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Archives

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.

Guto’r Glyn Website / Gwefan Guto’r Glyn

This is a freely available online bilingual (Welsh and English) standard critical edition of the poetry of Guto’r Glyn (c.1435-c.1490). Guto’r Glyn is regarded as one of the most accomplished poets of late medieval Wales. As well as providing the user with translations of the poetry and paraphrases into modern Welsh, there are copious notes on the poems, the patrons, their homes, on the historical background and any notable linguistic features. Each poem is also accompanied by images from the most important manuscript witnesses (provided by the National Library of Wales), as well as transcriptions.

 

Handschriftencensus

Handschriftencensus is a German-language web platform published by a team at the University of Marburg. The site functions as a directory for medieval German-language manuscripts from 750CE to 1520CE in libraries around the globe. The platform itself does not contain images, but does contain detailed catalog entries for each manuscript in addition to links to available images and the host repository’s catalog entry for a manuscipt. Users can see the nearly 900 manuscripts on the site in list format, ordered by repository, author/work, and illustration type.

The project has an active social media presence on Twitter and is continuously updated, with new additions made weekly. Users can also find a regularly updated, in-depth bibliography of secondary sources on German-language medieval texts and manuscripts. Copyrights for manuscript images obtained through the site are still retained by a manuscript’s holding institution.

Hebrew Fragments in Austria

A joint venture between the Austrian National Library, the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and the Institute for Jewish History in Austria, the Hebrew Fragments in Austria project provides images of Hebrew language fragments in Austrian manuscripts. The website functions in both English and German. There are over 500 images of fragments from over twenty repositories present in the database currently. Many of the fragments in the collection are contained in the bindings of other manuscripts and early printed books. Images are presented in JPG format and include catalog information. The projects also presents a list of the fragments arranged by text and manuscript.

The website for the project also includes a bibliography on the study of fragments generally and the study of fragments in Germanic countries specifically. Likewise, the website also presents a map of institutions in Austria holding fragments.

Historical Atlas of the Low Countries (1350-1800)

The Historical Atlas of the Low Countries includes GIS datasets that represent various areas of the low countries including Brabant, Holland, Zeeland, Hainaut, Artois and others. The sets are made freely available for download and use under a Creative Commons license.

Icelandic Saga Map

The Icelandic Saga Map project presents some thirty sagas from medieval Iceland with geotagged locations and images. The project aims to showcase the use landscape and eventually manuscript images alongside the places they represent.

The project presents a geo-tagged map and is free to use.

Initiale

A French-language, searchable catalog of manuscript illuminations found in manuscripts in French public libraries, excluding the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. The catalog may be searched by corpus, manuscript, decoration, or bibliography, and results include the manuscript citation, brief description, date, title, and images of the illumination.

International Center of Medieval Art

Website of the International Center of Medieval Arts, which promotes the study and understanding of visual arts produced in Europe, the Mediterranean, and Slavic world from c. 300 to c. 1500.  Includes image database (on Flickr), census of dissertations (1982 onwards), the Limestone Sculpture Provenance database, list of grad programs in medieval art history, and membership information on lectures, grants, employment opportunities, and other medieval news.  Access to Gesta (their journal) and current newsletters restricted to members.

* National History Day Selected Resource *

Internet Medieval History Sourcebook

The Internet Medieval Sourcebook is useful primarily as a source for short extracts, derived from public domain sources or copy-permitted translations, to be used for teaching (particularly for medieval survey courses). Also included are some complete documents, notably saints’ lives, or links to the full documents. The editor states that the early aim was to include a wide range of texts which address elite governmental, legal, religious and economic concerns. The resources now also include a large selection of texts on women’s and gender history, Islamic and Byzantine history, Jewish history, and social history. The texts, again according to the editor’s own statement, vary in quality, and do not always represent the best or most modern translation.

* National History Day Selected Resource *

Irish Sagas Online

Welcome to Irish Sagas Online, a website which aims to make available reliable versions of the original texts of medieval Irish sagas with parallel translations into Modern Irish and English.

* National History Day Selected Resource *

Irish Script on Screen

The object of ISOS is to create digital images of Irish manuscripts, and to make these images – together with relevant commentary – accessible on a WWW site. The purpose of such a site is to provide an electronic resource which will:

  • provide exposure on the internet for a vital part of Ireland’s cultural heritage.
  • place these primary materials at the disposal of scholars and students.
  • contribute to the conservation of these valuable books and documents by creating images of high-resolution detail which, generally speaking, will reduce the need to handle the artefacts themselves.

Italian Paleography

From the website:

The Italian Paleography website presents 102 Italian documents and manuscripts written between 1300 and 1700, with tools for deciphering them and learning about their social, cultural, and institutional settings. The site includes: digitized images of 102 manuscripts and documents; T-Pen, a digital tool to actively transcribe manuscripts and documents;
transcriptions and background essays for each item; a selection of calligraphy books and historical manuscript maps; a handbook of Italian vernacular scripts; additional resources, including a glossary, list of abbreviations and symbols, dictionaries, and teaching materials.

Les Archives de littérature du Moyen Âge (ARLIMA) 

Les Archives de littérature du Moyen Âge (ARLIMA) ont été fondées à l’intention des étudiants et chercheurs spécialistes du Moyen Âge, pour qui la constitution d’une bibliographie sur un auteur ou un texte est devenue une tâche de plus en plus ardue, en raison de la multiplication non seulement des publications mais également des outils bibliographiques imprimés et électroniques à leur disposition.

The Archive of Literature of the Middle Ages (ARLIMA) was founded for the students and researchers of the Middle Ages, for whom the compilation of a bibliography on an author or a text has become an increasingly difficult task, because of the proliferation not only of the publications but also the printed and electronic bibliographic tools at their disposal.

Lexis of Cloth and Clothing Project

Cloth and clothing have been integral to life for every person since civilization began.

In the Middle Ages dress was an identifier of occupation, status, gender and ethnicity; textiles ranged through opulent, symbolic, utilitarian and recycled. Cloth production and international trade constituted a major sector of the economy of medieval Britain.

Evidence for medieval textiles and clothing is sought in diverse academic disciplines: archaeology, archaeological textiles, art history, economic history, literature, languages.

The vocabulary of the various languages spoken and written in the British Isles is documented in different specialist dictionaries, yet geographical proximity and interaction through labour and trade would argue that this evidence should be categorised and analysed together.

The Arts and Humanities Research Council made an award of £765,576 within the Research Grants (Standard) Scheme to fund a 5-year Project to undertake a trans-disciplinary study with the purpose of  producing an analytical corpus of medieval dress and textiles terminology of the British Isles in the form of a searchable database, innovatively illustrated.

At its centre was the assembly and examination of textiles/clothing lexis in the early languages of Britain (Old and Middle English; Welsh, Old Irish and minor Celtic languages; Anglo-Norman/French, Medieval Latin, Anglo-Norse), investigating the genesis and subsequent development of the vocabulary.

The terms and their citations from both documentary and literary texts have been analysed in awareness of surviving textiles/dress accessories and graphic images in medieval art.


From the reviewer:

This website represents an ambitious project – “lexis” being the total stock of words in a language – in this case we are looking at words specific to the British Isles. The sections that focus on words are the best – the Dictionaries tab and the Search the Database are useful and provide data. The Gallery tab provides detailed photographs. The Research tab leads to interesting books – they are mostly dated from 2006 -2012, however.

Logeion

Logeion is a free online dictionary that aggregates the resources of all the Latin and Greek dictionaries available through the Perseus Classical collection in addition to other resources like the Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources. A user can search by headword or an inverse search and use the tabs to switch between dictionary sources, including: Lewis and Short, Gaffiot, and others. The website also provides basic corpus analysis, offering examples of the word in sentences as well as providing morphological analysis. Though not all sources in the project are medieval, some, like the Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, are predominantly medieval.

Mandragore

Les collections de la Bibliothèque nationale de France abritent plusieurs dizaines de milliers de manuscrits dont le décor constitue l’un des plus riches musées de peinture au monde. Par leur grande variété et leur intérêt iconographique, ces images composent aussi une véritable encyclopédie visuelle de leur temps. En accroissement continu, Mandragore compte aujourd’hui plus de 170.000 notices analysant des œuvres conservées au Département des manuscrits et à la Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, et dont les plus anciennes remontent à l’Égypte pharaonique et les plus récentes à l’époque contemporaine. Leur indexation repose sur un vocabulaire de plus de 18.000 descripteurs.

The collections of the National Library of France house tens of thousands of manuscripts whose decoration comprises one of the richest painting collections in the world. Through their wide variety and iconographic interest, these images also make up a veritable visual encyclopedia of their time. Growing continuously, Mandragore now has over 170,000 records analyzing works held in the Department of Manuscripts and the Library of Arsenal, the oldest of which date back to Pharaonic Egypt and the most recent from modern times . Their indexing is based on a controlled vocabulary of more than 18,000 descriptors.

Manuscripts of Lichfield Cathedral

The Manuscripts of Lichfield Cathedral Project presents digital surrogates and bibliography on two medieval manuscripts held in Lichfield Cathedral: the 9th-century St. Chad’s Gospels and the 15th-century Wycliffite New Testament. The project offers both standard and multispectral imaging of the manuscripts, alongside RTI, or Reflectance Transformation Imaging for selected openings from the books.