Skip to content

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.

Christine de Pizan Digital Scriptorium

The Christine de Pizan Digital Scriptorium is an ongoing project to make available digital surrogates of all the manuscripts of Christine de Pizan’s literary work. Currently, the project offers digital surrogates of 56 of the manuscripts of Christine de Pizan’s work, including all the manuscripts held in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Manuscripts are presented in a IIIF viewer.

Copyright to individual manuscripts and their images is retained by the institution that holds the material.

Collatex

CollateX is a software to

  1. read multiple (≥ 2) versions of a text, splitting each version into parts (tokens) to be compared,
  2. identify similarities of and differences between the versions (including moved/transposed segments) by aligning tokens, and
  3. output the alignment results in a variety of formats for further processing, for instance
  4. to support the production of a critical apparatusor the stemmatical analysis of a text’s genesis.

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.

Database of Byzantine Book Epigrams

The Database of Byzantine Book Epigrams is an ongoing project that seeks to compile all metrical poems in Byzantine manuscripts that self-reference the book in which they are found. The database currently has over 12,000 “occurrence” records that include the text of the epigrams and information on the manuscripts in which they are found. Occurrences are linked to “type” records that group identical or similar epigrams preserved in different manuscripts. There is a catalog searchable by occurrence, type, manuscripts, and people. There is also a substantial bibliography on Byzantine epigrams provided.

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).

Electronic Beowulf

The fourth edition of Electronic Beowulf 4.0 is a free, online version of Electronic Beowulf that supersedes all previous editions. The online edition is designed to meet the needs of general readers, who require a full, line by line, translation; of students, who want to understand the grammar and the meter and still have time in a semester to study and appreciate other important aspects of the poem; and of scholars, who want immediate access to a critical apparatus identifying the nearly 2000 eighteenth-century restorations, editorial emendations, and manuscript-based conjectural restorations.

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.

French of England

The French of England project provides a variety of resources for the study of French in England from the Norman Invasion into the early modern period. The site seeks to unseat typical chronological and geopolitical boundaries in showing that the French of England was a long-lasting and wide-ranging phenomenon.

The project provides resources, including: bibliographies, syllabuses, audio recordings of Anglo-French texts, some translations, and editions, as well as a list of links to other sites that approach the study of the language and cultures associated with the French of England.

Global Medieval Sourcebook

“The Global Medieval Sourcebook (GMS) is an open access teaching and research tool. It offers a flexible online display for the parallel viewing of medieval texts in their original language and in new English translations, complemented by new introductory materials.

The GMS spans one thousand years (600-1600) of literary production around the world. It contains short texts of broad interdisciplinary interest in a variety of genres, almost all of which have not previously been translated into English.”

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.

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.

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.

Manuscripts of the West Midlands

Manuscripts of the West Midlands is an online catalog of the vernacular manuscript books of the West Midlands from c. 1300 to 1475. Created by a team at the University of Birmingham (UK), the project presents catalog entries of around 150 manuscripts associated with the region. Catalog entries include information on the text contained within a manuscript in addition to the physical features of the manuscript and its shelfmark at the institution of which it is a part. Users may find lists of manuscripts by repository, title, people, and bindings. There is also a keyword search function as well as a means to search by IMEV number.

Mapping Metaphor: Metaphor Map of Old English

Mapping Metaphor is a project hosted by the University of Glasgow and represents the portion of the Mapping Metaphor project devoted particularly to the study of Old English. Deriving its data from the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, the project aims to provide useful data and data visualizations that map words and their usage as metaphors in Old English. The project presents over 70,000 metaphorical words in several visual formats. Users can also see which metaphorical words pair most frequently with a variety of statistical analyses.

The project has several tutorials and glossaries that teach a user how to use the database. Though the data itself is not available for download, the project includes several modes of searching its findings.

Medieval Nordic Text Archive

The Medieval Nordic Text Archive (Menota) is a digital repository for medieval texts from Nordic repositories. A user can navigate the repository in either English or Norwegian. A joint project among many libraries and universities across Scandinavia, Menota invites editors to submit medieval texts in the Nordic languages or Latin. All texts on the platform have been marked up in XML and users can select a variety of views, like diplomatic of facsimile. As of 2020, over 50 manuscripts have been digitally edited and the project is ongoing.

Beyond digital texts, the platform also provides a few translations of medieval texts, lexicographical resources, and links to some images of manuscripts in Nordic repositories. Menota makes its encoding practices clear in documents and handbooks available on the site. The XML of digital editions hosted on the platform are open-source and available for download.

Mittelalterliche Handschriften in Österreich / Medieval Manuscripts in Austria

Der Relaunch von manuscripta.at 2014 bietet neue Daten und Funktionalitäten, darunter:

  • einen Viewer für Digitalisate (Handschriften, ungedruckte Verzeichnisse und Materialien, Printpublikationen). Optional können die Digitalisate auch im DFG-Viewer betrachtet werden. Auf dislozierte Digitalisate wird verlinkt.
  • die direkte Verknüpfung der Handschrifteneinträge mit der “Bibliographie zu österreichischen Handschriften” (über den Link “Literatur zur Handschrift” oder “Weitere Literatur zur Handschrift”). Der direkte Zugang zur Bibliographie erfolgt über das Menü links (“Bibliographie”). Der Menüpunkt “Kataloge” erstellt eine gesonderte Liste der Handschriftenkataloge, geordnet nach Bibliotheksorten.
  • verbesserte Suchfunktionen, etwa die Schnellsuche nach einer bestimmten Handschrift über Ort/Bibliothek und Signatur (Teil von Signatur).

manuscripta.at soll nach und nach zum zentralen Nachweis- und Rechercheinstrument für mittelalterliche Handschriften in Österreich ausgebaut werden.

The relaunch of manuscripta.at in 2014 offers new data and functionality, including:

  • a viewer for digital images (manuscripts, unpublished directories and materials, print publications).
  • the direct linking of manuscript entries to the “Bibliography on Austrian Manuscripts” (via the link “Literatur zur Handschrift” or “Weitere Literatur zur Handschrift”). Direct access to the bibliography is via the menu on the left (“Bibliography”). The menu item “Catalogs” creates a separate list of manuscript catalogs, sorted by library type.
  • improved search functions, such as the quick search for a specific manuscripts by location / library and signature (part of signature).

manuscripta.at will continue to be developed into the central evidence- and research-tool for medieval manuscripts in Austria.

Narrative Sources

Narrative Sources aims to offer an exhaustive and critical survey of all the narrative sources originating from the medieval Low Countries. The database is intended to inventory all texts which describe the past in a narrative way: annals, chronicles, letters, diaries, poems, saint’s lives, genealogies etc. Narrative Sources covers present day Belgium and the Netherlands as well as those areas which belonged historically to the Low Countries but are part now of France (French Flanders, French Hainault) or Germany (East Frisia, the northern Rhineland). The texts inventoried in Narrative Sources date from the sixth to the first half of the sixteenth century.

Old English Newsletter Bibliography Database

Compiled by Roy Liuzza at the University of Tennessee, the OEN Bibliography Database is a searchable catalog of the annual Old English Newsletter bibliography, published annually from 1973 to 2009. Once users have registered for a free account, they can search the newsletters’ over 23,000 entries for topics related to the study of Old English. Each entry includes publication information for articles, books, and digital projects. Users may also search by topic, date, or subject. The database is no longer updated, but is a useful resource for scholars and students of early English history, literature, and cultures.

Oxford Cantigas de Santa Maria Database

The Oxford Cantigas de Santa Maria project is a platform containing numerous resources for the study of the 13th-century poems and their musical notation. The 429 poems of the Cantigas are each given an entry and within each entry one can find a synopsis of the poem, description of the miniature, a list of associated miracles, and a bibliography for that poem. Sometimes the poems will have linked recordings of their performance. The project also provides a fully searchable database of the qualities of the Cantigas so that one may search by a number of features, like the miracles, narrative, keywords, or manuscript. Likewise, the website presents an extensive bibliography of work on the poems. The project does not have the rights to reproduce the images of the manuscripts but can provide information on how to access and use them.

PhiloBiblon

PhiloBiblon is a free internet-based bio-bibliographical database of texts written in the various Romance vernaculars of the Iberian Peninsula during the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period. It includes the primary sources of those texts, both manuscript and printed, the individuals involved with the production and transmission of those sources and texts, and the libraries holding them, along with relevant secondary references and authority files for persons, places, and institutions.

Notes from reviewer:

PhiloBiblon combines a search of four online bibliographies of the Iberian Peninsula during the Middle Ages. As noted on the site, “There has been little concerted attempt to coordinate data among the four teams. Discrepancies will be found, for example, in the titles of texts originally written in Latin and in the names of individuals. In the case of translations from one Iberian language into another, however, the team describing the translated text tends to defer to the expertise of the team dealing with the original. There has been no systematic attempt to copy all of the information from the authority files of one bibliography into those of another.” This may make the resource confusing for inexperienced users.