A Guide for Student Researchers of the
Streets, Sites,
and Playhouses of Early Modern London
¶Introduction
If you are on this page, you have likely been invited to contribute an encyclopedia page to MoEML through
our Pedagogical Partnership.
Your professor is your first and best resource, especially on questions of how
to navigate the digital and print research tools of your own university library.
This page is meant to support you and your professor as you research a street,
site, or playhouse in early modern London.
Even when you are working with the best possible sources, answers may prove
elusive and require a bit of digging. The purpose of this page is to provide you
with an annotated list of the resources used most often by the MoEML team when
we research placenames, and to share our research tips and strategies with you.
In turn, we invite you to let us know if you find a useful source we have not
listed here.

¶Good Research Practices
Before you begin your research, it is important to think ahead and reflect on the
research
questions that you will need to answer. You are performing the work of
a forensic historian; it is up to you to gather information about the past to
examine and critically assess. Then, you can mobilize your research to write
about the topic that MoEML has assigned to you.
The most important thing in the research stage of your project is to keep good
records. Record your search terms/strings for any searches you perform in
electronic catalogues, databases, and reference tools. Copy and paste any
references and passages that look promising into a document, text file, or
spreadsheet file. Be sure to record citation information and/or your sources for
all excerpts, notes, and references. In your notes, distinguish carefully
between quotations (the words of your source) and paraphrases (your words).
Be aware of the nature of the source you are reading: is it a primary
source (a work from the early modern period) or a secondary
source (a work about the early modern period by a historian or a
literary critic)?
You also want to be aware of the nature of the resource or research tools you are
using to find and access sources. The more you know about your research tools,
the better you’ll be able to find what you need. Here are some questions to ask
about each resource you use:
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Is the resource a bibliography? If yes, does it list primary sources, secondary sources, or both? What are the parameters of the bibliography? In other words, what does it include and what does it exclude?
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Is it a catalogue of the holdings of a particular library or archive?
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Is it a database in which someone has entered information about people or places? (See ROLLCO, for example.)
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Is it a library of primary sources? If yes, are the sources digitized, transcribed, or both? (See EEBO, for example.)
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Is it a library of secondary sources?
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Is it open-access or behind a subscription paywall so that you have to be logged into your library’s system to access your university’s subscription? MoEML prefers to support open-access scholarly projects whenever possible, in part because many of our users do not have access to the kinds of resources that academic libraries purchase.
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Is it a hybrid resource? E.g., British History Online is a massive on-line library of primary and secondary sources, some of which have been transcribed and some of which have been digitized; some parts of it are open-access, and some are limited to subscribers.
¶Accessing Subscription Resources
Digital resources are either open-access or restricted. Open-access resources are
freely available to anyone with internet access. Restricted resources are
password-protected or protected by a subscription paywall. Your university may
or may not have purchased access to the resources behind a subscription paywall.
To check, make sure that you are attempting to access a particular resource
through your library’s server. If your university allows you to access its
networks over a VPN (Virtual Private Network) client, you may be able to connect
directly to subscription resources from your laptop or from home without having
to enter a username and password for each resource. (If you are a UVic student,
you’ll find VPN client installation instructions on the University Systems webpages.)
¶Temporal Scope of Your Research
MoEML is mainly interested in and focuses on London between 1550 and 1650. However, early modern Londoners were aware
of their Roman and medieval history (especially from Holinshed, Stow, Camden and other writers, as well as from contemporary history
plays) and, in fact, the earlier history of London is often preserved in its
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century placenames. That said, many MoEML users are
also interested in the fate of a street or site after 1650, particularly what happened to the site in the Great Fire of
1666, which destroyed most of the buildings within
the city walls. Many of the entries in the Placeography
section of our Encyclopedia end by telling the reader what occupies the site now.
Your encyclopedia article should therefore focus on the period from 1550 to 1650, with some reference to the periods before
and after, as seems appropriate and necessary.
You will notice that our project maps early modern London, rather than
Shakespeare’s London or Renaissance London. What
is the early modern period? In English studies, early modern is an alternate
term for the Renaissance (roughly 1485 to 1660), but you should be aware that scholars in other disciplines
use the term early modern differently. MoEML is an
interdisciplinary project which means that, to conduct thorough research into a
street, site, or playhouse, you may need to draw upon the work of not only
literary critics but also social and political historians, geographers,
archaeologists, and cartographic historians. As you search for and find
secondary sources from these various disciplines, keep in mind that literary
scholars tend to define the early modern period as 1475 or 1485 to 1660 or 1700 (depending on the scholar). For social historians, the early
modern period spans 1500 to 1750, 1789, or 1800 (depending on the
scholar). For many historians of England, the early modern period begins in
1485 (with the beginning of the Tudor
dynasty).
¶Research Questions

As mentioned above, it is important that you have reflected on the research
questions you will need to answer prior to beginning your research and
certainly before presenting your results in the form of an encyclopedia
article.
Different types of articles will need to address different research
questions, but generally all location articles in MoEML’s encyclopedia will
need to answer the following:
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Where is the street/site/playhouse?
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What was/is its name, and has it changed over time?
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What is its significance?
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What is its history?
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Does this street/site/playhouse have literary significance? In other words, is it mentioned or highlighted in the literature (plays, poems, prose works, etc.) of the day?
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What did it look like (if visual evidence and/or eyewitness accounts survive)?
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What was on the site before it was used for a playhouse?
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If the playhouse was torn down, moved, or repurposed, what was on the site afterwards?
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What is the construction and renovation history of the playhouse, if known?
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What is its playing history? Which theatre companies played there and when? What plays are known to have been performed there?
You may find many references to your street/site/playhouse from before 1550 and after 1650. Providing some
of the medieval history of the site is helpful, especially as that history
was known to early modern Londoners via John Stow’s A Survey of London and other
contemporary sources. You should be careful to distinguish what we know now
about the early history of the site from what early modern Londoners
understood about their city’s history. Be sparing in your reports of the
site’s history after 1650. However, if known, it is
useful to provide a brief note explaining whether or not the site still
exists and, if so, what occupies the site now, and/or how a street, for
instance, may have changed its course over time.
When you have completed your research, see our page about how to Prepare Your Encyclopedia
Article.
¶Resources
We have divided the following list of resources into two general categories:
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General Sources and Resources,
available in various media, that will help you answer a range of different questions. -
Answering Questions
that will help you answer some of the specific questions you are researching about for your street, site, or playhouse.
¶General Sources
¶Starting Points
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Weinreb, Ben, Christopher Hibbert, Julia Keay, and John Keay. The London Encyclopaedia. 3rd ed. Photography by Matthew Weinreb. London: Macmillan, 2008. Print. This source offers helpful short entries about the history of a street, site, or playhouse both before and after the early modern period. (Secondary Source)
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Harben, Henry. A Dictionary of London. London: Henry Jenkins, 1918. Print. Digital transcription and reprint by British History Online. Web. This free resource is organized alphabetically. You can also do keyword searches for words that occur within entries. We cite from the BHO transcription of Harben. In our citations, we give Harben’s name as well as the title of the entry in which we found the information if the entry is not the same as the subject of the page we are writing or if Harben’s authority name is significantly different than ours. (Secondary Source)
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Panton, Kenneth J. Historical Dictionary of London. Lanham, MD, and London: Scarecrow P, 2001. Print. Historical Dictionaries of Cities of the World, No. 11. Print. (Secondary Source)
¶Detailed Histories
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The Survey of London, 1900-2013 (not Stow’s A Survey of London, but in many ways an homage to and continuation of Stow’s project). 50 volumes have been published, of which 47 volumes have been transcribed and digitally reprinted by British History Online. This source is especially useful for the history of buildings. Note that this ongoing project has not covered every part of London. (Secondary Source)
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British History Online. BHO is a massive repository of primary and secondary sources, some of which we have singled out above. Use BHO’s search categories to refine the number and type of sources you search at one time. (Primary and Secondary Sources)
¶Principal Primary Sources and Eyewitness Accounts

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Kingsford’s edition of Stow’s A Survey of London. Available from BHO. Stow’s Survey is the most important primary source for the street/site essays. Despite Stow’s nostalgia, his text is rich in names, history, and details; in addition, his text influenced what newcomers to London knew about the city. Until our own versioned editions of the 1598, 1603, 1618, and 1633 texts of Stow’s Survey are available on our site, please cite from Kingsford. We will update your citations to point to our edition when our work is complete. (Primary Source)
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Strype, John. A Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster. 2 vols. London, 1720. Print. This eighteenth-century update of Stow’s Survey has been turned into a searchable, scholarly electronic edition by Dr. Julia Merritt and her team, and published by hriOnline in 2007. Strype is particularly useful if you want to know what happened to your street or site during and after the Great Fire in 1666. MoEML cites from Merritt’s electronic edition. (Primary Source)
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Machyn, Henry. A London Provisioner’s Chronicle, 1550-1563, by Henry Machyn: Manuscript, Transcription, and Modernization. Ed. Richard W. Bailey, Marilyn Miller, and Colette Moore. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2006. Web. Open. Machyn recorded the details of many processions and funerals in his chronicle, one of the most important eye-witness accounts of sixteenth-century London. MoEML cites from this edition rather than Nichols’ now-outdated nineteenth-century print edition. (Primary Source)
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Holinshed’s Chronicles is a rich source for information about events in London’s past. A searchable transcription of the 1577 and 1587 editions, with links to the EEBO images, is available at The Holinshed Project. We cite from The Holinshed Project’s transcription of the 1587 text. (Primary Source)
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Chamberlain, John. The Letters of John Chamberlain. Ed. Norman Egbert McClure. 2 vols. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1939. Print. Chamberlain was a prolific letter-writer and regular
Paul’s walker
(i.e., someone who walked the aisles at St. Paul’s Church, a good place to hear gossip). His letters are not only full of details about London’s people and places, but they are genuinely fun to read. (Primary Source) -
Oxford English Dictionary. Do a full-text search of the OED online; you need to go to the Advanced Search tab to do so. The entries may lead you to some interesting quotations. (Dictionary with quotations from Primary Sources)
¶Bibliographies of Secondary Sources

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Bibliography of British and Irish History (BBIH) incorporates the bibliographies formerly known as London’s Past Online and Irish History Online.
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Historical Abstracts is a subscription database that gives you a bibliography and short overview of academic articles published in History journals. Your university library will almost certainly have access to this bibliography.
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MLA International Bibliography. This electronic subscription bibliography may be useful for finding books and articles that will help you determine the literary significance of a street or site, or the theatre history of a playhouse. Your university library will almost certainly have access to this bibliography.
¶Miscellaneous
Need a saint’s name, a literary term, a musical definition, or anything else
for which you might turn to Wikipedia?
-
Try Oxford Reference Online for a more reliable and scholarly source. This general Oxford resource (an aggregation of the many Oxford reference books) allows you to search all of the Oxford reference books at once. (Secondary Source)
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MoEML supports Wikipedia, makes links to it, and has even contributed to some Wikipedia pages, but we think it is good practice to double-check one’s facts when they come from Wikipedia. (Secondary Source)
¶Library Catalogues
Make sure you check your library’s catalogue to see what your own university
has!

It’s a good idea to search the websites and online catalogues of libraries
that specialize in London history. If nothing else, a catalogue lets you
know that a book or article exists. You may then be able to order copies of
critical monographs and articles (although not rare books) through your own
library’s interlibrary loan service.
You can also derive a lot of useful information from the catalogue entries,
especially about manuscript sources. Although you won’t be able to call up
manuscripts from these libraries without actually going to the library, the
metadata in the catalogue is often sufficiently detailed to give you the
information you need (e.g., a date, a name, a transfer of ownership).
Some library catalogues now include scans or photographs of selected
materials, which means you can do some primary research without even leaving
your desk. At MoEML, we use the following libraries’ online catalogues
regularly. All three offer lists and descriptions of primary and secondary
sources.
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Institute for Historical Research (which houses the collection of the Centre for Metropolitan History). See also the guide to their Maps collection
¶Answering Questions
¶Determining Place Names
The following resources may help to determine the name of a street, site, or
playhouse.
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Ekwall, Eilert. Street-Names of the City of London. Oxford: Clarendon, 1965. Print. We rely on Ekwall for the etymology of street names, changes in street names, date of first appearance of those names in a print or manuscript source, and variant spellings. (Secondary Source)
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Mills, A. D. Oxford Dictionary of London Place Names. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001. Print. Available through Oxford Reference Online.
Be cautious with the following sources:
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Bebbington, Gillian. London Street Names. London: B.T. Batsford, 1972. Print. This volume is largely derived from Ekwall with some embellishments that are not always accurate.
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Smith, Al. Dictionary of City of London Street Names. New York: Arco, 1970. Print. This book is designed for the popular market.
¶Determining Locations: Maps and Gazetteers
MoEML location entries must comment on whether or not the street, site, or
playhouse is visible and labelled on the Agas
map. Many streets and sites are already plotted on our edition of
the Agas map. However, in the case of
playhouses, the Agas map predates their
construction. The structures on the Bankside that look like amphitheatres
are the bullbaiting and bearbaiting houses.
In your article, you might comment on whether a site or playhouse is visible
in any later maps of the city. For playhouse locations, MoEML uses the map
at Shakespearean London Theatres
(ShaLT) as a guide to where
the playhouses would be located on a modern map. It’s helpful to us if you
can confirm, correct, or refine our site identifications.
¶Early Modern Maps
Here are a few readily available maps of London from the
longearly modern period.
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ca. 1561. Agas map. Digitized by MoEML. Available as a printed atlas in the London Topographical Society’s
A to Z
series (Prockter and Taylor). When we built the first version of MoEML in 1999, we took Prockter and Taylor’s site identifications as our starting point. We’ve since been able to add many more sites and variant names/spellings to their gazetteer; in a few cases, our researchers have been able to draw upon new evidence to correct Prockter and Taylor’s identifications. -
1572. The Braun and Hogenberg map of London, in vol. 1 of Civitates Orbis Terrarum. Available at the Historic Cities website.
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1610-1612 surveys by Ralph Treswell, drawn for the Clothworkers’ Company and for Christ’s Hospital. These detailed ground plans of properties give the names and occupations of tenants, show the locations of stairways and doors, and other valuable information. John Schofield has edited and annotated these surveys for the London Topographical Society. If you are lucky enough to be writing about a street that had properties owned by Christ’s Hospital or the Clothworkers, then you have an incredibly rich primary source in Treswell.
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1676 survey of the city by Ogilby and Morgan. Available through BHO. Note that this map postdates the Great Fire of 1666. In 1677, Ogilby and Morgan published a gazetteer or
explanation
for their map, which you can read on EEBO (Wing O177). It’s also the basis of the A to Z of Restoration London. -
1746 Rocque map. This map has been digitized, georeferenced, and georectified by the Locating London’s Past project, itself an immensely valuable tool for MoEML contributors.
¶Reconstructions of London
There’s an excellent modern scholarly map of London’s footprint in 1520. Sheets of the map are
available on the website of the British Historic Towns Atlas. You’ll have to open up each
.pdf file separately to find the relevant sheet.
The Virtual Paul’s
Cross Project (Wall) will give you an excellent
sense of space, proportion, and acoustics in London.
Check out
Note that this project was produced by second-year
undergraduate students at DeMonfort University, based on their research
at the British Library. They blogged about their
project throughout.
Google Maps and Google Earth won’t show
you what early modern London looked like. The basic footprint of the
streets, however, has not changed much from early modern to modern-day
London, and you may find it useful to walk the streets of London
virtually to get a sense of how far it is from one point to another. In
addition, our users like to know what occupies a site now. We often hear
from people who have walked the streets of London with our website open
on a mobile device.
¶Later Maps of London
-
The London Topographical Society’s
A to Z
series is very helpful for working backwards from the present-day location to the Elizabethan location. The 6 volumes cover Elizabethan, Restoration, Georgian, Regency, Victorian, and Edwardian London. -
The Crace Collection of Maps of London, digitized by the British Library, gives you digital access to 1200+ maps of London from 1570-1860.
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Continue your investigations after 1860 with A Vision of Britain Through Time (1801-2001). Containing maps of London from 1803 to 1958, this resource is useful for determining how a London site changed during the Victorian era of modernization and rebuilding, and during the bombing of London in the Second World War. Use this resource to find maps that postdate the ones included in the Crace Collection.
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Hyde, Ralph. Maps of the City of London. London: London Topographical Society, 1999. Print. This secondary source includes reproductions of eighteenth-century ward maps, along with extensive commentary.
¶Gazetteers
A gazetteer is
a geographical index or dictionary(OED gazetteer n.3). At the most basic level, an index at the back of an atlas that lists names and coordinates within the atlas (page and grid section) is a gazetteer. But most of the works called gazetteers include additional information such as: place-names, latitude and longitude coordinates, and statistics. The best new gazetteers are digital databases, not books. Most gazetteers deal with places at the level of villages, towns, and counties, not at the level of a street or site. There is, as yet, no complete gazetteer of London between 1550-1650. When MoEML has identified every street and site, published encyclopedia articles on each location, and added all the latitude and longitude coordinates, we will have created a de facto complete descriptive gazetteer of early modern London. Your work helps MoEML build this gazetteer. In the meantime, we can draw upon the following resources:
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Gazetteer to c.1270 and c.1520 London available at the Historic Towns Atlas project (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3).
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The index to Prockter and Taylor’s A to Z of Elizabethan London is a partial gazetteer keyed to the squares they have plotted onto the Agas map.
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Weinreb, Hibbert, Keay, and Keay’s Encyclopedia of London is a gazetteer that uses London postcodes as its spatial referencing system.
¶Finding Images

Images are both an informative and aesthetically pleasing way to enhance your
encyclopedia article. However, it is vital that we only use images for which
we can obtain proper permissions. Fortunately, a number of sites offer
freely available images, and simply ask that we credit them. If you find an
image to illustrate your article, send us the stable URL and we will upload
the image into our database.
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Luna is the Folger Shakespeare Library’s database of tens of thousands of digital images. We can embed any of these images on our site for free, with appropriate credit to the Folger.
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Check out the British Library’s Flickr site. Here, you’ll find over 1 million images from books from 1600-1800. We can add any of these images to your article.
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Check out your own rare books library and/or special collections. You may well have treasures right on your own campus. If your library will digitize any relevant images from old books or maps, we would be delighted to include them in MoEML and give your institution full credit.
¶Looking for People?
It is often difficult to track down information on early modern Londoners,
and is typically much easier to find information on men and aristocrats than
on women and non-aristocrats, the latter of whom are often simply missing
from the historical record. We recommend you try the following
resources:
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Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB). Do a full-text search for the name of your street/site/playhouse. You may turn up details of people who lived/worked on the street/site you are researching. If you are looking for a particular person, be sure to do a
full text
search, not just aperson
search. Even if the person you are researching does not merit a full biographical entry in the ODNB, he or she may well be mentioned in another person’s entry. -
The British Book Trade Index (BBTI) provides the names and biographical details of people involved in the book trade in London. Some of these people may have lived or worked on the street/site you are researching. Note that there is redundancy in this database because it aggregates data from a number of different sources.
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People in Place: Families, Households and Housing in London 1550-1720. Follow links on this page to go to a variety of resources.
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Anne Lancashire’s database of Mayors and Sheriffs of London lists all mayors, sheriffs, and wardens in London from 1190 to 1558. Professor Lancashire has also created a .pdf that continues the database up to 1642. We often link to MASL directly from our personography.
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Records of London’s Livery Companies Online (ROLLCO) is
a site providing records of Apprentices and Freemen in the City of London Livery Companies between 1400 and 1900.
The records of the companies are a rich source of information about people. The database includes Clothworkers, Drapers, Goldsmiths (1600-1700), and Mercers. Membership records from other livery companies will be added in the future. We often link to ROLLCO directly from our personography. -
Wikipedia is often a good place to find information on more obscure historical Londoners, as researchers regularly add encylcopedia entries in an effort to insert lost historical figures back into the historical record. The usual scholarly caveats about relying solely on Wikipedia apply.
¶Investigating Literary Significance
¶Finding Literary References through Secondary Sources
Edward Sugden’s Topographical Dictionary to the Works of Shakespeare and his
Fellow Dramatists will be especially relevant when
you are looking for any dramatic references to a street/site/playhouse.
Sugden deals with all toponyms, not just London toponyms. Note that we
cite Shakespeare from the Internet Shakespeare Editions.
Fran Chalfant’s dictionary of Ben
Jonson’s London is useful for finding references to London in
Ben Jonson’s plays.
¶Finding Books and Articles about Places of Literary Significance
MoEML’s own bibliography of secondary
sources aims to be an exhaustive bibliography of geocultural
approaches to literature written about or set in London. We index
relevant articles from the following journals: The
London Journal, Early Theatre, and
The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern
Studies. We list articles from other journals as they come
to our attention. We try to include all recent monographs and essay
collections that deal with space, place, Stow, and/or early modern
Londoners. Browsing our bibliography will give you the titles of many
secondary sources you might want to find in your library. (Note that we
don’t try to be exhaustive in our list of secondary historical sources;
we include the sources cited in our project plus items that come to our
attention.)
MLA
International Bibliography. This electronic
subscription bibliography may be useful for finding books and articles
that will help you determine the literary significance of a street or
site, or the theatre history of a playhouse. For example, the MLA International Bibliography includes all the
articles in the 20087 Huntington Library
Quarterly special issue on The Places and
Spaces of Early Modern London. Your university library will
almost certainly have access to this bibliography.
¶Searching EEBO for Literary References
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—from the first book printed in English by William Caxton, through the age of Spenser and Shakespeare and the tumult of the English Civil War.EEBO-TCP is transcribing all the images, which makes it possible to search the full-text and not just the bibliographic records. Not all libraries subscribe to EEBO. If your professor is a member of the Renaissance Society of America, they may be able to access EEBO sources for you.
The images were digitized from the Early English
Books (EEB) microfilm series. EEB I
covers 1473-1640, the books listed in A. W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave’s
A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in
England, Scotland, & Ireland and of English Books Printed
Abroad, 1475-1640 (2nd ed., 1976-1991). Books listed in this
catalogue have an STC number. Scholars, booksellers, and librarians use
the STC number as a short-hand way of identifying a book. EEB II covers
1641-1700, the books listed in Donald Wing’s Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland,
Ireland, Wales, and British America, and of English books printed in
other countries, 1641-1700 (rev. ed., 1994-). Books listed
in this catalogue have a Wing number. Wing numbers begin with a letter
(normally the first letter of the author’s name). Scholars, booksellers,
and librarians use the Wing number as a short-hand way of identifying a
book. Books in the STC and in Wing are included in the English Short-Title Catalogue, a
free online catalogue hosted by the British Library. The ESTC helpfully
lists all the libraries that own the book; because it is a digital
catalogue, it is frequently updated as libraries discover and purchase
new books, or we learn more about the books. The ESTC supersedes the STC
and Wing as resources, but it is still very interesting to look at print
copies of STC and Wing to get a sense of the number and type of works
printed in London.
EEBO is your best resource for finding literary
and non-literary printed references to your street, site, or playhouse.
Remember that one of the research questions asks you to determine how
your location is represented in the literature of early modern London.
Find all references to the street, site, or playhouse in the
Early English Books I collection(limit search to STC items or use date parameters). If there are not a huge number of STC items, expand your search to
Early English Books II(the Wing collection) by removing date parameters. If you are interested only in references up to 1666 (for example), then use the date parameters to limit your search.
Students often find EEBO difficult to use at
first. Your professor will probably spend some time in class introducing
EEBO, and you can usually ask for help from
your university librarians. If you feel frustrated, remember that EEBO is a massive repository of texts from a
period when spelling was not standardized and printing was still
developing as a technology. You will want to search using variant
spellings and variant forms. To do so, check the boxes in the light
yellow bar on EEBO’s search page.
Note that a search will turn up references that appear in the item record
and references that appear in the full-text transcriptions. We need to
be aware that not all the texts listed in EEBO
have been transcribed. EEBO-TCP is working its
way through the images in EEBO’s database. You
may well find an untranscribed item whose record suggests that the
content will contain something relevant. If you do, have a look at the
page images and skim the text to see if there is indeed something in the
text that ought to be taken into account. Even if you do have a full
text transcription from EEBO-TCP, you need to
check the transcription against the page images. Never quote from EEBO-TCP without looking at the EEBO page images yourself.
¶Learning more about Playhouses

International Bibliography of Theatre &
Dance. If you have access to this subscription
database, it has many results for Blackfriars, although not all of these are
for either of the two early modern Blackfriars Theatres.
The MLA
International Bibliography indexes books and articles
on theatre history.
The journal Early Theatre is an excellent
resource. Searching back issues will turn up many articles. Go to their home
page to browse through back issues or search the full-text for a
keyword.
Alan B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser’s Database
of Early English Playbooks (DEEP) allows you to search for all the plays performed at
a particular playhouse (according to title-page attribution). You can also
search by author, company, date, title, printer, STC number, and other
categories. It’s a widely-used scholarly resource that began life as a
graduate student project.
We also recommend
The Theater of Shakespeare’s Timeby Holger Schott Syme in The Norton Shakespeare and Syme’s commentary on this chapter.
See also Syme’s
caveat about widely used secondary sources for the study of
theatre history.
o
¶Improve this Page
You may find other scholarly sources that are not listed here. If you think they
would be relevant to other researchers like you, let your professor or the MoEML team know and we will add them to
our list. When you send us a new source, please provide a full bibliographic
citation in MoEML or MLA style and indicate where you found the source so that
the MoEML team can retrace your steps if necessary.
References
-
Citation
Bacon, G.W. The A to Z of Victorian London. London: London Topographical Society, 1987. Print.This item is cited in the following documents:
-
Citation
Bebbington, Gillian. London Street Names. London: B.T. Batsford, 1972. Print.This item is cited in the following documents:
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Citation
Best, Michael, ed. The Internet Shakespeare Editions. U of Victoria. http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca.This item is cited in the following documents:
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Bibliography of British and Irish History. IHR. https://www.history.ac.uk/publications/bibliography-british-and-irish-history.This item is cited in the following documents:
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British Book Trade Index. Dev. Peter Isaac and Maureen Bell. U of Oxford. http://bbti.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/.This item is cited in the following documents:
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British History Online. IHR. https://www.british-history.ac.uk/.This item is cited in the following documents:
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Chalfant, Fran C. Ben Jonson’s London: A Jacobean Placename Dictionary. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1978. Print.This item is cited in the following documents:
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Chamberlain, John. The Letters of John Chamberlain. Ed. Norman Egbert McClure. 2 vols. Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 1939.This item is cited in the following documents:
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Davies, Matthew, ed. Records of London Livery Companies Online. Centre for Metropolitan History. https://www.londonroll.org/.This item is cited in the following documents:
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Early English Books Online (EEBO). Proquest LLC.This item is cited in the following documents:
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EEBO-TCP (EEBO Text Creation Partnership). [The Text Creation Partnership offers searchable diplomatic transcriptions of many EEBO items.] -
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Egan, Gabriel, ed. Shakespearean London Theatres. De Montfort U and Victoria & Albert Museum. http://shalt.dmu.ac.uk/.This item is cited in the following documents:
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Ekwall, Eilert. Street-Names of the City of London. Oxford: Clarendon, 1965. Print.This item is cited in the following documents:
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Guildhall Library.
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Harben, Henry A. A Dictionary of London. London: Herbert Jenkins, 1918. [Available digitally from British History Online: https://www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/dictionary-of-london.]This item is cited in the following documents:
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Historical Abstracts. EBSCO. EBSCO Industries. https://www.ebsco.com/products/research-databases/historical-abstracts.This item is cited in the following documents:
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Holinshed, Raphael and William Harrison. The first and second volumes of Chronicles comprising 1 The description and historie of England, 2 The description and historie of Ireland, 3 The description and historie of Scotland: first collected and published by Raphaell Holinshed, William Harrison, and others: now newlie augmented and continued (with manifold matters of singular note and worthie memorie) to the yeare 1586. London, 1587. STC 13569.This item is cited in the following documents:
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Horwood, Richard. The A to Z of Regency London. Introduced by Paul Laxton. Indexed by Joseph Wisdom. London: London Topographical Society, 1985. Print.This item is cited in the following documents:
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Hyde, Ralph. Ward Maps of the City of London. London: London Topographical Society, 1999. Print.This item is cited in the following documents:
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Kewes, Paulina, Ian Archer, and Felicity Heal, eds. The Holinshed Project. U of Oxford. http://english.nsms.ox.ac.uk/holinshed/.This item is cited in the following documents:
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Kingsford, Charles Lethbridge, ed. A Survey of London by John Stow. Reprinted from the Text of 1603. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1908. Print.This item is cited in the following documents:
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Lancashire, Anne. Mayors and Sheriffs of London. U of Toronto. https://masl.library.utoronto.ca/. [We cite this resource parenthetically by the acronym MASL.]This item is cited in the following documents:
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London Metropolitan Archives.
City of London. https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/things-to-do/history-and-heritage/london-metropolitan-archives.This item is cited in the following documents:
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Machyn, Henry. A London Provisioner’s Chronicle, 1550–1563, by Henry Machyn: Manuscript, Transcription, and Modernization. Ed. Richard W. Bailey, Marilyn Miller, and Colette Moore. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2006. [The Map of Early Modern London cites from this edition rather than Nichols’s nineteenth-century edition. We cite by the date of the entry thus: (Machyn 1550–08–04).]This item is cited in the following documents:
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Mills, A.D. Oxford Dictionary of London Place Names. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001. Remediated by Oxford Reference.This item is cited in the following documents:
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MLA International Bibliography. [The Modern Language Association International Bibliography offers searchable bibliographies of many relevant books and articles. This is a subscription database, to which most universities will be subscribed.This item is cited in the following documents:
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Newton, Gill. People in Place: Families, Households and Housing in London, 1550–1720. IHR. http://www.history.ac.uk/cmh/pip/index.html.This item is cited in the following documents:
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Norden, John.London
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ODNB. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. Lawrence Goldman. Oxford UP. https://www.oxforddnb.com/. [The ODNB is a subscription database. Most university and college institutions will have a subscription.]This item is cited in the following documents:
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Ogilby, John, and William Morgan. A Large and Accurate Map of the City of London Ichnographically Describing All the Streets, Lanes, Alleys, Courts, Yards, Churches, Halls and Houses, &c. Actually Surveyed and Delineated by John Ogilby, esq., His Majesties Cosmographer. London, 1676. Reprinted as The A to Z of Restoration London. Introduced by Ralph Hyde. Indexed by John Fisher and Roger Cline. London: London Topographical Society, 1992. Print.This item is cited in the following documents:
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Ogilby, John, and William Morgan. London Survey’d, or, An Explanation of the Large Map of London Giving a Particular Account of the Streets and Lanes in the City and Liberties, with the Courts, Yards, Alleys, Churches, Halls, and Houses of Note in Every Street and Lane, and Directions to Find Them in the Map, with the Names and Marks of the Wards, Parishes, and Precincts Therein Described. London: Printed and Sold at the Author’s House in Whitefriars, 1677.This item is cited in the following documents:
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Oxford American Dictionary of Current English. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. Remediated by Oxford Reference.This item is cited in the following documents:
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Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford UP. https://www.oed.com/.This item is cited in the following documents:
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Panton, Kenneth J. Historical Dictionary of London. Lanham: Scarecrow P, 2001. Print.This item is cited in the following documents:
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Prockter, Adrian, and Robert Taylor, comps. The A to Z of Elizabethan London. London: Guildhall Library, 1979. Print. [This volume is our primary source for identifying and naming map locations.]This item is cited in the following documents:
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Rocque, John. A Plan of the Cities of London and Westminster, and Borough of Southwark with Contiguous Buildings. London: Printed by John Rocque, 1746. Reprinted as The A to Z of Georgian London. Introduced by Ralph Hyde. London: London Topographical Society, 1982. [We cite by index label thus: Rocque 15Db.This item is cited in the following documents:
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Saunders, Ann, ed. The A to Z of Edwardian London. London: London Topographical Society, 2007. Print.This item is cited in the following documents:
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Smith, Al. Dictionary of City of London Street Names. New York: Arco, 1970. Print.This item is cited in the following documents:
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Stow, John. A Survey of London. Reprinted from the Text of 1603. Ed. Charles Lethbridge Kingsford. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1908. Remediated by British History Online. [Kingsford edition, courtesy of The Centre for Metropolitan History. Articles written after 2011 cite from this searchable transcription.]This item is cited in the following documents:
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Strype, John, John Stow. A SURVEY OF THE CITIES OF LONDON and WESTMINSTER, And the Borough of SOUTHWARK. CONTAINING The Original, Antiquity, Increase, present State and Government of those CITIES. Written at first in the Year 1698, By John Stow, Citizen and Native of London. Corrected, Improved, and very much Enlarged, in the Year 1720, By JOHN STRYPE, M.A. A NATIVE ALSO OF THE SAID CITY. The Survey and History brought down to the present Time BY CAREFUL HANDS. Illustrated with exact Maps of the City and Suburbs, and of all the Wards; and, likewise, of the Out-Parishes of London and Westminster, and the Country ten Miles round London. Together with many fair Draughts of the most Eminent Buildings. The Life of the Author, written by Mr. Strype, is prefixed; And, at the End is added, an APPENDIX Of certain Tracts, Discourses, and Remarks on the State of the City of London. 6th ed. 2 vols. London: Printed for W. Innys and J. Richardson, J. and P. Knapton, and S. Birt, R. Ware, T. and T. Longman, and seven others, 1754–1755. ESTC T150145.This item is cited in the following documents:
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Strype, John. A Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster: Containing the Original, Antiquity, Increase, Modern Estate, and Government of those Cities. London, 1720. Reprinted as An Electronic Edition of John Strype’s A Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster. Ed. Julia Merritt (Stuart London Project). Version 1.0. Sheffield: hriOnline, 2007. https://www.dhi.ac.uk/strype/index.jsp.This item is cited in the following documents:
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Sugden, Edward. A Topographical Dictionary to the Works of Shakespeare and His Fellow Dramatists. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1925. Remediated by Internet Archive.This item is cited in the following documents:
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Survey of London. 47 vols. 17 monographs. London: London County Council and Guild & School of Handicraft, 1900–1991. Remediated by British History Online.This item is cited in the following documents:
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Wall, John N., ed. Virtual Paul’s Cross Project. North Carolina State U. http://vpcp.chass.ncsu.edu/.This item is cited in the following documents:
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Weinreb, Ben, Christopher Hibbert, Julia Keay, and John Keay. The London Encyclopaedia. 3rd ed. London: Macmillan, 2008. Print.This item is cited in the following documents: