Reference links

  This is primarily a class about reading literature.  Still, since our readings come from an unfamiliar place and historical period, you'll encounter a lot of new information.  At the same time, you'll notice that even an edition with footnotes will leave many things unexplained.
    What are you expected to do about all this?  Not to know everything in advance--and not to remember it all now and become a Nobel contender in European history.  (That might be a doomed enterprise in any case.) 
    You need to judge in each case whether it's worth your time to remember information, or indeed whether it's worth your time to look for it in the first place.

    Words that seem especially important in a text are probably worth looking up in the Oxford English Dictionary if you're puzzled about what they mean. 

    If you're reading, you've been completely lost for the last two or three pages, and re-reading the passage doesn't help, try looking for a name or word in the passage you could look up.  

    If you think more information about the author might help, there are reliable and often quite interesting articles in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and the Encyclopedia Britannica.

    Otherwise, you should write down your questions and raise them in class.

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These resources are part of the Caltech library collection, so you'll be prompted for your ITS username and password when you connect.

Oxford English Dictionary
    (Enter your word in either of the two search boxes and choose "Find Word.")
    This dictionary not only arranges a word's meanings in a historical order, with the earliest meanings listed first--it provides dated quotations so that you can see how the word was used in sentences at different times.  As a result, the more eventful a word's history has been, the more prodigiously long you'll find the dictionary entry.

Encyclopaedia Britannica
    (Use the search box at the top, and choose to search only in "Encyclopaedia Britannica" proper.)
    The article on "English Literature" is fairly good, and see especially the subheading "The Renaissance period: 1550-1660."  More specifically, for the poems we read on January 10 (Spenser's Amoretti), you might see the sections "Literature and the age" and "Elizabethan poetry and prose"; for Donne and his fans, you might see "Early Stuart poetry and prose."  If you have a large appetite for political history, try the articles on "Elizabeth I" or "James I."
    For articles on individual authors, usefulness varies. Many articles focus on the author's writings to the near exclusion of the biography; for Spenser and Milton, on the other hand, the biographical information is extremely dense.  You might try the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography instead.

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
    (Search on "biography of a person," and use only the person's surname; first names can cause a problem.  This contains articles for essentially everyone we've ever heard of in the British Isles, though it does not include living people.)
    These are often far more enjoyable to read than their counterparts in Encyclopaedia Britannica; they typically focus on biography and reputation, only rarely offering any intensive analysis of an author's writings.

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