Archives

Académie de Chant grégorien

A searchable database of Gregorian chant.

Searchable database of the manuscripts held at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in the Departement des Manuscrits and the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, some with links to digitized versions of the manuscripts. Database includes full descriptions of manuscripts and bibliographical information, as well as incipit and explicit.

Cantus Index

Cantus Index is a catalogue of chant texts and melodies for Office and Mass. Multiple online medieval music databases have been connected together through unique “Cantus ID numbers”. Chant texts and melodies can be searched on this Cantus Index website, and matches in any of the partner databases will be returned.

CANTUS Network: libri ordinarii of the Salzburg metropolitan province

The research project CANTUS NETWORK, based at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, aims to investigate the records of Christian medieval worship that have survived in manuscript form and describe the practice of liturgical and musical acts of worship. The key sources for this transmission are the liturgical “prompt books”, called liber ordinarius, which include a short form of more or less the entire rite of a diocese or a monastery. Here, prayers, readings and chants are given as in abbreviated form as text incipits.
A liber ordinarius usually includes all information necessary for the church services of an individual institution (church, monastery) or a group (diocese, group of monasteries). On the one hand, this includes the incipits of chants, readings and prayers for the liturgy of the hours, for mass and for processions. On the other hand, it also includes rubrics that provide instructions on how and when particular liturgical actions should be carried out. In a third column, libri ordinarii may contain commentaries on the liturgy taken from standard contemporary works, providing additional information for particular feast days or a particular liturgical activity. A fourth column may provide the unlined neume notation of the chant incipits. When dealing with parts of ordinals, the neumes are the only proof of which piece of music is actually concerned. “Local colour” is created by the combination of the three or four columns, that is, the chant and recital text tradition, the rubrics and the explanations of the liturgy. [the site is in German with an English option]

Cantus Planus at University of Regensburg

Cantus Planus at the University of Regensburg presents a variety of tools and databases for the study of plainchant. The site offers a number of datafiles containing antiphons, responsories, and the texts of various liturgical books from across Europe. Likewise, the site presents databases for searching various aspects of the liturgy, including saints’ feasts or the type of liturgy used for a particular day. Likewise, the site contains search apparatus for notation as well as a number of bibliographies on chant.

The site is free to use, though it has not been recently updated.

CESG – Codices Electronici Sangallenses

Part of e-codices, the Virtual Manuscript Library of Switzerland, this site provides images and codicological descriptions of the medieval manuscripts contained at the Abbey Library of St. Gallen, Switzerland.

Chant Discography

Assembled by Jerome Weber, this discography lists commercial sound recordings of Latin chant, on LP and CD. The site is updated regularly.

CPI Conductus: Thirteenth-Century Music and Poetry

A searchable catalogue of 12th- and 13th-century Latin conductus (liturgical poems not based on preexisting chants and set to music for one, two, or three voices).

DIAMM (the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music)

DIAMM (the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music) is a leading resource for the study of medieval manuscripts. We present images and metadata for thousands of manuscripts on this website. We also provide a home for scholarly resources and editions, undertake digital restoration of damaged manuscripts and documents, publish high-quality facsimiles, and offer our expertise as consultants.

Digital Scriptorium

An searchable image database of selections from medieval and Renaissance manuscripts that unites scattered resources from many institutions into an international tool for teaching and scholarly research.

Durham Priory Library Recreated

From the creators: The purpose of the project is to collect all information relating to the books of Durham Priory, manuscript and printed work inherited, given, bought or created by the monks of the Benedictine priory of Durham, its predecessors and cells.

As of 2020, the project has made available catalog descriptions and IIIF-compliant images of over 150 of the manuscripts associated with Durham Cathedral. Currently items are not searchable but are arranged by shelfmark. The project is regularly updated as has an active blog associated with it.

e-codices: Virtual Manuscript Library of Switzerland

A collection of nearly 1,500 digitized manuscripts from Swiss libraries and collections. These manuscripts may be searched or browsed (by location, language, date, material, author, scribe, and others), including brief descriptions and annotations and bibliography where available. Libraries and collections include: St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek; Cologny, Foundation Martin Bodmer; Basel, Universitätsbibliothek; Einsiedeln, Stiftsbibliothek, and many others.

Europeana Regia

A project that brings together three collections of royal manuscripts – Carolingian manuscripts, the library of Charles V and family, and the library of the Aragonese kings of Naples – currently housed across Europe at five member libraries. Provides short essays as well as the virtual exhibition “Manuscripts and Princes in Medieval and Renaissance Europe.”

Fragmentarium: Digital Research Laboratory for Medieval Manuscript Fragments

Fragmentarium’s primary objective is to develop a digital library specialized for medieval manuscript fragment research. Although based on the many years of experience of e-codices — Virtual Manuscript Library of Switzerland, the Fragmentarium Digital Library has an international orientation. First and foremost it is conceived as a social platform for libraries, scholars and students to do scholarly work on fragments. It conforms to the latest standards set by digital libraries and will set new standards, especially in the area of interoperability.

The web application contains a series of tools:

A cataloging tool that enables libraries, collectors, researchers and students to gather and describe fragments via a CMS.
A tool for curated and social tags, facets and keywords, allowing efficient research through comparison and cross-checking.
A tool to link and assemble fragments offers the possibility to arrange cuttings, fragments of leaves, and individual leaves in any order.

Gregorian Archive

The Gregorian Archive is primarily a collection of recorded solo performances of the nearly six hundred Gregorian melodies provided in the earliest manuscript sources for the chanted Propers of the Roman Mass.

Les ressources électroniques (Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes) [Electronic Resources: IRHT]

A collection of online resources for the study of manuscripts and archives.

Manuscripta Mediaevalia

The result of a project to centralize the digital cataloging of medieval manuscripts held in German libraries, this German-language site offers a searchable database of those manuscripts, some of which are also digitized.

MARGOT

From the project: “MARGOT is a long-term research project devoted to publishing fully searchable editions of either generally inaccessible texts from the French Middle Ages and the Early Modern period (the Ancien Régime) or of texts in connection with a specific project from the same time period.”

MARGOT contains a number of other DH projects, including CANTUS, a database of medieval chant, French Women Writers, The Campsey Project, and Reading the Roman de la Rose in Text and Images, among others.

MARGOT makes its materials freely available under a Creative Commons license.

Medieval Manuscripts in Dutch Collections

This database contains descriptions of all medieval western manuscripts up to c. 1550 written in Latin script and preserved in public and semi-public collections in the Netherlands. These include the collections of libraries, museums, archives, collections of monastic orders and some private institutions open to researchers. No censorship has been carried out: all literary, historiographical, academic, hagiographical, and (para-)liturgical texts, artes texts, ego-documents etc. written in Latin or one of the Western European vernacular languages qualify for inclusion. However, fragments of manuscripts are only included when possible and useful: the texts must be identifiable or the fragments should have already been catalogued as an object. Archival documents and letters are not recorded, except when already part of another included manuscript.

MESA Medieval Electronic Scholarly Alliance

A community of scholars, projects, institutions, and organizations that provides a searchable database of digital resources for medieval studies including texts, manuscript facsimiles, and many others, and also allows scholars to upload and publish their own work.

Monastic Matrix: A scholarly resource for the study of women’s religious communities from 400 to 1600 CE

Ongoing collection of texts (primary and secondary, in original and translation) and images of art and architecture related to religious women in medieval Europe.

Monumenta Musicae Byzantinae

Provides an index of volumes published in University of Copenhagen’s Monumenta Musicae Byzantinae series, dedicated to scholarship about Byzantine chant. Also includes extensive bibliography, an inventory of the microfilms and photos of manuscripts housed at the University for the study of Byzantine chant, and the standard abridged version of the Sticherarion (Byzantine notated chant book) downloadable in .pdf format.

Online Medieval Sources Bibliography

Searchable annotated bibliography of over 5000 modern print and online editions of medieval primary sources, intended for a broad audience including high school and college level instructors as well as more advanced scholars or enthusiasts.

St. Stephen’s Chapel, Westminster: Visual & Political Culture, 1292-1941

From the creators: As a monument to medieval kingship and a setting for parliamentary government, St Stephen’s Chapel in the Palace of Westminster has helped to shape the political culture of the nation. Funded by the AHRC (2013-17), our project explores the history, art and architecture of the royal chapel which became the first dedicated House of Commons. This website provides access to the 3D visualizations modeled from our research.

TELMA – Traitement electronique des manuscrits et des archives

L’objectif de TELMA est de mettre en ligne à la disposition de la communauté scientifique des corpus de sources primaires et les instruments de recherche nécessaires à leur exploitation. De ce fait, TELMA intègre deux types de corpus : des répertoires de ressources et des éditions critiques de sources manuscrites associées ou non à des images numérisées des documents.

The objective of TELMA is to make available to the scientific community a corpus of primary sources and research tools necessary for their exploitation. As a result, TELMA integrates two types of resources: databases and critical editions of handwritten sources with or without digitized images of documents.