FYE: Renaissance Culture
Humanities Liaison Librarian
- Steve Lawson
- Tutt Library Room 173
- (in the Learning Commons,
off the Map Room) - (719) 389-6857
- Email me or Chat with me now
Updated for 2009.
Reference works
When starting work on a topic, an overview from an encyclopedia or other reference work can be a good place to get background information, find keywords for future searching, or a bibliography of books and articles to look for in the library.
There are many places to start, depending on your topic. Call numbers beginning with C or D for history, N for art or P for languages and literatures might be good places to browse the reference collection.
- Dictionary of the Middle Ages
- Print only, in the Tutt Reference section.
- Encyclopedia of the Renaissance
- Print only, in the Tutt Reference section.
- The Grove Dictionary Of Art Online
- Coverage: N/A
- Comprehensive online reference source for all aspects of the visual arts worldwide from prehistory to the present day. The online version of the Grove Dictionary of Art (Tutt Reference, N31.D5 1996). Now part of Oxford Art Online.
- Medieval Italy : An Encyclopedia
- Print only, in the Tutt Reference section.
- Middle English Dictionary
- Coverage: N/A
- This electronic version of the MED preserves all the details of the print MED (available in Tutt Library ), but goes far beyond this, by converting its contents into an enormous database, searchable in ways impossible within any print dictionary.
Online texts
- Geoffrey Chaucer Online: The Electronic Canterbury Tales
- An Online Compendium and Companion to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
- The Princeton Dante Project
- The PDP combines a traditional approach to the study of Dante's Comedy with new techniques of compiling and consulting data, images, and sound.
- Dartmouth Dante Project
- The Dartmouth Dante Project (DDP) is a searchable full-text database containing more than seventy commentaries on Dante's Divine Comedy - the Commedia.
Searching by keywords and subjects
Books
Start with TIGER to find books here at Colorado College then try Prospector if we don’t have what you need or if it is already checked out to find books across Colorado. Books
Articles
There are many places to look for articles, depending on the subject of your research. Here are some ideas on where to begin:
- Art Abstracts
- Coverage: 1929 - current
- Indexes hundreds of international art journals. Abstracts and some fulltext back to 1984, citations for earlier articles. This is a combined search of Art Abstracts and Art Index Retrospective.
- Historical Abstracts
- Coverage: 1967 - current
- Covers world history.
- JSTOR
- Coverage: late 1800's - most recent 5 years
- Archival access to many scholarly periodicals. Jstor does not cover the most recent three years of most journals.
- MLA International Bibliography
- Coverage: 1963 - current
- Literature, languages, linguistics, and folklore from over journals and series published worldwide.
When you have the full citation
What is this thing?
Citations look different and contain different information depending on what they refer to. Examples:
- Grafton, Anthony. Defenders of the Text : The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450-1800. Cambridge, Mass., 1991.
- Grendler, Marcella. “A Greek Collection in Padua: The Library of Gian Vincenzo Pinelli (1535-1601).” Renaissance Quarterly 33 (1980): 386-416.
- Robathan, Dorothy M. “Libraries of the Italian Renaissance.” In The Medieval Library. Edited by James Westfall Thompson. 1939. Reprint, New York, 1957. Pages 509-588.
Finding books and book chapters
Once you have established that what you want is a book, or a part of a book, simply look for it in TIGER under the title of the book (not the title of the article, or chapter). That’s usually the part in italics.
Finding articles
Finding articles from their citations is slightly trickier. On the library home page, inside the “Find Articles” box, you will find a line that says “Have a complete citation in hand? Find Journals." Follow that link and enter the title of the journal (not the article). With any luck the result will give you one or more links to that journal online and also tell you if we have that journal in the library.
Pay careful attention to the dates on that screen, and see if the article you want falls inside those dates?
Questions or problems? Ask a librarian (or ask me, specifically).