An online collection of nearly 4,700 secondary and primary works sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies, available with an institutional subscription. Individuals without a subscription may still view table of contents free of charge, and hundreds of books are added each year.
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 *
A database of manuscripts digitized by the British Library; see the website for the full range of its archival collection.
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 *
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.
Cantus Planus at the University of Regensburg presents a variety of tools and databases for the study of plainchant. The site offers a number of datafiles containing antiphons, responsories, and the texts of various liturgical books from across Europe. Likewise, the site presents databases for searching various aspects of the liturgy, including saints’ feasts or the type of liturgy used for a particular day. Likewise, the site contains search apparatus for notation as well as a number of bibliographies on chant.
The site is free to use, though it has not been recently updated.
Part of e-codices, the Virtual Manuscript Library of Switzerland, this site provides images and codicological descriptions of the medieval manuscripts contained at the Abbey Library of St. Gallen, Switzerland.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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).
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.
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:
The Glasgow Incunabula Project seeks to provide a catalog of the over 1000 incunabula in the University of Glasgow Library’s collections. The project provides multiple access points for the early printed materials. On the website, one can find lists of incunabula by authors, printers, dates, annotators, languages, prices, and multiple other qualities.
Most incunabula’s listings contain a detailed catalog entry and sometimes an accompanying image, all housed on Flickr. The project also has a blog that was active until 2017.