This is a sortable table of contents of the letters included in the three-volume Memorials of affairs of state in the reigns of Q. Elizabeth and K. James I, collected (chiefly) from the original papers of … Sir Ralph Winwood, edited by Edmund Sawyer, published in 1725. I have based this on the editions available on Google Books, but also put in references to the editions included in ECCO (Eighteenth-Century Collections Online).
The creation of this interactive ToC stems from annoyance at there not being an online edition of Winwood's Memorials (WM), despite its prominence as a source for Early Modern English diplomatic history. In particular, I am interested in reconstructing correspondence chronology, and have been resorting to WM when recreating the correspondence between Sir Charles Cornwallis in Spain and Sir Robert Cecil in England. This would be greatly facilitated by having a searchable and sortable table of contents to WM, which one can then compare with catalogue sources of archives and libraries, and with the tables of contents of manuscript letter-books, etc. Or that's the theory - in practice, all these sources suffer from catalogitis, ie. entries such as "The same to the same, eodem die", which in context are clear enough, but drawn out of a database as single entries tell you nothing at all.
This being the case, I have expanded all names, dates and places and normalised their spelling in order to attain sortability and searchability. I have also normalised the names in the search columns: for instance, Sir Robert Cecil, later Viscount Cranborne and then Earl Salisbury, is named "Cecil, Sir Robert" throughout. The letter titles or headings given in WM, however, are retained as they appear in the printed work.
NB this table will inevitably contain errata. I hope to correct some of them in due course. It is possible to create hyperlinks to the TNA catalogue, and as the TNA catalogue notes (all? some of?) the letters reproduced in WM, this process could be half-automated. I am not sure about the possibility of stable links to the BL or Bodleian manuscript catalogue, but encourage any attempts to extract them. Any corrections or additions to this table will be highly appreciated! (En masse, please, not one by one..)
This table of contents is created by Samuli Kaislaniemi (2011), and published under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 3.0 License.
Editorial notes:
The following table is based on the e-table of contents of the 1727 edition of WM as published on ECCO (NB while the contents are the same as in the 1725 edition, the page numbers are not!). As such, it contains errors, primarily due to the (frankly rather poor) digitisation and (lack of) proofreading process of Gale, but also errors derived from the ToC of the printed edition. These errors of content have been corrected when glaring (such as letters missing from the ToC). NB! the following tables of contents have not been checked against the letters as printed in the original works. Any such errors are, thus, retained here. (I would correct them, but it's rather a painstaking and time-consuming a process so it will have to wait. Any volunteer contributions will be lauded!)
There are also omissions: my primary aim has been to provide a rough-and-ready transcription of the ToC, containing at the very least the accurate names of the principal senders and recipients, and normalised versions of all dates provided in the source. This means that rarer names (and, to my shame, non-English writers and recipients) are not all identified or spelled out, and about a fifth of the documents do not come with a date. All have been provided with a year, however, although uncertain cases are given uncertain dates (ie. documents sans date in the ToC between calendar years, e.g. an undated letter falling between dated letters of 1600 and 1601 is given the year 1600.1).
ETA
Well, so much for hoping Google Docs would be amenable to allowing sortability when sharing spreadsheets on the net. Instead, you'll have to make do with dynamic html in an iframe - clunkier, but it works! Click on the headers to sort by that column. Now, if we could only have filtering as well...
(Here's a link to the source page for better viewing. Alternatively, here's the link to the spreadsheet on Google Docs. You're more than welcome to copy all of it into the spreadsheet editor of your choice.)
UPDATE 5.11.2013
I'm not sure whether it's a temporary error or whether iFrames no longer work here for some reason, but should the frame below look blank, you can still find a functioning dynamic table on the source page here, and of course the spreadsheet on Google Docs.
UPDATE 27.10.2020
Apologies for lack of embedded table – please use the spreadsheet on Google Docs instead.
Page last updated 5.11.2013 by SK.