TCP for their generosity in sharing the Phase I transcriptions and making projects like this one possible.

Initial Texts for Test Encoding

John Clapham’s The Historie of Great Britannie, published in London in 1606

John Speed’s The History of Great Britaine, published in London in 1611

Samuel Daniel’s The Collection of the Historie of England, published in London in 1618

William Slatyer’s The History of Great Britanie, published in London in 1621

James Ware’s Two Histories of Ireland, published in Dublin in 1633 and collecting:

  • Edmund Campion’s A Historie of Ireland
  • Meredith Hanmer’s Chronicle of Ireland
  • Henry of Marleborough’s Chronicle of Ireland, and
  • Edmund Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland

Richard Baker’s A Chronicle of the Kings of England, published in London in 1643

John Prise’s A Description of Wales, edited by Humphrey Lloyd and published in Oxford in 1663

Margaret Cavendish’s The Life of the Thrice Noble, High, and Puissant Prince William Cavendishe, published in London in 1667

John Milton’s The History of Britain, published in London in 1670

Aylett Sammes’s Britannia Antiqua Illustrata, published in London in 1676

Richard Cox’s Hibernia Anglicana: Or the History of Ireland from the Conquest Thereof by the English to this Present Time, published in London in 1689

William Temple’s An Introduction to the History of England, published in London in 1695

James Tyrrell’s The General History of England, Both Ecclesiastical and Civil; From the Earliest Accounts of Time to the Reign of His Present Majesty, King William III, published in London in 1696

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