The Holinshed Project

Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland was at once the crowning achievement of Tudor historiography and the most important single source for contemporary playwrights and poets, above all Shakespeare, Spenser, Daniel, and Drayton. Popularly known as Holinshed's Chronicles, the work was first printed in 1577. The second, revised and expanded, edition followed in 1587. 

The Holinshed Project site started as an online home for the ongoing editing project. However the scope of the project soon changed and we extended the site to incorporate searchable versions of the full texts of both sixteenth-century editions. Not only is this the only edited version of the texts available online, a script allows the user to directly compare parallel passages side by side.

The texts are based on HTML transcriptions from Early English Books Online, which were then edited by Holinshed Project team and converted to marked-up XML by the Text Encoding Initiative. We then decided on the best way of structuring and indexing the texts and Tom Wrobel produced the PHP functionality.