Project Gutenberg, first begun in the 1970s, aims to provide free access to reading materials via the internet. The project currently includes over 50,000 open-access works, covering multiple subjects and representative of many time periods. Some of the works will be of interest to medievalists; editions of the Divine Comedy can be found in Italian on the site, for example, and other works of potential interest, both primary and secondary, are certainly to be found within the large collection. However, both the search and browse functions are outdated given current search engines. Even given the large number of volumes included, medieval works are more sparse than one might desire for inclusion in the MDR.
Archives
REFRAIN
Registers van de Hollandse grafelijkheid 1299-1345
The “Registers of the Counts of Holland, 1299-1345” contains over 3500 digitized charters from Holland in this period. The site is fully keyword searchable and includes a list of documents one can view based on time and place. The website is in Dutch with English translation for some pages.
This project offers online diplomatic transcriptions of the texts of charters as recorded in a number of registers of the counts of Holland, now hold at the Dutch national archives, the Nationaal Archief, The Hague. There are also archival descriptions of these registers, and itineraries of the counts between 1395 and 1400 as reconstructed from these registers are presented, too. These registers can rightly been viewed as cartularies.
RIALFrI
RIALFri (Computerized Repository of Ancient Franco-Italian Literature) is a project that aims to bring together the corpus Franco-Italian literature found in the north of Italy and south of France from the 13th to 15th centuries. The project presents texts, images of manuscripts, and lists of manuscripts containing examples of the linguistically mixed style. The project also includes a dictionary of Franco-Italian.
Rijmkroniek van Holland (366-1305)
The Rijmkroniek van Holland [Verse chronicle of Holland. Trans.] is an important source of information on the history of Holland during the latter half of the thirteenth century and the beginning of the fourteenth century. This was a turbulent time for the province, marked by events such as the violent death of Count Floris V in 1296 and the transition from the House of Holland to the House of Hainault at the end of 1299. These events were followed by years of local feuding and a war with Flanders, which came to a head on 10 August 1304 with a naval battle on the Gouwe. Moreover, in its capacity as one of the earliest historiographic works in the Dutch language, the chronicle is an important research tool for scholars of Middle Dutch.
The Rijmkroniek, as it has been handed down through the ages, evolved in several consecutive stages. In 1280-1282 an anonymous author employed at the court of Count Floris V wrote a chronicle in verse form about the earliest history of Holland up to 1205. In 1301-1302 and during, or shortly after, 1305 Melis Stoke, clerk to Count Jan II and Count Willem III, produced a sequel to the first chronicle, in which he presents a colourful and engaging account of the events that took place after 1205. This version of the Rijmkroniek was revised subsequently by Stoke himself.
The online edition presented here contains images of all the manuscripts and fragments in which the Rijmkroniek has been handed down. These images, which can be accessed via the list of contents are accompanied by a diplomatic transcript containing palaeographic remarks. It is also possible to place transcripts of different manuscripts and fragments side by side on the screen to compare them with each other. The search facility makes it possible to go to any numbered line in addition to browsing through the Rijmkroniek for a single word or combination of words, as well as via an index of names.
Roman de la Rose Digital Library
A searchable catalog of digitized manuscripts containing the Roman de la Rose, an allegorical love poem in the form of a dream vision composed in Old French in the 13th century. The current collection of 130 manuscripts (of an estimated 320 total) may be browsed by repository, shelf mark, date, origin, or illustrations, allowing cross-manuscript comparison of illustrations and sections of text. Much of the data downloadable in .csv format.
* National History Day Selected Resource *
Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts
The SDBM continuously aggregates and updates observations of pre-modern manuscripts drawn from over 13,000 auction and sales catalogs, inventories, catalogs from institutional and private collections, and other sources that document sales and locations of these books from around the world. It may be searched or browsed by author, title, seller, provenance, date, and others, and the datasets may also be downloaded in .xlsx or .csv format. Members of our user community are invited to log in and help us to build, maintain, and improve this resource.
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St. Catherine’s Monastery, Sinai
Offers a description and photos of St. Catherine’s Monastery on Mount Sinai, as well as images of some of its architecture, icons, mosaics, murals, engraving, metalwork, woodcarving, embroidery, and manuscripts, including the partial Codex Sinaiticus. Also includes a bibliography of publications by the Mount Sinai Foundation.
St. Gall Project
Provides a digital reconstruction of the 9th-century libraries of the monasteries of Reichenau and St. Gall, including manuscript images, codicological descriptions bibliography, and virtual exhibitions of selections from the library. Also includes a high-resolution image of the Plan of St. Gall (Codex Sangallensis 1092) a detailed plan of the monastery complex, along with a modern diagram and a number of modern 2D and 3D models. [note: this site is no longer updated and has been archived]
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Syri.ac
This site aims to be a comprehensive annotated bibliography of open-access resources related to the study of Syriac. The primary goal of Syri.ac is to make research on Syriac literature, history, and culture as painless and direct as possible. The annotated bibliographies can be accessed through the list of authors and themes at the top right of the page (or through a dropdown menu on mobile devices). Each page offers direct links to editions and translations of the texts referenced. Our intention is to collate in one place a world-class scholarly library that can be accessed completely through the web.
Other tools for Syriac research are also available through the menu at the top of the page. The most significant is our database of Syriac manuscripts available in digitized form. The database is searchable and offers direct links to manuscripts, even specific folios of manuscripts, so that students and scholars can quickly consult high-quality images of physical Syriac texts online.
TEAMS (Teaching Association for Medieval Studies)
TEAMS was originally founded as a committee of the Medieval Academy of America to develop new ways to support the teaching activities of its members. It was later re-organized as an independent nonprofit educational corporation whose mission continues to be the support of teaching in medieval studies at the undergraduate, secondary, and elementary school level through the provision of resources and the sharing of techniques.
Its current programs include the publication of TEAMS Teaching Texts in cooperation with Medieval Institute Publications, the maintenance of an online library of Middle English texts, and the establishment of a committee for outreach to secondary schools. It sponsors several sessions of papers at the annual International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University. TEAMS also publishes a peer-reviewed electronic journal, The Once and Future Classroom: Resources for Teaching the Middle Ages in Grades K-12, and sponsors an annual teaching prize to recognize excellence in teaching medieval studies in the K-12 classroom.
TELMA – Traitement electronique des manuscrits et des archives
L’objectif de TELMA est de mettre en ligne à la disposition de la communauté scientifique des corpus de sources primaires et les instruments de recherche nécessaires à leur exploitation. De ce fait, TELMA intègre deux types de corpus : des répertoires de ressources et des éditions critiques de sources manuscrites associées ou non à des images numérisées des documents.
The objective of TELMA is to make available to the scientific community a corpus of primary sources and research tools necessary for their exploitation. As a result, TELMA integrates two types of resources: databases and critical editions of handwritten sources with or without digitized images of documents.
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 Community of the Realm in Scotland 1249-1424
The Community of the Realm in Scotland 1249-1424 is an ongoing project hosted by King’s College, London that seeks to provide digital editions of important Scottish documents from the middle and later medieval period. The creators of the project have begun with the Declaration of Arbroath, a seminal document in the foundation of a community of the realm of Scotland, and Regiam Majestatem, the foundational legal document for the realm. Rather than privileging stemmatic editing and its search for an archetypal version of a text, the Community of the Realm’s edition of the Declaration allows a user to compare versions of the document as it appears in different manuscript witnesses. When in comparison mode, a user can view others’ annotations or make their own. Likewise, users can view the document in Latin or in an English translation for comparison.
The project does not limit itself to just its viewer. The creators envision the platform as providing a space for discussion of Scotland in the high Middle Ages and beyond. The site provides a biweekly podcast, an active blog, multimedia videos on the history of Scotland, and the XML data they have used to create the editions. The site is free to use for non-commercial purposes.
‘The Development of the Welsh Language (Datblygiad yr Iaith Gymraeg)’: Fifteenth-century prose
Bwriad y prosiect yw digido rhyddiaith Gymraeg o’r llawysgrifau rhwng cyfnod y prosiect Rhyddiaith Gymraeg 1300–1425 a chyfnod y prosiect Corpws Hanesyddol yr Iaith Gymraeg 1500-1850
The project aims to digitise Middle Welsh prose manuscripts in the period between the project Welsh Prose 1300–1425 and the period of the project A Historical Corpus of the Welsh Language 1500-1850
European Library
Provides access to the contents of 48 European national libraries as well as a number of research libraries such as Oxford University’s Bodleian Library, including catalog entries and some full-text content. The European Library also provides the basis for the Europeana portal, which provides links to digitized books, including many early printed books.
The International Collection of Digitized Hebrew Manuscripts
The International Collection of Digitized Hebrew Manuscripts is a resource that aggregates catalog entries and images of Hebrew manuscripts from repositories around the world. The project currently has entries for over 400,000 manuscripts of all types and genres from 123 collections; manuscripts in the collections comprise a wide range of medieval dates, from the 9th century to the 16th century. Data and images are pulled from the holding institution’s catalog. Thus, image and data quality varies among institutions. Entries are searchable by a number of qualities, including author, date, type of text, language, and many others. Links to the document’s holding institution are frequently present.
Holding institutions retain the copyright on data and images in the database and users must follow their guidelines for use. The Collection often provides links to holding institutions for copyright information.
Labyrinth: Resources for Medieval Studies
A collection of digital resources for medieval studies organized by category, including Art, Armor, Crusades, Gender, Manuscripts, and many others. The site may be browsed by category or searched, and each link is accompanied by a brief description of its contents.
* National History Day Selected Resource *
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.
Usuarium
vHMML (Virtual Hill Museum & Manuscript Library)
A collection of resources and tools for manuscript studies, including links to HMML manuscripts, pedagogical exercises, and research tools.
* National History Day Selected Resource *
Vocabulaire Codicologique
French-language site that provides a glossary of French codicological terms cross-referenced with their equivalents in English, Spanish, Italian, and German, based upon Denis Muzerelle’s print Vocabulaire Codicologique: répertoire méthodique des termes français relatifs au manuscrits (Paris, 1985). The English parts of the site are incomplete, but provide a (French) definition of terms and illustrations where applicable.
Published in 1985, Denis Muzarelle, Vocabulaire codicologique : répertoire méthodique des termes français relatifs aux manuscrits, Paris : Editions CEMI, 1985. (Rubricae, 1.), has proved to be a useful tool for anyone working with medieval manuscripts. This hypertext version reproduces an enhanced version of Muzerelle’s printed text, with the accompanying figures, accompanied by translations of the terms into Italian, Spanish, English, and German, the latter two still in progress. The nomenclature of script is not addressed, and the definitions are in French (although the terms are translated).
Wren Digital Library
The Wren Digital Library is the digital archive of the Wren Library at Trinity College, Cambridge. The Wren is home to over 1,000 medieval manuscripts from the 10th century onwards, of which the digital archive has published over 800 in addition to many early printed books and modern manuscripts. The ongoing project of the digital platform is to digitally publish all manuscripts in M.R. James’ 1901-1903 print catalog of the library’s holdings.
As of 2020, the library has no search function, but one can filter manuscripts by title, shelfmark, and date. Each entry includes catalog information in addition to a bibliography. Images are available in IIIF format and can be downloaded free of charge, though high-resolution images can only be obtained by contacting the repository.
York’s Archbishops’ Registers Revealed
From the creators: York’s Archbishops Registers Revealed provides free access to over 20,000 images of Registers produced by the Archbishops of York, 1225-1650, in addition to a growing searchable index of names, subjects, places and organisations. The registers are a valuable, and in many cases, unexploited source for ecclesiastical, political, social, local and family history – covering periods of war, famine, political strife and religious reformation in the Archdiocese of York and the wider Northern Province.
The site contains over 5000 entries cataloged and organized with subject headings, indexes, and searchable contents. The project also offers IIIF capability for its images.