Indexes

Gardiner's History of England.

Last updated: February 6, 2012.

One hundred and thirty-odd years after its completion, Samuel Rawson Gardiner's History of England from the Accession of James I to the Outbreak of the Civil War remains the definitive description of that period. It has been augmented from the few manuscript sources that were unavailable to Gardiner and by a great deal of statistical analysis using data that was not usefully aggregated in Gardiner's time; but for the most part, the events that Gardiner describes are still considered the important events and the conclusions Gardiner draws still inform historians' thinking about those events.

There is surprisingly little published information about Gardiner. A Life is probably needed, but I know of none in plan. I have collected some information on a biography page.

Because Gardiner's History is extensive (occupying 10 volumes) and exhaustive, it is fortunate that it has been well indexed. I don't know who created the index, but she (it probably was a she) was thorough and skillful. The index, which occupies the final 150 pages of Volume X, consists of 2362 subject entries and over 14000 index entries.

I have created some HTML documents based on the index. They are

1. A Subject Index, in which the subjects are listed alphabetically and each subject entry is a hyperlink to a document containing the index entries for that subject. The subject entries (here's an example), contain links to copies of the History hosted by Google Books.
2. A page index which lists index entries by page within volume, creating (given Gardiner's method) a kind of detailed outline of the History.

Sometimes it is useful to have all the index entries in a single report. The resulting reports are very large in this case, however, so I have provided them in a compressed form as MonolithicGardinerIndex.zip; unzip the file and read the file README.txt.

Some may be interested in the process of generating these indexes. They can download GardinerIndexSourceFiles.zip which contains:

• The text file that is the basis for the index reports.
• The python scripts used to generate the reports.
• A brief description of the process.

Copyright

All text and html files are © Bob Blair, 2011-2012; and are dedicated to the public domain. They may be used for any legal purpose, with or without attribution. They are not warranted useful for any purpose.

All source code is licensed under an MIT-type license. See source files for details.

Errors

The indexes contain instances of these kinds of errors:

• Misspellings
• Links to wrong volumes
• Links to wrong pages within volumes

If you find an error and tell me about it, I will fix it. Send error reports, and any other comments and suggestions, to bblair48@yahoo.com.