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History Research Guide: History 347 (W3)

Researching Witches, Wives, and Whores

The boxes on this page link to primary and secondary resources relating to Early Modern women.

Online primary source collections

Here's a cure from Margaret Baker's Receipt book, 1650. Available in the Perdita digital collection.

For the toothache // Take goose dung and warm it in a fire shoule very hot // so lay it all over that side of your face which is in pain
"For the toothache
Take goose dung and warm it in a fire shoule very hot
so lay it all over that side of your face which is in pain"

Databases that track secondary sources

Two search tips

1. Use shortcuts. Typically you can use

  • the asterisk * at the end of a word stem to retrieve more results. For example, arrest* finds arrest, arrests, arrested.
  • quotation marks around phrases retrieves records with that exact string of words.
  • geographical and date limits to narrow or broaden your results.

2. Use terms that will expand (or narrow) your search

Build a bibliography

Start of the bibliography for Tallentire's MA thesis: Edifice Built Like a City Wall: Women, Gender Ideology, and the Social Construction of Space in Early Modern Europe. 1998.

From Jenéa Tallentire's bibliography for her thesis: "An Edifice Built Like a City Wall: Women, Gender Ideology, and the Social Construction of Space in Early Modern Europe." University of Regina, 1998.


Your librarian

Questions? Let me know.
Mike Chee, History Librarian
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