Bloomsbury Medieval Studies is a subscription-based platform that provides a number of sources for the study of the Middle Ages across the globe and within all subperiods. Among the resources is the Encyclopedia of the Global Middle Ages, over 200 ebooks on a variety of topics, images of digitized primary sources including manuscripts and incunables, and research and learning tools.
Archives
Chinese Text Project
The Chinese Text Project is an open-access digital library whose goal is to make available a wide variety of Chinese texts from ancient periods. Though the site focuses on ancient texts in particular, texts from the Tang, Song, and Ming dynasties are well represented as well. Texts are generally taken from open-source documents published elsewhere on the internet, but there are also original transcriptions as well.
The CTP also brings together a variety of resources for the study of ancient Chinese texts, including dictionaries, bibliographies, and other resources. There is also an active discussion board where questions of transcription and translation are frequently asked. The site continues to be updated regularly.
Decretum Gratiani
The Decretum Gratiani project sets as its goal the creation of an edition of Gratian’s Decretum. Though it is unclear whether the final edition will be digital or on paper, the project as of 2020 provides a PDF of a draft of the text with caveats for its use. There is also a list of manuscript sigla of the Decretum that link to outside repositories. However, many of the links in this list and elsewhere on the site are broken.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Matthew Paris’s Clickable Map: An Interactive Claudius Map
“This project presents an annotated copy of Matthew Paris’s c. 1250 map of Britain (BL Cotton MS Claudius D VI), made using Omeka’s Neatline extension.”
The annotated map is clickable with annotations that include text, images from medieval manuscripts, and sometimes modern photographs of locations depicted in Paris’s maps.
Piers Plowman Electronic Archive
Published by the Society for Early English and Norse Electronic Texts (SEENET), the Piers Plowman Electronic Archive is a collaborative, peer-reviewed, and open-source web platform for the study of the texts and manuscripts of the late Middle English poem, Piers Plowman. Piers Plowman is a poem rich in versions and variants, and the project sets as its goal the publication of digital editions of each of the over 50 manuscript witnesses to the poem. Thus far it has published eight manuscripts in addition to the a reconstructed digital edition of the archetype of the B text of the poem. Many other manuscript witnesses are in the process of being edited as of 2020.
Each manuscript’s edition displays the text and material features of the manuscript along with the images from that manuscript. Users can also compare the text of individual manuscripts to the edited version of the text, making the platform particularly useful for comparing variant readings. Users will also find teaching materials for Piers Plowman along with an extensive bibliography on textual and manuscript studies as they relate to the poem.
Though image copyrights are held by institutions, the edited editions are open for use with citation. The source code and markup for the Archive is also downloadable.
Regesta Imperii
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).
Restoring Lost Songs: Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy
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.
Rijmkroniek van Holland (366-1305)
The “Rhyme Chronicle of Holland” project presents downloadable images of all known fragments and manuscripts of the text. The Chronicle is an important document in the history of 13th-century and 14th-century Holland.
The website is presented in Dutch with English translations available for most pages.
The Canterbury Roll – A Digital Edition
The Canterbury Roll is a 15th-century, hand-written genealogy that begins with Noah and traces the rulers of England from the mythical Brutus to King Edward IV. The genealogy is accompanied by an extensive commentary in Latin. The five-metre long manuscript roll was purchased by the University of Canterbury, Aotearoa New Zealand in 1918 from a local family of British descent. The key products of the first stage of the Canterbury Roll Project are a new digital transcription and translation, both of which have been mapped to a high quality digital facsimile of the Roll. The ongoing project is a partnership between UC History, the UC Arts Digital Lab, the UC internship programme, the Collaborative Research Centre 933 of Heidelberg University, and Nottingham Trent University (UK).
The Romaunt of the Rose
The Romaunt of the Rose project provides images and a side-by-side transcription of the Romance of the Rose from the University of Glasgow’s MS Hunter 409. The project also contains images of the library’s William Thynne’s 1532 edition of the Romance. Additionally, the website provides a description of the manuscript and a brief discussion of the text of the poem.
Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum
The Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum is a database of digitized medieval Latin texts on the topic of music, broadly imagined. Housed at the University of Indiana, the project transcribes and digitizes texts on all topics related to medieval music from the 5th to 17th centuries and provides a database to house them. A user may search by title, author, topic, century, and numerous other qualities. Each text entry offers a brief synopsis and bibliography, including manuscripts in which the text appears.
The TML clearly outlines their transcription policies and provides all their material for free via a Creative Commons license.