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British Library manuscripts

A database of manuscripts digitized by the British Library; see the website for the full range of its archival collection.

British Museum Collections Online

Searchable database of tens of thousands of images and records of objects in the British Museum collection, spanning thousands of years and from all across the world.

* National History Day Selected Resource *

Cahiers de Fanjeaux

Provides summaries of the annual conference proceedings of Le Centre d’Etudes Historiques de Fanjeaux, dedicated to exploring the medieval religious culture of Languedoc. The site lists the conference proceedings (volumes 1/1966 – 49/2014) including table of contents, as well as abstracts in French for the articles in volumes 29-49. The Cahiers may also be browsed by author.

CORSAIR Online Collection Catalog (The Morgan Library & Museum)

Named after Pierpont Morgan’s yacht, CORSAIR is a single database providing unified access to over 250,000 records for medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, rare and reference books, literary and historical manuscripts, music scores, ancient seals and tablets, drawings, prints, and other art objects. Records continue to be added for the balance of the collection as well as for new acquisitions.

The depth of detail is unusual for an online catalog. Many records include summaries of the content of individual letters, lengthy notes about provenance, and detailed descriptions of bindings. Specialized indexes enable researchers to find all of the Morgan’s holdings associated with a given name, date, or place. For example, with a single search a scholar interested in Dickens can find records for manuscripts and letters in the author’s hand, early printed editions of his novels, original illustrations, photographs, and personal possessions such as Dickens’ ink pot and cigar case.

CORSAIR also serves as the gateway to one of the largest repositories of medieval images on the Internet, providing access to more than 57,000 digitized images from the Morgan’s collection of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts. Users may page through every illustrated leaf within a manuscript, or search for individual images by place or date of creation, artist’s name, illustration type, and subject. The images and descriptions may be accessed directly through CORSAIR, or by visiting Images from Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts.

Creation of the Gothic

Creation of the Gothic is a project that presents all 1600 churches from the Limestone Basin region of France and seeks to explore the beginnings of the Gothic style in the region prior to 1250. Each church is listed individually with most containing images of the church as a whole and sometimes images of the details of the architectural features. The website is free to use.

Digital Dante

A collection of online texts and resources pertaining to the Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, hosted by Columbia University’s Department of Italian and its Center for Digital Research and Scholarship. 

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Digital Vatican Library (DVL)

DigiVatLib is a digital library service. It provides free access to the Vatican Library’s digitized collections: manuscripts, incunabula, archival materials and inventories as well as graphic materials, coins and medals, printed materials (special projects).

DMMmaps

An interactive map of more than 500 libraries holding digitized medieval manuscripts that may be browsed for free, providing a portal to the individual institutions.

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Documentary Archaeology of Late Medieval Europe (DALME)

The Documentary Archaeology of Late Medieval Europe project consists of over 500 records of material culture relating to late medieval Europe. Records include household inventories, wills, descriptions, and sometimes the items themselves. The site is frequently updated with objects and lists of the month, which include essays on a variety of objects from around Europe.

The project seeks guest collaborators and discuss objects.

Duke Wired

The Duke Wired! Lab conducts projects allowing the visualization of data on material culture and urban history, including student-generated projects as well as workshops and tutorials.

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Dumbarton Oaks

Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection is the legacy of Robert and Mildred Woods Bliss to Harvard University and to the humanities. The multiple aspects of the Blisses’ gift include historic gardens and buildings, world-class collections for researchers and the public to enjoy, and generous support for fellowships and scholarly endeavors on the local, national, and international levels.

Our mission is, first, to maintain what we have been entrusted by the Blisses to preserve. Second, to support the pursuit of the humanities as a whole, with particular focus on the disciplines of Byzantine, Pre-Columbian, and Garden and Landscape Studies. Third, to honor the intention of the donors by achieving the greatest mutual advantage between Harvard and Dumbarton Oaks. Fourth, to serve the larger public through the museum, garden, and Friends of Music.

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).

 

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.

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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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.

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 *

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.

Mapping Gothic France

With a database of images, texts, charts and historical maps, Mapping Gothic France invites you to explore the parallel stories of Gothic architecture and the formation of France in the 12th and 13th centuries, considered in three dimensions: space, time, and narrative.

* National History Day Selected Resource *

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.

Medieval Bestiary

This web site deals with any and all aspects of the general topic “animals in the Middle Ages”, though there is an emphasis on the manuscript tradition, particularly of the bestiaries, and mostly in western Europe. The subject is vast, so this a large site, with well over 3000 pages, and perhaps the best way to explore it is to just wander around. The various pages making up the site are extensively linked; any text appearing in this blue color is a link (except for that one!). You can also click the green arrows at the top and bottom of each page; these will take you from one section to the next, or to the next page in a series. If you get lost, click the  button on any page to return to the table of contents. If you are interested in bestiary manuscripts, start wil the section on the manuscript families, which will link you to various other pages of interest. If you want to learn about a particular animal, start with the Beasts pages. If you are looking for something in particular, try the site search. For more help in navigating the site, click the green  on any page.

Informal articles, opinionated reviews, and irreverent comments on the bestiary genre can be found in the bestiary blog, Chimaera.

 

(Please note: this resource has not been updated since 2011, including the bibliography)