Early Modern Books

Please see the EEBO libguide for all details about variants and the CIC CLI Virtual Modernisation Project.

How does the Variant Searching work on the ProQuest platform?

All the variant form and spelling suggestions are now grouped together in one dictionary.

The Variant searching is active by default if the Linguistics are active on the ProQuest platform – which can be deactivated by the library in the ProQuest Administration Module or by the single My Research users from the Preferences.

To see all the variants that were actually searched on at the top of the results page, use Advanced Search and make sure the boxes under the search boxes are selected. They should be selected by default See example below.

If you type a search term in the search box, you will automatically retrieve all instances of your search term and its early modern variant inflected forms and spellings in EMB. For example, if you type the word murder, when you submit your search you will retrieve all occurrences of the word murder together with its inflected forms murdered, murdering, murders and its early modern variant spellings murther, murdre, murdir and mvrder.

Plus instances of early modern spelling variants of all the various inflected forms of your original search term, for  instance murthred, murthrest, murdreth, murdring, murtherynge and murthers.

The process of expanding a search to include inflected forms of your original term is known as lemmatization.

Please note:

Variant searching is deactivated when quotes are put around the search terms to search phrases, or when truncation or wildcard symbols (e.g.  je?lo?s*) are added to a word.

1) - When using Advanced search to search keywords:

2) - Select the first checkbox if you would like to include variant forms/spellings for search terms. Select the second checkbox to show the variant spellings and variant forms of your keyword on top of the result list.

3) - The variant spellings and variant forms of your keyword can be listed on top of the result list.

4) - Click this link if you would like the result list without variants.

On Early Modern Books Advanced Search you can search Document Feature - maps, musical notations, portraits and much more. Each image on the thumbnails display for a book is accompanied by a list of the document features associated with the page shown.

Searching Early Modern Books means you are able to find books from both EEB and EEBO. Please see more details about the thumbnails pages for Early English Books Online and Early European Books.

1- Sort the result list by relevance or date.
2 - Use the Filters section to apply additional limits to refine your results - Author, USTC Subject, Subject, Place of Publication, Publisher, Language, Source Library.
3 - The result list may contain books from Early European Books.
4 - It may also contain books from Early English Books Online.
5 - On top of the result list there are tools for activating Alerts, Cite, Print, Save and Recent searches (your search history).

Please see more details on the libguide for Early European Books.

Please see more details on the libguide for Early English Books Online.