The resources on this page can help you find secondary criticism and primary sources relevant to medieval literature. Please read through the rest of the English Literature guide for a full overview of the library's literary resources.
By default, these databases include books and book chapters along with journal articles in their search results. Usually, you can quickly access full text for journal articles using a "find full text" button in the databases, which will direct you either to a copy of the article or to Interlibrary Loan if the article is not available through our library. If there is no "find full text" button, try looking up the journal name in our Journals A to Z list (usually most reliable) or search for the article title in Google Scholar (easiest).
Books, however, cannot be found this way. You must look up books in OneSearch. But be careful-- your database result might be for a chapter within a book, with its own title and author. You should be searching for the book as a whole. If the book is not in our catalog, you can most likely find it on Worldcat (which searches thousands of libraries worldwide) and request it through Interlibrary Loan that way.
The Cambridge Companions series offers high-quality research overviews and bibliographies. These links are for full-text digital versions of the companions in the Cambridge Companions Online database. To find more research overviews in the library catalog, try a keyword search for a topic AND (companion OR handbook).
This library research guide is particularly relevant for this class. Review other guides or search for topics on the Libguides page.
Library reference resources offer reliable introductions to unfamiliar topics.
These digital and print materials give you more direct access to texts of the period.