Friday, March 19, 2010

Question from Michelle - Letters and Papers

Hi, I have a question about 'The Letters and Papers of the Reign of Henry VIII', 1910 (?). I've searched online, and am a bit confused as to what this is. While I know this, or at least part of this is available for view online/National Archives, I've seen references to it as a 21 volume set of books. Does anyone know if this exists? If so, is it basically a volume of copies of the primary sources, etc.? Also, is it available for purchase?
Thanks in advance!

4 comments:

kb said...

This is the precursor to the Calendars of State Papers. "Letters and Papers" are the printed papers of Henry's reign in date order. Some documents are printed in full with modernized spelling, some are summarized.

The set runs to 21 volumes as you have discovered. Some of the volumes are available at the Internet Archive, I think there may be a couple available on Google Books but you'll have to check.

Buying them is an expensive proposition. They can be found in larger research libraries.

You can check on the used book store web sites like ABEbooks.

feuerrabe said...

The Volumes are free online at archive.org (a free content website for media) - they are so old there is no copyright on them anymore

http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=Letters%20and%20Papers%2C%20Foreign%20and%20Domestic%2C%20Henry%20VIII%20AND%20mediatype%3Atexts

kb said...

feuerraabe -

Are they all up there now? When last I looked on the Internet Archive [archive.org] not all the volumes had been digitized.

Michelle - You can download PDFs of the books from that site or read them online if disk space is an issue. They are searchable which is very useful.

Michelle said...

Thank you!