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.
An informational site that provides descriptions of and guide to the holdings of the Archivio Segreto Vaticano (ASV) and its publications, including a history of the archive and procedures for consultation or requests for photographic or digital reproductions of any holdings. Descriptions of the major projects are accompanied by images of representative manuscripts. The downloadable guide lists the over 600 different collections, but not individual manuscripts of their contents.
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.
Searchable database of the manuscripts held at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in the Departement des Manuscrits and the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, some with links to digitized versions of the manuscripts. Database includes full descriptions of manuscripts and bibliographical information, as well as incipit and explicit.
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.
A searchable digital library of Christian texts in English translation, drawn from out- of-copyright editions. Texts are readable online, or downloadable as an ePUB, .pdf, or .txt. Each text also includes a brief summary and information about the author and edition. Searchable by title, author, scriptural passages, etc.., but not by date or period.
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.
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).
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.
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).
A database of the volumes of the Monumenta Germaniae Historia (MGH), a collection of meticulously edited primary sources for the study of the Middle Ages with an emphasis on the German lands. The database may be searched or browsed by the department, and the volumes (published 1826-2010) may be read online or downloaded as .pdfs.
A digitized version of volumes 1-217 of Migne’s Patrologia Latina, a collection of texts in Latin by church fathers, theologians, popes, councils, and many others from late antiquity through the high Middle Ages, indexed by volume. The texts, which are divided by author within each volume, may be read online or downloaded in .pdf format.
The REGESTA IMPERII (RI) records all documented and historiographically documented activities of Roman-German kings and emperors from the Carolingians to Maximilian I (about 751-1519) and the popes of the early and early Middle Ages in the form of German-speaking regesta. The website is a portal for the Commission on the regesta imperii, including links to the RI Opac (bibliographical search engine), electronic publications (work in progress editions and data collections), and the searchable RI database (chronological entries relating to imperial history from the Carolingian to the fifteenth century, based on the 80+ published volumes).
The Repertorium is a free German-language reference work for the history of the German Middle Ages from about 750-1500. It provides a large catalog of authors and works who discuss the history of the region that is today German. Entries frequently provide links to digitized manuscripts and texts on external websites when available. There are also a number of tags to sort entries, including by lists of saints and places in addition to a search function. An English version of the site can be accessed here: https://geschichtsquellen.de/start?s=en
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.