Old and Middle English Corpora

The following list provides a catalogue of electronic corpora containing Old and Middle English texts. Some of them are available via the Web, and some on CD-ROM.

• Brooklyn-Geneva-Amsterdam-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English - grammatically parsed part Helsinki Corpus (e-mail: SP20@york.ac.uk).
• Corpus of Early English Correspondence - c.2.7 million words.
• Corpus of Early English Medical Writing - covers 1375-1750 (e-mail: Irma.Taavitsainen@helsinki.fi)
• Corpus of Early Middle English Tagged Texts and maps - hosted by the Institute for Historical Dialectology, Edinburgh. (e-mail: M.Laing@ed.ac.uk).
• Corpus of Irish English - covering 14th and 15th century (e-mail: r.hickey@uni-essen.de).
• Edinburgh Corpus of Older Scots - covering 1380 to 1500 (e-mail: I.K.Williamson@ed.ac.uk).
• Helsinki Corpus - c. 1.5 million words, covering various genres, from the years 750 to 1710. Available as part of the ICAME CD-ROM in the Centre for Humanities Computing. A new CD-ROM is to be released soon including a Corpus of Older Scots (covering 1450-1700) [More information available]
• Innsbruck Computer Archive of Middle English Texts - 5.5 million words, covering 1100-1500 (e-mail: manfred.markus@uibk.ac.at).
• Literature On-Line (LION) - contains the English Poetry and English Verse Drama database (1100-1900). For Old English texts use the networked CD-ROM available via OxLIP (Oxford Libraries Information Platform - also includes the Bible in English).
• Middle English Compendium (University of Michigan) - covers the major anonymous works, Chaucer, Dunbar, Gower, Henryson, Herebert, Hue de Rotelande, Julian of Norwich, Langland, Layamon, Malory, and Paston. Similar texts available in the Electronic Text Centre's collection (University of Virginia).
• Old English Corpus - all Old English texts used by the Dictionary of Old English Project, Toronto.
• The Oxford Text Archive - the largest and oldest e-text archive in existence. All texts are available free of charge to Oxford users.
• Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English - syntactically parsed prose selection from the Helsinki Corpus.