The Athenæ Oxonienses, sometimes also called the Oxford Atheneum, or more properly the Oxford Athens, is a list of people who went to Oxford University starting in the year 1500, together with short dexcriptions of what they did. It mainly lists people who published books or became bishops.

The book was written by Anthony à Wood (1632‒1695) and published in two volumes.

The full title is Athenæ Oxonienses. Vol. 1. an exact history of all the writers and bishops who have had their education in the most ancient and famous University of Oxford, from the fifteenth year of King Henry the Seventh, Dom. 1500, to the end of the year 1690, representing the birth, fortune, preferment, and death of all those authors and prelates, the great accidents of their lives, and the fate and character of their writings : to which are added, the Fasti, or, Annals, of the said university, for the same time ...

The set of two printed books used here is the first edition, from 1691; the book was reprinted and extended by others well into the 19th century.

The transcription was done in 2005 by the Text Creation Partnership between The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, MI, USA, and The University of Oxford, in Oxford, Oxon., UK.

They used the Text Encoding Initiative markup language, and typed the document by hand. THis does mean there are errors; i [Liam Quin] have corrected some, and have supplied some words or characters marked as missing, by using higher quality page scans than were available to the original team.

The XML texts from the Text Creation Partnership have been made available for reuse, including commercially. You can get them from the Oxford Text Archive.

These Web pages are of course also freely available. If you would like a copy of the XSLT used to make the Web edition, contact slave at fromoldbooks dot org via electronic mail. Mention the colour of your socks in the subject line, and Ath. Ox.

I wanted an online copy of this work because Alexander Chalmers, in his 32-volume dictionary of biography that i also have online here, frequently refers to Ath. Ox., and i wanted to make the references work. Later, i may try to add some of Chalmers’ other sources.