Early English Books Online (review)

186 Reviews The problem with this book is not the interpretation of the texts and their contexts and purposes. As Dockray-Miller emphasises, it is clearly possible to recover the relationships and actions of mothers in Anglo-Saxon texts. But she draws some very tenuous connections to try to establish her thesis, particularly in Chapters T w o and Three. There is no doubt that the authors of the texts she examines in these chapters did elide the contribution of w o m e n to the events they describe. But the relationships she sets out to demonstrate as being determined from these texts have not been convincingly established. It is conceivable that such relationships did exist; there can be no doubt that some royal w o m e n exerted personal influence, and perhaps did foster such matrilineal inheritances. But the evidence provided in this book does not confirm such optimism. Julie Ann Smith School ofHistory, Philosophy and Politics Massey University Early English Books Online, Ann Arbor, ProQuest, 2001; Web service; RRP US$14,212 p.a. Just under 50 years ago, Allardyce Nicoll reported on what he called a revol in the world of scholarship, created by the issue of the microfilm series Early English Books (EEB). One result of that revolution was the foundation of the Shakespeare Institute at Stratford-upon-Avon, with Nicoll himself as the first director: 'a fundamental element in its planning was precisely this basic use of microfilm— it was decided that its own library should in the main be ofmicrofilm reels' ('The "Basic" Use ofMicrofilm', PMLA 68.4(ii) [ 1953], p. 62). That famous microfilm series now exists in an online version, E E B O . M a n y of the benefits Nicoll enumerated cross over into E E B O ; some of them are enhanced by the crossover, or will be; there are at this stage also a few limitations and glitches. The central benefit of EEB, and the source of Nicoll's revolution, was its 'important service for scholars, by enabling them to have virtually all the books within their period of study gathered together in a single centre' (p. 65). James Binns put this point more graphically in a later overview of EEB: 'no library has a complete run of STC books - not the Folger, nor the Huntington, not Bodley, nor yet the British Library. These libraries m a y each have somewhere between about 6 5 % to 8 0 % or even a little more of STC items, but even so they still cannot claim to have between them every STC book' (Intellectual Reviews 187 Culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England [Leeds: Francis Caims, 1990], p. xix). When complete, E E B O will contain every book listed in the Pollard and Redgrave and the Wing Short Title Catalogues, as well as the complete collection of Thomason Tracts. It has not yet reached this level of comprehensiveness . Though it includes 9 5 % or more of the books for which I have searched, it still has a long way to go in its coverage of the Thomason broadsides or pamphlets, which appears at the time of writing to be about 3 0 % to 3 5 % . Not only were Nicoll's microfilms available in one centre, but 'a reader never has to wait an hour and a half while a particular volume is fetched from the vaults; he can be at work on the text he wants within a few minutes after putting in his call' (p. 66). E E B O vastly enhances this convenience, and not only for the 'she's apparently excluded from Nicoll's libraries, like Virginia Woolfat Trinity College, Cambridge. Texts no longer subsist anywhere so unhip as a physical 'centre'; their virtual reality can n o w manifest on any networked computer terminal - in institutions able and willing to pay the astronomical price, i t must be added. The speed at which E E B O searches its catalogue, and, even more, the speed at which it delivers its page images, are ways in which it performs better than might have been expected. E E B O overcomes otherrigidities,not only of the traditional...