Skip to Main Content
QUL logo

Medieval and Renaissance Studies

Finding Books

Search Omni to find books, journals, videos and other materials owned by the Library.  You can search by keywords, author, title or subject headings. 
 
To find books by a particular author or person, search Omni by author/creator. Go to Advanced Search and enter person's name..
 
 
To find books about a particular author or person, search Omni by subject heading:
 

Subject Headings vs Keyword Searching

Subject headings allow you to search for resources on a particular author or topic and are often more productive than keyword searches. 

Keyword searches work best if you have multiple concepts or topics. Think of the words that best describe your topic and then connect them with the boolean operators AND OR NOT.

One strategy to find books on your topic is to use a keyword search to find relevant subjects that you can click on to find more books on the same topic.

Keyword Searching TIPS
 

Search Technique  

What It Does

quotation marks

Searches for exact phrase

Truncation *

Searches for all forms of a word

Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT)

Lets you broaden or narrow your search
 
Topic: Family life in the Middle Ages:
 
Search: family AND "middle ages"
 
Revise search: (family OR household*) AND ("middle ages" OR medieval)
 
Select useful titles and look at the full record for subject headings.
 
family--history
households--england--history
england--social life and customs--medieval period
 
Examples of subject headings relating to medieval studies:
 
Middle Ages
English literature  Middle English, 1100-1500.
France History Medieval period 987-1515
Great Britain History To 1485
Great Britain History Medieval period, 1066-1485
Great Britain Social life and customs Medieval period, 1066-1485
Hastings, Battle of, 1066
Social history  Medieval, 500-1500
Women  History  Middle Ages, 500-1500
 
Examples of subject headings relating to the Renaissance:
 
Renaissance
Art, Renaissance
England Civilization
English literature Early modern 1500-1700
Europe History  1492-1648
European literature Renaissance 1450-1600
History Modern 16th century
Philosophy Renaissance
Women History  Renaissance, 1450-1600
 

E-Books

 
The Library subscribes to a number of e-book packages which can be accessed via Databases. Packages that are of interest to history students are:
 
Provides full-text access to major works in American, European and Middle Eastern history.
 
A series of over 300 volumes spanning ten subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, with a concentration on political and cultural history. 
 
Oxford Academic                 
Full-text access to scholarly publishing in 20 subjects from around the world,
 
Provides access to about 600,000 electronic books (ebooks) from a wide variety of publishers.
 
UPSO includes titles from Oxford University Press and other partner presses. QUL has access to selected titles, indicated by a green open lock icon on search results screens.

Open Access Textbooks

British Literature I: Middle Ages to the Eighteenth Century and Neoclassicism