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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Archives
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.
Durham Priory Library Recreated
From the creators: The purpose of the project is to collect all information relating to the books of Durham Priory, manuscript and printed work inherited, given, bought or created by the monks of the Benedictine priory of Durham, its predecessors and cells.
As of 2020, the project has made available catalog descriptions and IIIF-compliant images of over 150 of the manuscripts associated with Durham Cathedral. Currently items are not searchable but are arranged by shelfmark. The project is regularly updated as has an active blog associated with it.
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.
EMT: Early Music Theory
Enluminures
La base Enluminures propose la consultation gratuite de plus de 120 000 images, sous forme de vignette et de plein écran, reproductions numériques des enluminures et éléments de décor de plus de 5 000 manuscrits médiévaux conservés dans une centaine de bibliothèques municipales françaises.
The Enluminures database offers free consultation of more than 120,000 images, in the form of a thumbnail and full-screen, digital reproductions of illuminations and decorative elements of more than 5,000 medieval manuscripts preserved in some 100 French municipal libraries.
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)
Gregorian Archive
The Gregorian Archive is primarily a collection of recorded solo performances of the nearly six hundred Gregorian melodies provided in the earliest manuscript sources for the chanted Propers of the Roman Mass.
Hebrew Fragments in Austria
A joint venture between the Austrian National Library, the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and the Institute for Jewish History in Austria, the Hebrew Fragments in Austria project provides images of Hebrew language fragments in Austrian manuscripts. The website functions in both English and German. There are over 500 images of fragments from over twenty repositories present in the database currently. Many of the fragments in the collection are contained in the bindings of other manuscripts and early printed books. Images are presented in JPG format and include catalog information. The projects also presents a list of the fragments arranged by text and manuscript.
The website for the project also includes a bibliography on the study of fragments generally and the study of fragments in Germanic countries specifically. Likewise, the website also presents a map of institutions in Austria holding fragments.
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.
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 *
Irish Script on Screen
The object of ISOS is to create digital images of Irish manuscripts, and to make these images – together with relevant commentary – accessible on a WWW site. The purpose of such a site is to provide an electronic resource which will:
- provide exposure on the internet for a vital part of Ireland’s cultural heritage.
- place these primary materials at the disposal of scholars and students.
- contribute to the conservation of these valuable books and documents by creating images of high-resolution detail which, generally speaking, will reduce the need to handle the artefacts themselves.
Italian Paleography
From the website:
The Italian Paleography website presents 102 Italian documents and manuscripts written between 1300 and 1700, with tools for deciphering them and learning about their social, cultural, and institutional settings. The site includes: digitized images of 102 manuscripts and documents; T-Pen, a digital tool to actively transcribe manuscripts and documents;
transcriptions and background essays for each item; a selection of calligraphy books and historical manuscript maps; a handbook of Italian vernacular scripts; additional resources, including a glossary, list of abbreviations and symbols, dictionaries, and teaching materials.
Iter: Gateway to the Middle Ages and Renaissance
Les ressources électroniques (Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes) [Electronic Resources: IRHT]
A collection of online resources for the study of manuscripts and archives.
Mandragore
Les collections de la Bibliothèque nationale de France abritent plusieurs dizaines de milliers de manuscrits dont le décor constitue l’un des plus riches musées de peinture au monde. Par leur grande variété et leur intérêt iconographique, ces images composent aussi une véritable encyclopédie visuelle de leur temps. En accroissement continu, Mandragore compte aujourd’hui plus de 170.000 notices analysant des œuvres conservées au Département des manuscrits et à la Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, et dont les plus anciennes remontent à l’Égypte pharaonique et les plus récentes à l’époque contemporaine. Leur indexation repose sur un vocabulaire de plus de 18.000 descripteurs.
The collections of the National Library of France house tens of thousands of manuscripts whose decoration comprises one of the richest painting collections in the world. Through their wide variety and iconographic interest, these images also make up a veritable visual encyclopedia of their time. Growing continuously, Mandragore now has over 170,000 records analyzing works held in the Department of Manuscripts and the Library of Arsenal, the oldest of which date back to Pharaonic Egypt and the most recent from modern times . Their indexing is based on a controlled vocabulary of more than 18,000 descriptors.
Manuscripta Mediaevalia
Manuscripts of Lichfield Cathedral
The Manuscripts of Lichfield Cathedral Project presents digital surrogates and bibliography on two medieval manuscripts held in Lichfield Cathedral: the 9th-century St. Chad’s Gospels and the 15th-century Wycliffite New Testament. The project offers both standard and multispectral imaging of the manuscripts, alongside RTI, or Reflectance Transformation Imaging for selected openings from the books.
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.
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.
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)