Texts in Context is a rich and unusual collection of over 400 British Library texts. It includes menus for medieval banquets and handwritten recipes scribbled inside book covers. It opens up the first English dictionary ever written and explores the secret language of the Georgian underworld. It allows you to examine the shopping lists of the East India Company and to practise sentences from colonial phrasebooks. It presents smugglers' songs, rare dialect recordings, and the logbooks of 18th century trading ships.
These 'everyday' texts illustrate the many histories – social, cultural, economic, political, technical – within which language is used and produced. We have included a whole range of characters: cooks, clerks, publishers, tradesmen, lexicographers, sea captains, smugglers and quack doctors, to name a few. All the texts will allow you to explore how language varies with situation within as well as across time.
New - Text in Context playing cards. Click here to find out more...
Use the links below to explore the following themes:
