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FYSP 189: Cities of Women: Home

Finding Querelles

Strategy 1

Search Summon for books with a subject of Women -- Early works to 1800 and "all fields" for the name of the women profiled in your querelle (e.g. Zenobia). Be sure to include any alternate spellings of the name with an "OR" boolean operator. 

Summon can search the full text of some books that Oberlin only owns in print. There's no guarantee that there is a substantive discussion of the woman in question in the the text, but it can often tell you if her name appears at all. 

Strategy 2

Search one of these online collections of primary sources directly for texts that reference the woman profiled in your querelle. 

Oberlin owns the series "The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe" both in print and online. To search across the full online collection at once, open ProQuest Ebook Central, navigate to the advanced search screen, and combine a Series Title search for "The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe" with the name of the women profiled in your querelles. 

You can also read and browse these volumes in print by looking them up by title in OBIS, either as an entire series or by searching for individual volumes by title (e.g. "The Story of Sappho.")

Strategy 3

Work from a list of writers who secondary sources tell us might have written querelles. (The sources below have good lists of these authors). 

Once you have the name of a writer who (not the subject of a querelle, but its author), use OBIS to conduct an author search to see which works Oberlin owns by those writers. 

 

If Oberlin has an ebook available, search inside the full text for the name of the woman profiled in your querelle.

If Oberlin does not have an ebook available, search inside the book on Google Books to see if the work mentions the woman profiled in your querelle. In the example below, you can see that Lucrezia Marinella references Zenobia several times in her text, and that means it would likely be worthwhile to obtain a print copy of this book. 

If you need access to a book that Oberlin only owns in print and our copy is checked out, use the search OhioLink button to see if an additional copy that you can request is available. 

If there's no electronic version at all available to search inside for the name of the woman profiled in your querelle, look at a print copy from the stacks, and use the index or table of contents to identify references to them. 

Research Help

Librarian

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Elizabeth Sullivan
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Main Library, 105 Mudd
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