Monday, April 11, 2005

Texts in Context at the BritishLibrary

Texts in Context is a new online resource from the British Library.

It is a rich and unusual collection of over 400 texts where you can find menus for medieval banquets and handwritten recipes scribbled inside book covers. You can browse the first English dictionary ever written and explore the secret language of the Georgian underworld. You can study the East India Company's shopping lists and practise sentences from colonial phrasebooks. You can learn smugglers' songs, listen to rare dialect recordings, and examine the logbooks of 17th century trading ships.