Research & Subject Guides: French and Francophone Languages and Literatures: Primary Sources

Online Repositories

ARTFL (American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language)
Includes the Tresor de la Langue Francaise (over 2600 texts, ranging from classic works to non-fiction prose and technical writing.) Also included is the Opera del Vocabolario Italiano (OVI) ? containing 1780 vernacular texts dated prior to 1375, including Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. Reference sources include Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopdie, as well as a number of historical French dictionaries (Nicot, Fraud, Littr, Bayle, and several editions of the Dictionnaire de L'Acadmie franaise.)
Gale Primary Sources
Provides access and simultaneous cross searching of six Gale primary source databases: The 17th and 18th Century Burney Collection, Eighteenth Century Collections Online, The Making of the Modern World, The Times Digital Archive, Sabin Americana, 1500-1926, Eighteenth Century Collections Online, and Witchcraft in Europe and America (Archives Unbound). Gale Primary Sources also allows researchers to visualize search data by term frequency. Researchers can search all six databases at once using this portal, or access each individually by visiting the appropriate page in the A-Z list.
Gale Primary Sources: Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO)
1700-1799. Fulltext. Major digital collection consisting of every significant English-language and foreign-language title printed in the United Kingdom during the 18th century, along with thousands of important works from the Americas. Includes over 180,000 titles (200,000 volumes) - books, pamphlets, essays, broadsides and more. Based on the English Short Title Catalogue.
Gallica
Gallica digital library from the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Over a million documents accessible for free : Books, Manuscripts, Maps, Images, Newspapers, Magazines, Periodicals, Sound records, Music, Scores, etc.
HathiTrust Digital Library
Over 8 million digitized items, including more than 2 million public domain books available for free. HathiTrust is a partnership of major research institutions and libraries.

To access Stony Brook specific holdings, log in to HathiTrust by following the link above, clicking on "Log in" in the upper right corner, and searching for "Stony Brook University" under "Filter by Institution". When you click on "Stony Brook University" and "Continue" you will be prompted to log in with your NetID and password and then will be logged into HathiTrust through SBU.
Internet Archive
Access for researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public to historical collections that exist in digital format; includes texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived web pages

World Digital Library
The World Digital Library (WDL) is a project of the U.S. Library of Congress, carried out with the support of the United Nations Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization (UNESCO), and in cooperation with libraries, archives, museums, educational institutions, and international organizations from around the world. The WDL makes it possible to discover, study, and enjoy cultural treasures and significant historical documents on one site, in a variety of ways. Content on the WDL includes books, manuscripts, maps, newspapers, journals, prints and photographs, sound recordings, and films.

Finding Primary Sources

Use the links on this page to search physical library collections, as well as digital libraries. If you are looking for a specific author or title, try doing a search on WorldCat Basic Search (for books) or on ArchiveGrid (for manuscripts and archival collections).

Libraries and Archives

Paleography

Paleography
Tutorials for reading old handwriting offered by the National Archives (UK)
Orbis Latinus (Graesse)
Index of Latin place names
French Renaissance Paleography
(University of Toronto & The Newberry Library)
Dizionario di abbreviature latini ed italiani (Cappelli)
Resource for scribal abbreviations in Latin

A Guide to Western Historical Scripts from Antiquity to 1600 by Michelle P. Brown
Call Number: Main Library Stacks OVERSIZE x Z113 .B76 1990
ISBN: 0802058663
Publication Date: 1990-01-01

French and Francophone Languages and Literatures

Online Repositories

Finding Primary Sources

Libraries and Archives

Paleography

Library

Resources

Follow Us