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Ad Fontes

Ad Fontes is a web platform designed to train students and scholars for medieval archival work. Administered through the University of Zurich, the project requires the user to register for a free account that then allows him or her to take modules on the use of archives. Numerous modules exist, including ones on transcription, coinage, heraldry, chronology, dating, and maps. Transcription and script training focuses on several languages, including medieval Latin, German, and Scandinavian languages among others. Transcription modules include quizzes that allow a user to test their progress.

The platform is continuously updated, with new modules added every few months.

Archivio Segreto Vaticano: The Papal Archives

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.

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Becerro Galicano Digital

Published by the University of the Basque Country, the Becerro Galicano Digital project provides a digital edition, facsimile, and downloadable data derived from the cartulary. The Becerro Galicano is an extensive cartulary from the monastery of San Millan de la Cogolla, which is situated in the Rioja area on the border between Navarre and Castille. The monastery played a large role in the history of large swathes of northern-central Spain (Navarre, Rioja, Basque Country, Castile), and the Becerro is one of the most important sources for the region’s history from the 8th century to the 13th century.

The digital project provides an image of each folio of the manuscript in addition to an accompanying critical text. The website also makes available a bibliography on the cartulary as well as a brief introduction to its importance. Data from the project, including the critical text and indices of names and places, can be downloaded in RTF and TEI format. The website is available in Spanish, English, and Basque.

SfarData: The Codicological Data-Base of the Hebrew Palaeography Project

The goal of the project was to locate all the medieval codices written in the Hebrew script, which contained explicit production dates or at least scribe names; to study and document all their visual and measurable material features and scribal practices in situ, i.e. in the libraries in which they were kept; and classify these features and practices in order to expose a historical typology of the hand-produced Hebrew book and provide users of Hebrew manuscripts with a tool for identifying the production region and assessing the period of the studied manuscripts. Indeed, since the initiation of the project, almost all the dated manuscripts that were located have been studied and documented in some two hundred and fifty libraries and private collections.

Biblissima

Bibliothèque virtuelle des bibliothèques, ce portail vous invite à découvrir l’histoire d’une partie des textes et livres qui ont été écrits, traduits, enluminés, collectionnés ou inventoriés depuis l’Antiquité jusqu’au XVIIIe siècle.

A virtual library of libraries, this portal invites you to discover the history of a portion of the texts and books  that were written, translated, illuminated, collected or catalogued from Antiquity to the eighteenth century.

Bloomsbury Medieval Studies

Bloomsbury Medieval Studies is a subscription-based platform that provides a number of sources for the study of the Middle Ages across the globe and within all subperiods. Among the resources is the Encyclopedia of the Global Middle Ages, over 200 ebooks on a variety of topics, images of digitized primary sources including manuscripts and incunables, and research and learning tools.

Cambridge Genizah Digital Collection

The Cambridge Genizah collection is one of the largest groups of medieval Jewish manuscript fragments in the world. Famously, Cambridge is the repository for most of the materials of the Cairo Genizah, which were brought there with the Jewish community’s permission in the early 20th century. Roughly 193,000 items from the Genizah are housed in the library today. The digital collections contain over 20,000 digitized and fully searchable items with downloadable metadata and a variety of image sizes in IIIF format. Further, Cambridge has encouraged community-driven metadata and allowed users to tag fragments with keywords, which has expanded search opportunities.

Cantus Index

Cantus Index is a catalogue of chant texts and melodies for Office and Mass. Multiple online medieval music databases have been connected together through unique “Cantus ID numbers”. Chant texts and melodies can be searched on this Cantus Index website, and matches in any of the partner databases will be returned.

CANTUS Network: libri ordinarii of the Salzburg metropolitan province

The research project CANTUS NETWORK, based at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, aims to investigate the records of Christian medieval worship that have survived in manuscript form and describe the practice of liturgical and musical acts of worship. The key sources for this transmission are the liturgical “prompt books”, called liber ordinarius, which include a short form of more or less the entire rite of a diocese or a monastery. Here, prayers, readings and chants are given as in abbreviated form as text incipits.
A liber ordinarius usually includes all information necessary for the church services of an individual institution (church, monastery) or a group (diocese, group of monasteries). On the one hand, this includes the incipits of chants, readings and prayers for the liturgy of the hours, for mass and for processions. On the other hand, it also includes rubrics that provide instructions on how and when particular liturgical actions should be carried out. In a third column, libri ordinarii may contain commentaries on the liturgy taken from standard contemporary works, providing additional information for particular feast days or a particular liturgical activity. A fourth column may provide the unlined neume notation of the chant incipits. When dealing with parts of ordinals, the neumes are the only proof of which piece of music is actually concerned. “Local colour” is created by the combination of the three or four columns, that is, the chant and recital text tradition, the rubrics and the explanations of the liturgy. [the site is in German with an English option]

Cantus Planus at University of Regensburg

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.

Celtic Digital Initiative

The aim of the Celtic Digital Initiative (CDI) is to make scarce resources available in an electronic format to students and scholars, both within UCC and beyond. This initiative has been jointly funded by the Department of Early and Medieval Irish and by the Quality Promotion Unit (from its Quality Improvement Fund) and is an ongoing project; material is continually added to the site as time and finances allow.

There are four major sections: Images (digitised pictures of interest to Celticists), Text Archive (links to PDF files of rare material), Celtic Noticeboard(an area devoted to announcements of forthcoming conferences, events, vacancies, publications etc.) and Celtic journals (tables of contents of Celtic Studies journals).

* National History Day Selected Resource *

Christine de Pizan

A collection of online resources about Christine de Pizan, including links to digitized manuscripts and incunabula, out-of-copyright modern editions of her work (in the original French as well as English translation), and scholarly societies, projects, and websites devoted to Christine.

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.

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.

Creation of Gothic

Creation of 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.

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.

Decretum Gratiani

The Decretum Gratiani project sets as its goal the creation of an edition of Gratian’s Decretum. Though it is unclear whether the final edition will be digital or on paper, the project as of 2020 provides a PDF of a draft of the text with caveats for its use. There is also a list of manuscript sigla of the Decretum that link to outside repositories. However, many of the links in this list and elsewhere on the site are broken.

DIAMM (the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music)

DIAMM (the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music) is a leading resource for the study of medieval manuscripts. We present images and metadata for thousands of manuscripts on this website. We also provide a home for scholarly resources and editions, undertake digital restoration of damaged manuscripts and documents, publish high-quality facsimiles, and offer our expertise as consultants.