Early Modern England Encyclopedia

Early Modern England Encyclopedia

A peer-reviewed student resource exploring the people, places, and performances of 1485–1700 England—with a special focus on Shakespeare and his world.

Explore Early Modern England

Find articles, images, and resources related to early modern English history, culture, and the theatrical world, plus discover big ideas about the era.
A full length color image of an Elizabethan gentleman holding a hawk and wearing low-crowned black hat, a blue vest over a gold doublet and red pants. He stands next to a woman in a green and white dress wearing a high-crowned black hat. Behind them stands a servant in a green hat, rust colored doublet and light blue pants holding his master’s sword and buckler shield. By Lucas de Heere from his Corte Beschryvinghe van England, Scotland, ende Irland (A short description of England, Scotland and Ireland), a manuscript written and illustrated in about 1574. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Courtesy of the British Library. Public Domain. Theatre
Explore the vibrant world of early modern theatre, including Shakespeare’s plays and the cultural impact of performance.
A three-quarter portrait bust of a woman wearing a crown, a large neck ruff, and an elaborate golden gown holding a scepter and a red book. The title of the work is Portrait of Elizabeth I of England by Lucas de Heere from his Corte Beschryvinghe van England, Scotland, ende Irland (A short description of England, Scotland and Ireland), a manuscript written and illustrated in about 1574. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Courtesy of the British Library. Public Domain. History
Discover the events, people, and politics that shaped early modern England.
A full-length image of three Elizabethan gentlewomen in grey, brown, and black gowns with small ruffs and white head coverings and one countrywoman in a gown covered by an apron and wearing a tall grey hat. The title of the work is London Gentlewomen and a Countrywoman by Lucas de Heere from his Corte Beschryvinghe van England, Scotland, ende Irland (A short description of England, Scotland and Ireland), a manuscript codex written and illustrated ca. 1571–1574 (BL Add MS 28330). Source: Wikimedia Commons. Courtesy of the British Library. Public Domain. Culture
Learn about the customs, beliefs, and daily life of people in early modern England.
An image of Arundel House, from the north. Created by Wenceslaus Hollar in 1646. Source: University of Toronto Libraries, Hollar Collection.
Using EMEE in Your Work
All entries are peer-reviewed and citable, and include curated images and sources. Use EMEE to enrich papers, projects, or presentations.

Featured Pages

EMEE is a collaborative project. We welcome contributions from students, scholars, and enthusiasts of early modern England. If you have expertise or resources to share, consider joining our community.
#TODO The Death of Elizabeth
On the 24th of March 1603, Queen Elizabeth I died after ruling England for 44 years. After several months of decline and eventual refusal to eat or speak, she fell into a coma at Richmond Palace and died. She was 69 years old and, against the odds, had managed to rule England as a single female monarch. Her death affected Shakespeare and his company in terms of royal patronage and the topics for new plays written after 1603.
#TODO Astrology
In Elizabethan culture and society, astrology and fate were thought to rule over people’s day to day lives. Even the ministers of Queen Elizabeth I asked influential mathematician and astrologer Dr. John Dee to name a good date for her coronation in 1558.
#TODO Anne Boleyn
Anne Boleyn, King Henry VIII’s second wife, was arguably the most controversial and famous of Henry’s six wives. Her impact on English politics and religion makes her a notable figure in England’s history, particularly in the person of her daughter, who would become Elizabeth I.

Prosopography

Emma Lam

Emma Lam was a student at Utah Valley University. She led the creation of UVU’s first design system, developed a digital preservation project focused on Greek stone carving, and founded a product design club to support interdisciplinary collaboration. For LEMDO, she customized and styled the Early Modern England Encyclopedia anthology site with a focus on accessibility and long-term handoff.

Janelle Jenstad

Janelle Jenstad is a Professor of English at the University of Victoria, Director of The Map of Early Modern London, and Director of Linked Early Modern Drama Online. With Jennifer Roberts-Smith and Mark Beatrice Kaethler, she co-edited Shakespeare’s Language in Digital Media: Old Words, New Tools (Routledge). She has edited John Stow’s A Survey of London (1598 text) for MoEML and is currently editing The Merchant of Venice (with Stephen Wittek) and Heywood’s 2 If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody for DRE. Her articles have appeared in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Elizabethan Theatre, Early Modern Literary Studies, Shakespeare Bulletin, Renaissance and Reformation, and The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. She contributed chapters to Approaches to Teaching Othello (MLA); Teaching Early Modern Literature from the Archives (MLA); Institutional Culture in Early Modern England (Brill); Shakespeare, Language, and the Stage (Arden); Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate); New Directions in the Geohumanities (Routledge); Early Modern Studies and the Digital Turn (Iter); Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers (Indiana); Making Things and Drawing Boundaries (Minnesota); Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study: Audiences, Authors, and Digital Technologies (Routledge); and Civic Performance: Pageantry and Entertainments in Early Modern London (Routledge). For more details, see janellejenstad.com.

Kate McPherson

Kate McPherson is Professor of English and Honors Program Director at Utah Valley University (Orem, UT, USA). In 2015, she began working to redevelop Shakespeare’s Life and Times, created by Michael Best, into the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Her other publications include commentary on Pericles and The Comedy of Errors for the New Oxford Shakespeare (2016); the co-edited volumes Stages of Engagement: Drama and Religion in Post-Reformation England with James Mardock (Duquesne University Press, 2014) and Shakespeare Expressed: Page, Stage, and Classroom in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, with Kathryn M. Moncrief and Sarah Enloe (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013). With Kathryn M. Moncrief, Kate has also two edited collections, Performing Pedagogy in Early Modern England: Gender, Instruction, and Performance (Ashgate, 2011) and Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate 2008). She has also published numerous articles on early modern maternity in scholarly journals. Kate participated in the 2008 National Endowment for the Humanities Institute, Shakespeare’s Blackfriars: The Study, the Stage, the Classroom, at the American Shakespeare Center. She also served as Play Seminar Director, a public humanities position, for the Utah Shakespeare Festival in 2017 and 2018.

Leah Hamby

Leah Hamby is the primary encoder for the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Aside from encoding, she also works as an editor for the project and contributed several articles of her own. She has been working on the EMEE since February 2023. As of February 2026, she is soon to graduate with honours from Utah Valley University with a major in history and a minor in creative writing. Her other work with the LEMDO program includes remediating William Kemp’s Kemp’s Nine Day’s Wonder for the Digital Renaissance Editions.

Mark Forsyth

Mark Forsyth, a Computer Science and Honors Program student at Utah Valley University, designed the initial website for draft versions of EMEE in 2023.

Martin Holmes

Martin Holmes has worked as a developer in the UVic’s Humanities Computing and Media Centre for over two decades, and has been involved with dozens of Digital Humanities projects. He has served on the TEI Technical Council and as Managing Editor of the Journal of the TEI. He took over from Joey Takeda as lead developer on LEMDO in 2020. He is a collaborator on the SSHRC Partnership Grant led by Janelle Jenstad.

Patrick Szpak

Patrick Szpak is a Programmer Consultant and Web Designer in the Humanities Computing and Media Centre at the University of Victoria.

Orgography

LEMDO Team (LEMD1)

The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators, encoders, and remediating editors.

University of Victoria (UVIC1)

https://www.uvic.ca/

Metadata

Authority title
Type of text Anthology
Publisher University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform
Series Early Modern England Encyclopedia
Source
Content written by Kate McPherson. Design by Emma Lam, Patrick Szpak, and Martin Holmes. Linking and data architecture by Janelle Jenstad.
Editorial declaration This document uses Canadian English spelling
Edition Released with Early Modern England Encyclopedia 1.0a
Sponsor(s)

Early Modern England Encyclopedia

Anthology Leads: Kate McPherson and Kate Moncrief.
Encoding description Encoded in TEI P5 according to the LEMDO Customization and Encoding Guidelines
Document status published
Funder(s) Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
Mitacs Globalink Research Internship
Utah Valley University
License/availability
Unless otherwise noted, intellectual copyright in EMEE Anthology pages is held by Kate McPherson on behalf of the contributors. Copyright on the TEI-XML markup is held by the University of Victoria on behalf of the LEMDO Team. The content and TEI-XML markup in this file are licensed under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. This file is freely downloadable without permission under the following conditions: (1) credit must be given to the authors, EMEE, and LEMDO in any subsequent use of the files and /or data; (2) this availability statement must remain in the file; (3) the content cannot be adapted or repurposed (except for quotations for the purposes of academic review and citation); and (4) commercial uses are not permitted without the knowledge and consent of the authors, EMEE, and LEMDO. Neither the content nor the code in this file is licensed for training large language models (LLMs), ingestion into an LLM, or any use in any artificial intelligence applications; such uses are considered to be commercial uses and are strictly prohibited.