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Archives

ALIM (Archivio della latinità italiana del Medioevo)

Ongoing project to collect Latin texts written in Italy during the Middle Ages. The holdings are divided between literary (e.g. hagiography, philosophy, sermons, chronicles) and documentary (e.g. town statutes, papal bulls) works, and can be searched or browsed by period, location, author, genre, prose, or verse. Each item includes the edition from which the text was taken, and preserves original pagination.

ARTFL Project

The Project for American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language (ARTFL) provides a collection of searchable databases of French language texts from the Middle Ages to the present.

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SfarData: The Codicological Data-Base of the Hebrew Palaeography Project

The goal of the project was to locate all the medieval codices written in the Hebrew script, which contained explicit production dates or at least scribe names; to study and document all their visual and measurable material features and scribal practices in situ, i.e. in the libraries in which they were kept; and classify these features and practices in order to expose a historical typology of the hand-produced Hebrew book and provide users of Hebrew manuscripts with a tool for identifying the production region and assessing the period of the studied manuscripts. Indeed, since the initiation of the project, almost all the dated manuscripts that were located have been studied and documented in some two hundred and fifty libraries and private collections.

Bibliotheca Latina: Latinitas Mediaevalis

A free digital library providing medieval Latin texts from the 7th to the 14th centuries in an alphabetical list (by author). It is part of the larger IntraText Library digital collection published by Èulogos SpA (http://www.eulogos.net), which includes, among other archives, Biblioteca Italiana and Biblioteca religiosa. Texts are harvested from other websites—not all academic–as well as print matter. Searchable across entire collection. Includes linked notes, concordances, lists, and statistics related to texts. Although BL texts are also searchable by author, title, or general period of origin, the site offers no editorial or contextual information. Published under Creative Commons.

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Bodleian Library Online Catalogues of Western Manuscripts

Includes descriptions of a portion of the Bodleian’s medieval holdings, providing shelfmark, summary of contents, language, origin, date, material, decoration (if any), and an image (.gif) of the Summary Catalog entry for each manuscript. Also provides many digitized versions of previously unpublished collection catalogs.

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British History Online

A digital library and index of primary and secondary sources and British and Irish history resources, which currently (Jan. 2016) contains material from over 1,250 printed volumes. Also provides  digitized versions of guides and calendars held at the National Archives at Kew, and historic maps, including the 19th-century Ordnance Survey. Augmented by scholarly born-digital resources like browsable datasets compiled from taxes, references to medieval market privileges, and central courts such as the Court of Common Pleas. Also includes useful subject guides to local, parliamentary, urban, and religious history with essays and bibliography. A small amount of content is restricted to subscription holders.

* National History Day Selected Resource *

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.

Cassiodorus

Resources on the life and work of Cassiodorus, including full text of James J. O’Donnell’s Cassiodorus (UC-Berkeley, 1979), as well as Cassiodorus’ De animaInstitutiones books 1 and 2, and Variae. Also included are the Instituta of Junillus, Quaestor at Constantinople and Cassiodorus’ contemporary, and Jordanes’ Getica, an abridged version of Cassiodorus’ lost Gothic History.

* National History Day Selected Resource *

CELT: Corpus of Electronic Texts

Provides a searchable corpus of over 1500 digitized Irish literary and historical texts available to read or use online as HTML, XML, or SGML, and some of which may also be downloaded in .pdf format.

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Chartes originales antérieures à 1121 conservées en France

Cette base de données présente le texte, et bientôt les reproductions photographiques, de l’ensemble des chartes originales antérieures à 1121 conservées en France. (This database presents the texts, and sometimes photographic reproductions, of the corpus of original charters preserved in France predating the year 1121.)

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 Scriptorium

An searchable image database of selections from medieval and Renaissance manuscripts that unites scattered resources from many institutions into an international tool for teaching and scholarly research.

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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).

Digitale Charterbank Nederland

The Digital Charterbank of the Netherlands is a portal for searching all charters held in Dutch archives. Though the repository does not include images, it does offer links to the holding institution and descriptions of the materials. The website is presented in Dutch only. When available entries about charters are linked to images. You can navigate also from each entry to the finding aid of holding institutions.

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.

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.

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).

 

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.