ABSTRACT
While the major electronic databases of literary texts make texts (relatively) cheaply available and easy to store, printed books retain considerable advantages for most purposes. But the electronic versions allow a kind of instant scholarship which the print medium denies. Suppose you have The English Poetry Full-Text Datebase2 and you want to find coronation odes for the early Stuarts; specify to the enquiry system appropriate dates and a few obvious keywords, and dozens of examples are immediately located; suppose you want to find analogues to Milton’s Nativity Ode; again offer dates and the obvious words-Christmas, nativity-and an extraordinarily rich intertext is immediately presented. Here there is enormous power and a potential for informed, scholarly criticism that we have scarcely begun to appreciate.
