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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.

Early English Laws Online

Early English Laws Online has as its goal the publication in print and translation of all English legal codes up to Magna Carta in 1215. Currently, the project has digitized and indexed a number of legal texts from the period in Latin, Old French, and Old English. One can search by text name, abbreviation, category, or by the king under whose reign the laws were written. Likewise, one can view catalog data and links to other repositories containing manuscripts of the legal codes. A few of these manuscripts have images that can be viewed in the site’s manuscript viewer.

The project also contains a bibliography on English law, a glossary, contextual essays, and links to other related projects.

Early Music Theory

Early Music Theory is a web platform for the publishing of editions of medieval and early modern musical theory. Currently, the site hosts digital editions of some of the works of late medieval theorist Johannes Tinctoris, in addition to a bibliography and biography of the writer. The editions of Tinctoris’ texts are presented in a viewer that includes musical notation. The platform also includes commentary on the texts and links to Early Music Theory’s social media profiles, which are active as of 2020.

eDIL

The electronic Dictionary of the Irish Language (eDIL) is a digital dictionary of medieval Irish. It is based on the ROYAL IRISH ACADEMY’S Dictionary of the Irish Language based mainly on Old and Middle Irish materials (1913-1976) which covers the period c.700-c.1700. The current site contains revisions to c.4000 entries and further corrections and additions will be added in the coming years.

Eel-Rents Project

The Eel-Rents Project is a multimedia platform for an exploration of eels as a part of the economy and culture of eleventh-century Britain. The project presents an interactive map that shows the location of eel rents in the Domesday Books and also presents a bibliography and discussion of the importance of the aquatic animals to early English life.

Electronic Beowulf

The fourth edition of Electronic Beowulf 4.0 is a free, online version of Electronic Beowulf that supersedes all previous editions. The online edition is designed to meet the needs of general readers, who require a full, line by line, translation; of students, who want to understand the grammar and the meter and still have time in a semester to study and appreciate other important aspects of the poem; and of scholars, who want immediate access to a critical apparatus identifying the nearly 2000 eighteenth-century restorations, editorial emendations, and manuscript-based conjectural restorations.

England’s Immigrants 1330-1550: Resident Aliens in the Late Middle Ages

“England’s Immigrants 1330-1550” is a fully-searchable database containing over 64,000 names of people known to have migrated to England during the period of the Hundred Years’ War and the Black Death, the Wars of the Roses and the Reformation.

The information within this database has been drawn from a variety of published and un-published records – taxation assessments, letters of denization and protection, and a variety of other licences and grants – and offers a valuable resource for anyone interested in the origins, destinations, occupations and identities of the people who chose to make England their home during this turbulent period.

Enluminures

La base Enluminures propose la consultation gratuite de plus de 120 000 images, sous forme de vignette et de plein écran, reproductions numériques des enluminures et éléments de décor de plus de 5 000 manuscrits médiévaux conservés dans une centaine de bibliothèques municipales françaises.

The Enluminures database offers free consultation of more than 120,000 images, in the form of a thumbnail and full-screen, digital reproductions of illuminations and decorative elements of more than 5,000 medieval manuscripts preserved in some 100 French municipal libraries.

Epistolae: Medieval Women’s Letters

Epistolae is a collection of medieval Latin letters to and from women.  The letters collected here date from the 4th to the 13th centuries, and they are presented in their original Latin as well as in English translation.  The letters are organized by the name and biography of the women writers or recipients.  Biographical sketches of the women, descriptions of the subject matter of the letters, and the historical context of the correspondence are included where available.

Dr. Joan Ferrante, Professor Emerita of English and Comparative Literature of Columbia University, has with her colleagues collected and translated these letters mainly from printed sources.  She has worked with the Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning to develop this unique open online collection for teaching and research purposes.  New letters continue to be added to the collection.  Users are invited to participate by sending material or inquiries to jmf2@columbia.edu.  Contributions, fully acknowledged, will be added to the database after review for accuracy and style by members of the Epistolae board.

Estoria de Espanna Digital

Created by scholars at the University of Birmingham, the Estoria de Espanna Digital project has created a digital edition of nine of the medieval manuscript witnesses to the text of the Estoria de Espanna, the 13th-century Spanish-language chronicle commissioned by Alfonso X. The chronicle details the history of the Iberian peninsula from Roman times up to Alfonso’s reign. The project presents the versions in diplomatic or facsimile format and allows a user to view texts side by side for comparison.

The project includes methodological and introductory information in both Spanish and English. The project has also made its data open-source, allowing users to download complete textual versions in XML. The project was recently updated in June 2020.

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.”

Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Index

Searchable bibliography/index of articles in over 500 journals, book reviews, and essays in books about women, sexuality, and gender during the middle ages published from c.1990 onwards. Excludes books by a single author (e.g., monographs). Many items include  brief annotations. Some images also indexed. Provides links to other resources on medieval women and gender (including masculinity and homosexuality).

 

Fontes Anglo-Saxonici

Fontes Anglo-Saxonici: A Register of Written Sources Used by Authors in Anglo-Saxon England is intended to identify all written sources which were incorporated, quoted, translated or adapted anywhere in English or Latin texts which were written in Anglo-Saxon England (i.e. England to 1066), or by Anglo-Saxons in other countries.  The material is compiled in the form of a database which analyses each Anglo-Saxon text passage by passage, sentence by sentence or, if necessary, phrase by phrase, identifying the probable source-passages used for each particular segment. The database now contains over 28,000 records analysing in detail the source-relationships of around 1143 Anglo-Saxon texts (over 500 Old English and over 600 Latin) and identifying the use of over 1000 sources and analogues. These numbers continue to grow rapidly as we add records to the database.  The database shows which texts were known in Anglo-Saxon England, how well specific texts and authors were known, and in what different ways they were used. It also provides the basis for studies on the intellectual interests of Anglo-Saxon authors, and what contributions the Anglo-Saxons made to the history of ideas.

Footprints: Jewish Books through Time and Place

The Footprints projects is a growing database of records that aim to track the circulation of printed “Jewish books” across time and space. Though the great majority of records come from the early modern period and beyond, there are currently over 200 entries from the invention of the printing press to the end of the 16th century.

The database tracks interactions with printed books through what it calls “footprints,” which is the project’s terminology for users’ interactions with books through marginalia, ownership marks, and numerous other qualities. The project features advanced search functionality that allows a user to search by time, place, and various textual and physical properties of the printed books. There is also visualization capability to show the path of books and holdings in various repositories around the world.

Additionally, an active community of users exists on the site as well as a blog that is updated regularly.

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.

Franciscan Women: History and Culture

Franciscan Women: History and Culture is a project of the Franciscan Institute and Bonaventure University to gather information on women’s Franciscan orders across the globe from the 13th century to the 18th century. The website provides a free database where users can find an extensive searchable bibliography on Franciscan women. There is also an encyclopedia of Franciscan women in addition to a list of convents across the globe with years of operation and references to secondary sources that treat the person or location. As of 2020, there are hundreds of entries available. Individual entries vary in length and contents based and can be anywhere from one sentence to several paragraphs long.

The project also has a list of helpful links for the study of women’s orders.

French of England

The French of England project provides a variety of resources for the study of French in England from the Norman Invasion into the early modern period. The site seeks to unseat typical chronological and geopolitical boundaries in showing that the French of England was a long-lasting and wide-ranging phenomenon.

The project provides resources, including: bibliographies, syllabuses, audio recordings of Anglo-French texts, some translations, and editions, as well as a list of links to other sites that approach the study of the language and cultures associated with the French of England.

Gallica (BnF)

Gallica is the digital library of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and makes available nearly thousands of manuscripts, printed books, and images that may be searched or browsed online, some of which are available for download as .pdf or .jpg.

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Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru: A Dictionary of the Welsh Language

Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru: A Dictionary of the Welsh Language (GPC) is the online version of A Dictionary of the Welsh Language, the historical dictionary of Welsh similar in scope to the Oxford English Dictionary. Funded by the Welsh government, the decades-long print project was completed in 2001 and the digital version was begun in 2011 and is an ongoing project. The GPC contains entries dating back to the earliest references to Welsh and contains many entries spanning the medieval period. Entries contain grammatical information as well as a definition and dated historical sources to the words under consideration. Users may search entries in either Welsh or English.

The project is free to use and has an active web presence that updates users on the project’s status.

Glasgow Incunabula Project

The Glasgow Incunabula Project seeks to provide a catalog of the over 1000 incunabula in the University of Glasgow Library’s collections. The project provides multiple access points for the early printed materials. On the website, one can find lists of incunabula by authors, printers, dates, annotators, languages, prices, and multiple other qualities.

Most incunabula’s listings contain a detailed catalog entry and sometimes an accompanying image, all housed on Flickr. The project also has a blog that was active until 2017.

Global Medieval Sourcebook

“The Global Medieval Sourcebook (GMS) is an open access teaching and research tool. It offers a flexible online display for the parallel viewing of medieval texts in their original language and in new English translations, complemented by new introductory materials.

The GMS spans one thousand years (600-1600) of literary production around the world. It contains short texts of broad interdisciplinary interest in a variety of genres, almost all of which have not previously been translated into English.”

Global Middle Ages Project

The Global Middle Ages Project, or GMAP, aims to explore the whole world of the Middle Ages, from 500 to 1500CE, by exploring peoples, places, objects, and numerous other vectors for medieval research.

The website functions as a clearinghouse for projects hosted by GMAP with links to a variety of digital humanities projects from scholars of various aspects of the Middle Ages.

Glossarial Concordance to Middle English

Housed at Johns Hopkins University, the Glossarial Concordance to Middle English is a database of words and their locations in texts derived from the Chaucer and Gower’s poetic works. The creators hope to expand the platform to other Middle English authors in the future. Drawing primarily from Larry Benson’s Riverside Chaucer in addition to the compiled works of Gower, the database allows a user to make complex searches for terms and phrases in those authors’ works. For an entry, the Concordance presents the text’s title and the line number at which it appears.

The site also interacts with the Middle English Dictionary to allow a user to search by dictionary headword. Searching is made simpler through the use of predictive text, so that as a user begins typing, the Concordance offers possible matches in the search box. The site invites users to contact the creators if they would like to add a text. Additionally, the source code for the project is made available on GitHub.

Glossarium Græco-Arabicum

The database Glossarium Græco-Arabicum makes available the files of a lexical project, intended to open up the lexicon of the mediæval Arabic translations from the Greek. It contains images of the filecards (ca. 80,000) which have not yet been published in the analytical reference dictionary A Greek and Arabic Lexicon (Leiden: Brill, 1992ff.), and comprises Arabic roots from the letter jîm to the end of the Arabic alphabet.

From the eighth to the tenth century A. D., Greek scientific and philosophical works were translated wholesale into Arabic. This activity resulted in the incorporation and reorganization of the classical heritage in the new civilization which, using Arabic, spread with Islam.

The object of project Glossarium Graeco-Arabicum is to make readily available to scholars the direct information which the Graeco-Arabic translations contain for several areas of research. These include:

– the vocabulary and syntax of Classical and Middle Arabic;
– the development of a scientific and technical vocabulary in Arabic;
– the vocabulary of Classical and Middle Greek;
– the chronology and nature of the translation movement into Arabic; and
– the establishment of the texts of Greek works and their Arabic translations.