This collection contains complete digital scans of over 300 early modern English bound manuscripts from the Clark Library. Dating primarily from the seventeenth- and eighteenth-centuries, these handwritten texts comprise a vast range of manuscript genres, including commonplace books, miscellanies, recipe collections, historical treatises, literary manuscripts, sermon notebooks, scientific texts, heraldic manuals, musical collections, travel narratives, legal compilations, and account books. Together, these items offer an expansive research archive for historians and literary critics, with particular strengths in social history, the history of food and medicine, musicology, textual studies, and history of the book. Digitization of the majority of items in this collection has been made possible by the generous support of the Council for Library and Information Resources (CLIR), who awarded the Clark a Digitizing Hidden Collections grant in 2015.
