Over the last decade the scholarly enterprise has been transformed by the internet. All the early modern texts cited here are to be found on the internet, some at subscription services (Early English Books Online (EEBO); Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO)) but many at open-access sites (Google Books, Gallica).
In particular, my research on the history of words has been internet based. The key sources are as follows: 1. For English, the Oxford English Dictionary, supplemented by the search facilities in EEBO and ECCO. EEBO searches all titles and, apparently, some 25 per cent of texts (but, in reality, rather more than that, as many texts are duplicated in several editions), while ECCO searches (very erratically) all texts on the database (which is nearly complete). One can also search early-modern-English dictionaries at http://leme.library.utoronto.ca. 2. For French, the public-access dictionary collection at http://artfl-project. uchicago.edu/contentdictionnaires-dautrefois. 3. For Italian, the Vocabolario degli accademici della Crusca (1612) at http://vocabolario. signum.sns.it/. 4. For all languages, and particularly for Latin, the resources at Google Books and other collections of ebooks (such as archive.org and gallica.bnf.fr). I have not noted the date of these searches, but the bulk of the book was written in 2012–14: outcomes will change, of course, as further materials come on line and as the OED is revised.
But this is only part of my debt to the internet: day after day the postman has brought packages of books to my door, acquired from far-flung corners of the world. Seventeenth-century scholars sometimes felt they were drowning in an ocean of books. As the piles on and beside my desk have grown I, too, have had this feeling, but mostly I have felt as though I were far out at sea, unsure where or when I would make landfall but delighted to be on my own voyage of discovery.