Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEEC, 1998 version)

Work on the original Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEEC) began in 1993, and was completed in 1998. The CEEC covers the years 1410?–1681, and contains 2.6 million words of personal correspondence in c. 6,000 letters by 778 writers from 96 letter collections. The corpus was designed to be used in testing the applicability of sociolinguistic methods to the history of English.

The application of sociolinguistic methods is made possible by an extensive database containing background information about letter writers. This database is currently being extended to cover information on letter recipients as well. A second database contains information on each letter, including data on e.g. authenticity in addition to sender and recipient. An interface, allowing combined searches from these databases and making the selection of desired social groups for study has been developed and is currently being tested.

For more details, see the front page.