The Parker Library on the Web project is a joint endeavor by the Parker Library at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge and Stanford University to publish images of the roughly 600 medieval manuscripts housed in the library. To date, they have digitized and made freely available over 500 of those manuscripts. The Parker Library is one of the richest collections of early English books in the world, having been gifted the collections by Matthew Parker, the 16th-century Archbishop of Canterbury.
Parker Library on the Web has been at the forefront of library digitization projects. It was an early adopted of the IIIF image format. In addition to a wide range of manuscript images, including detailed images of illuminations, each entry has a detailed cataloging information and a bibliography for the item. Additionally, the platform also presents past digital exhibitions in addition to copious information on how to use the site.
A digitized version of volumes 1-217 of Migne’s Patrologia Latina, a collection of texts in Latin by church fathers, theologians, popes, councils, and many others from late antiquity through the high Middle Ages, indexed by volume. The texts, which are divided by author within each volume, may be read online or downloaded in .pdf format.
Read More →
People of Medieval Scotland 1093-1371 is a research project administered by King’s College London, University of Glasgow, and University of Edinburgh. The project has created an online database of all Scottish people mentioned in the over 8600 extant documents from the period 1093CE to 1371CE, though names and documents extend into the early 15th century. The database allows a user to search by keywords, people, places, sources, or “factoids,” which are legal events committed to documents. Each entry provides a list of associated people, the type of document, dates, and other documentary evidence as well as the holding institution for the document. When available, the project includes images of the documents in an on-screen viewer.
The project also presents an interactive network map that allows a user to visualize social connections in medieval Scotland. Additionally, the project presents a map of Scotland that a user may lay over with places and events as derived from the documentary evidence.
The database and its materials are free to use. The project is ongoing with the period under consideration extended in recent updates.
Project Gutenberg, first begun in the 1970s, aims to provide free access to reading materials via the internet. The project currently includes over 50,000 open-access works, covering multiple subjects and representative of many time periods. Some of the works will be of interest to medievalists; editions of the Divine Comedy can be found in Italian on the site, for example, and other works of potential interest, both primary and secondary, are certainly to be found within the large collection. However, both the search and browse functions are outdated given current search engines. Even given the large number of volumes included, medieval works are more sparse than one might desire for inclusion in the MDR.
The Prosopography of the Byzantine World projects creates a chronological, prosopographical reading of sources (predominantly seals) from the Byzantine World in the period 1025-1180. The project presents a description of the source and where it is held and also allows for text-based searching of materials.
Recovering the Earliest English Language in Scotland is a project that aims to uncover Old English place names in southern Scotland. Old English is the predecessor to both Middle English and Scots, and the project relies upon place names to provide evidence of the early Northumbrian dialect of the language. As of 2020, the database includes a list of over 500 place names in southern Scotland derived from Old English. Users can view the list of places alphabetically, by map, or through advanced searching for keywords and other salient qualities. Places can be displays on a map and frequently include a description of the place-name in addition to bibliography where available.
Users can download all project data through its API, and all data is made available under a Creative Commons license. One can also find a glossary of early place terms in addition to links to other projects with similar goals.
A searchable database of medieval refrains, or fragments of music or text that circulated between songs of various types during the thirteenth century.
Read More →
The REGESTA IMPERII (RI) records all documented and historiographically documented activities of Roman-German kings and emperors from the Carolingians to Maximilian I (about 751-1519) and the popes of the early and early Middle Ages in the form of German-speaking regesta. The website is a portal for the Commission on the regesta imperii, including links to the RI Opac (bibliographical search engine), electronic publications (work in progress editions and data collections), and the searchable RI database (chronological entries relating to imperial history from the Carolingian to the fifteenth century, based on the 80+ published volumes).
The “Registers of the Counts of Holland, 1299-1345” contains over 3500 digitized charters from Holland in this period. The site is fully keyword searchable and includes a list of documents one can view based on time and place. The website is in Dutch with English translation for some pages.
This project offers online diplomatic transcriptions of the texts of charters as recorded in a number of registers of the counts of Holland, now hold at the Dutch national archives, the Nationaal Archief, The Hague. There are also archival descriptions of these registers, and itineraries of the counts between 1395 and 1400 as reconstructed from these registers are presented, too. These registers can rightly been viewed as cartularies.
RELMIN recueille, étudie et publie des textes juridiques définissant le statut des minorités religieuses dans l’Europe médiévale. Riche et varié, le corpus couvre dix siècles et s’étend sur une large zone géographique ; écrits en latin, arabe, grec, hébreu et araméen (ainsi qu’en espagnol, portugais, et en d’autres langues vernaculaires européennes), ces textes sont actuellement dispersés dans les bibliothèques et les dépôts d’archives de toute l’Europe. Ils sont maintenant recueillis dans la base de données RELMIN dans leur langue originale et accompagnés de traductions, ainsi que de commentaires. Ces textes sont ainsi mis à disposition de la communauté scientifique, des étudiants et des citoyens partout dans le monde, librement et de manière pérenne.
RELMIN collects, studies and publishes legal texts defining the status of religious minorities in medieval Europe. Rich and varied, the corpus covers ten centuries and extends over a wide geographical area; Written in Latin, Arabic, Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic (as well as Spanish, Portuguese, and other European vernacular languages), these texts are currently scattered in libraries and archives throughout Europe. They are now collected in the RELMIN database in their original language and accompanied by translations and comments. These texts are thus made available to the scientific community, students and citizens around the world, freely and permanently.
The Repertorium is a free German-language reference work for the history of the German Middle Ages from about 750-1500. It provides a large catalog of authors and works who discuss the history of the region that is today German. Entries frequently provide links to digitized manuscripts and texts on external websites when available. There are also a number of tags to sort entries, including by lists of saints and places in addition to a search function. An English version of the site can be accessed here: https://geschichtsquellen.de/start?s=en
Restoring Lost Songs is a Cambridge University project to reconstruct the music accompanying Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy. Though it is understood that early medieval composers set music to Boethius’ lyrics, it remains unclear what the melody of those performance sounded like due to the notation systems used. The project seeks to offer possible restorations of the music in text and performance. On the platform, one may find a list of medieval manuscripts containing notated versions of the Consolation in addition to links to repositories and sometimes images of the manuscript. Additionally, a user may search by song to find in which manuscripts it appears.
The project has also published scores in modern notation of possible restorations of some of the lyrics. Additionally, the project offers numerous essays on topics from instruments and notation, to performance practices. Finally, the platform offers numerous video and audio recordings of their restorations in performance in addition to teaching materials. The site is occasionally updated as of 2020.
RIALFri (Computerized Repository of Ancient Franco-Italian Literature) is a project that aims to bring together the corpus Franco-Italian literature found in the north of Italy and south of France from the 13th to 15th centuries. The project presents texts, images of manuscripts, and lists of manuscripts containing examples of the linguistically mixed style. The project also includes a dictionary of Franco-Italian.
On this website you can hear, chant by chant, the whole early repertory of Gregorian chant, the standard repertory of nearly six hundred chants for the Propers of the Roman Mass. This is a study edition for enjoying and comparing recorded solo performances by Richard Crocker and three or four friends, of Gregorian chant sung according to current tradition updated with the results of current research on the earliest medieval notation.
The Rijmkroniek van Holland [Verse chronicle of Holland. Trans.] is an important source of information on the history of Holland during the latter half of the thirteenth century and the beginning of the fourteenth century. This was a turbulent time for the province, marked by events such as the violent death of Count Floris V in 1296 and the transition from the House of Holland to the House of Hainault at the end of 1299. These events were followed by years of local feuding and a war with Flanders, which came to a head on 10 August 1304 with a naval battle on the Gouwe. Moreover, in its capacity as one of the earliest historiographic works in the Dutch language, the chronicle is an important research tool for scholars of Middle Dutch.
The Rijmkroniek, as it has been handed down through the ages, evolved in several consecutive stages. In 1280-1282 an anonymous author employed at the court of Count Floris V wrote a chronicle in verse form about the earliest history of Holland up to 1205. In 1301-1302 and during, or shortly after, 1305 Melis Stoke, clerk to Count Jan II and Count Willem III, produced a sequel to the first chronicle, in which he presents a colourful and engaging account of the events that took place after 1205. This version of the Rijmkroniek was revised subsequently by Stoke himself.
The online edition presented here contains images of all the manuscripts and fragments in which the Rijmkroniek has been handed down. These images, which can be accessed via the list of contents are accompanied by a diplomatic transcript containing palaeographic remarks. It is also possible to place transcripts of different manuscripts and fragments side by side on the screen to compare them with each other. The search facility makes it possible to go to any numbered line in addition to browsing through the Rijmkroniek for a single word or combination of words, as well as via an index of names.
A searchable catalog of digitized manuscripts containing the Roman de la Rose, an allegorical love poem in the form of a dream vision composed in Old French in the 13th century. The current collection of 130 manuscripts (of an estimated 320 total) may be browsed by repository, shelf mark, date, origin, or illustrations, allowing cross-manuscript comparison of illustrations and sections of text. Much of the data downloadable in .csv format.
* National History Day Selected Resource *
Genealogies have been constructed and used for hundreds of years to help families understand their ancestry and more recently to help scholars understand the relationships between medieval people and families. The Rusian genealogical database offers an update on this traditional discipline. The research underlying this database is new and is built on the primary sources in Old East Slavic, Latin, Greek, and Old Norse, as well as a thorough reading and understanding of the modern secondary literature. That information is then accessed through an XML database that allows the user to search through the variety of information presented here, including parentage, regnal dates, place of rule, and other data points. The end result is the most accurate genealogy of Rus′ yet developed, presented in an accessible and intuitive way for use by scholars, students, and others.
Saints in Scottish Place-Names is a research project published by the University of Glasgow that seeks to catalog all the place names in Scotland derived from saints. The majority of the over 13,000 place names cataloged derive from the medieval period and from the many historical languages of Scotland, including Norse, Scots, Latin, and Gaelic. Users are able to search by either place name or saint’s name in addition to a more robust advanced search. Further, users may view a list of places and saints. Individual entries include the place-name, saint, and the source that first lists the place-name. The project also provides a map on which users may see the hagiotoponyms overlaid.
All information on the site is provided free of charge with citation.
The SDBM continuously aggregates and updates observations of pre-modern manuscripts drawn from over 13,000 auction and sales catalogs, inventories, catalogs from institutional and private collections, and other sources that document sales and locations of these books from around the world. It may be searched or browsed by author, title, seller, provenance, date, and others, and the datasets may also be downloaded in .xlsx or .csv format. Members of our user community are invited to log in and help us to build, maintain, and improve this resource.
Read More →
Provides a digital reconstruction of the 9th-century libraries of the monasteries of Reichenau and St. Gall, including manuscript images, codicological descriptions bibliography, and virtual exhibitions of selections from the library. Also includes a high-resolution image of the Plan of St. Gall (Codex Sangallensis 1092) a detailed plan of the monastery complex, along with a modern diagram and a number of modern 2D and 3D models. [note: this site is no longer updated and has been archived]
Read More →
This site aims to be a comprehensive annotated bibliography of open-access resources related to the study of Syriac. The primary goal of Syri.ac is to make research on Syriac literature, history, and culture as painless and direct as possible. The annotated bibliographies can be accessed through the list of authors and themes at the top right of the page (or through a dropdown menu on mobile devices). Each page offers direct links to editions and translations of the texts referenced. Our intention is to collate in one place a world-class scholarly library that can be accessed completely through the web.
Other tools for Syriac research are also available through the menu at the top of the page. The most significant is our database of Syriac manuscripts available in digitized form. The database is searchable and offers direct links to manuscripts, even specific folios of manuscripts, so that students and scholars can quickly consult high-quality images of physical Syriac texts online.
The TEAMS Middle English Texts are published for TEAMS (The Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages) in association with the University of Rochester by Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Michigan. The General Editor of the series is Russell Peck of the University of Rochester. The texts are made available here by permission of the Executive Committee of TEAMS and The Medieval Institute at Western Michigan University.
The goal of the TEAMS Middle English text series is to make available to teachers and students texts which occupy an important place in the literary and cultural canon but which have not been readily available in student editions.
The focus is upon literature adjacent to that normally in print, which teachers need in compiling the syllabi they wish to teach. The editions maintain the linguistic integrity of the original works but within the parameters of modern reading conventions.
We are grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities for its generous support in creating and maintaining this site.
* National History Day Selected Resource *
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.
Bwriad y prosiect yw digido rhyddiaith Gymraeg o’r llawysgrifau rhwng cyfnod y prosiect Rhyddiaith Gymraeg 1300–1425 a chyfnod y prosiect Corpws Hanesyddol yr Iaith Gymraeg 1500-1850
The project aims to digitise Middle Welsh prose manuscripts in the period between the project Welsh Prose 1300–1425 and the period of the project A Historical Corpus of the Welsh Language 1500-1850
