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1.  To Find Books:

Search the our library catalog Voyager for books by or about medieval authors and related topics. To find books by Geoffrey Chaucer, do an author search under Chaucer, Geoffrey; to find books about him, so a subject search under the same term. For an anonymous work like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, search it as a title to find copies of the text; search it as a subject to find books of criticism and interpretation. Note that anonymous works generally have a standardized uniform title heading which is used to bring together all versions of a work regardless of the original spelling.

To widen your search, use a similar strategy in WorldCat , or other library catalogs.  Also, set up an account with Netlibrary in order to check out items from our e-book collection. Register for ILLIAD in order to be able to request books on ILL.

2.  Journal Articles—Online Full-text Sources

Besides books about the authors and their works, there is a bounteous supply of literary criticism published in journals on the subject.  Many of these literary journals can be accessed in the following databases:

·        Humanities Abstracts (Index to journal articles in the humanities)

·        WilsonSelectPlus (Full-text articles from general and scholarly periodicals)

·        JSTOR (Full-content back runs of high-quality scholarly journals in the humanities)

·        Project Muse (Full-content current subscriptions to scholarly journals in the humanities)

4. Modern Language Association Bibliography

For extensive literary research the essential, most compendious database is the Modern Language Association Bibliography (covering literature, languages, linguistics, and folklore). It contains over one million citations for items from journals and series published worldwide, as well as indexing books, essay collections, working papers, proceedings, dissertations, and bibliographies.  Publications in English and many other languages are included.

When searching MLA Bibliography on FirstSearch it is advisable to use the advanced search mode.  Common methods of search would include by an author’s name, by the title of a work of literature, or by a combination of topics, e.g. (women or women) and “canterbury tales”.

Record types--Journal article

The majority of entries in the MLA Bibliography are articles from scholarly journals like the following:

This entry indicates both that the full text of the article is available online, and also that it comes from a print journal, Review of English Studies, to which we subscribe. If we click on the "Search the catalog" link at the top of the entry, we will find the following Voyager record for the print (or “hard copy”) subscription:

Therefore you may obtain a copy of this article either as online html full-text, or as originally published in the source journal.

Record type--Book article

Many entries in MLA also come from books, which have a different "source" field than the journal articles:

If we search for the book in Voyager by its title, we find the following record:

Many other types of source documents are indexed in MLA and a multitude of different search techniques may be used, but these are the most fundamental to understand. If you have any questions please contact Frank Lepkowski, 248 370 2497, 238 Kresge Library, lepkowsk@oakland.edu.