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.
Ongoing project to collect Latin texts written in Italy during the Middle Ages. The holdings are divided between literary (e.g. hagiography, philosophy, sermons, chronicles) and documentary (e.g. town statutes, papal bulls) works, and can be searched or browsed by period, location, author, genre, prose, or verse. Each item includes the edition from which the text was taken, and preserves original pagination.
The Project for American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language (ARTFL) provides a collection of searchable databases of French language texts from the Middle Ages to the present.
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The BVMM is a French-language resource that serves as a clearing house for images and data on medieval manuscripts held in institutions in Europe. Institutions range from municipal libraries and religious houses up to major research and university libraries across continental Europe. Images can sometimes be from microfilm, black and white, or in full color.
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 *
Resources on the life and work of Cassiodorus, including full text of James J. O’Donnell’s Cassiodorus (UC-Berkeley, 1979), as well as Cassiodorus’ De anima, Institutiones books 1 and 2, and Variae. Also included are the Instituta of Junillus, Quaestor at Constantinople and Cassiodorus’ contemporary, and Jordanes’ Getica, an abridged version of Cassiodorus’ lost Gothic History.
* National History Day Selected Resource *
Provides a searchable corpus of over 1500 digitized Irish literary and historical texts available to read or use online as HTML, XML, or SGML, and some of which may also be downloaded in .pdf format.
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Cette base de données présente le texte, et bientôt les reproductions photographiques, de l’ensemble des chartes originales antérieures à 1121 conservées en France. (This database presents the texts, and sometimes photographic reproductions, of the corpus of original charters preserved in France predating the year 1121.)
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.
An searchable image database of selections from medieval and Renaissance manuscripts that unites scattered resources from many institutions into an international tool for teaching and scholarly research.
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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.
“England’s Immigrants 1330-1550” is a fully-searchable database containing over 64,000 names of people known to have migrated to England during the period of the Hundred Years’ War and the Black Death, the Wars of the Roses and the Reformation.
The information within this database has been drawn from a variety of published and un-published records – taxation assessments, letters of denization and protection, and a variety of other licences and grants – and offers a valuable resource for anyone interested in the origins, destinations, occupations and identities of the people who chose to make England their home during this turbulent period.
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.”
The Internet Medieval Sourcebook is useful primarily as a source for short extracts, derived from public domain sources or copy-permitted translations, to be used for teaching (particularly for medieval survey courses). Also included are some complete documents, notably saints’ lives, or links to the full documents. The editor states that the early aim was to include a wide range of texts which address elite governmental, legal, religious and economic concerns. The resources now also include a large selection of texts on women’s and gender history, Islamic and Byzantine history, Jewish history, and social history. The texts, again according to the editor’s own statement, vary in quality, and do not always represent the best or most modern translation.
* National History Day Selected Resource *
The result of a project to centralize the digital cataloging of medieval manuscripts held in German libraries, this German-language site offers a searchable database of those manuscripts, some of which are also digitized.
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The Soldier in Medieval England originated from a major project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). This Research Grant was worth just under £500,000 and was awarded jointly to Professor Adrian Bell of the Henley Business School and Professor Anne Curry of the University of Southampton to challenge assumptions about the emergence of professional soldiery between 1369 and 1453. The original project ran from 1/10/2006 – 30/9/2009 and the team was made up of Adrian, Anne and Dr Andy King, Dr David Simpkin and Dr Adam Chapman (who completed his PhD during the course of the activity).
Since the end of the official project we have continuously developed this sustainable website and its searchable database. We have welcomed our many interactions with colleagues, academics and ‘citizen’ historians and now host a number of soldier profiles resulting from this use of our datasets.
In the Summer of 2016, working with Dr Aleksandr Lobanov we refreshed the website and database following feedback from users. We look forward to continuing our conversations with all those who value this resource as we do.
Our database contains the names of soldiers serving the English crown between 1369 and 1453. Most were fighting the French. In this second phase of the Hundred Years War major invasions of France were launched, including that of 1415 which culminated in Henry V’s victory at Agincourt 1415. We have also included soldiers serving in other theatres (Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Spain, Calais etc), and in all types of service (expeditions on land and sea, garrisons, escorts, standing forces).
Why do we know so many names? The simple explanation is that soldiers received pay and this had to be audited. The financial officials of the crown were keen to check the soldiers were present and correct. The main way of doing this was by checking off their names at a muster, at the beginning of a campaign or during it, or every few months for troops in garrison. Thousands of muster rolls survive in archive collections in England, France and beyond. We also have the evidence of letters of protection which soldiers bought from the Chancery to prevent legal actions whilst they were absent from home.
Ongoing collection of texts (primary and secondary, in original and translation) and images of art and architecture related to religious women in medieval Europe.
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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.
Narrative Sources aims to offer an exhaustive and critical survey of all the narrative sources originating from the medieval Low Countries. The database is intended to inventory all texts which describe the past in a narrative way: annals, chronicles, letters, diaries, poems, saint’s lives, genealogies etc. Narrative Sources covers present day Belgium and the Netherlands as well as those areas which belonged historically to the Low Countries but are part now of France (French Flanders, French Hainault) or Germany (East Frisia, the northern Rhineland). The texts inventoried in Narrative Sources date from the sixth to the first half of the sixteenth century.
Searchable annotated bibliography of over 5000 modern print and online editions of medieval primary sources, intended for a broad audience including high school and college level instructors as well as more advanced scholars or enthusiasts.
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