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.
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 *
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.
The Historical Atlas of the Low Countries includes GIS datasets that represent various areas of the low countries including Brabant, Holland, Zeeland, Hainaut, Artois and others. The sets are made freely available for download and use under a Creative Commons license.
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 14th century travel book and geography, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville provides readers with a fantastical tale of a man’s (supposed) journey from England to the farthest edges of the world. Sir John, the books’ narrator, tells stories of the sanctity of the Holy Land, of the wickedness of distant pagans peoples, and amazing and monstrous races that inhabit the corners of the globe. Taken as a whole, Mandeville’s book offers a remarkable insight into medieval ideas about geography, and about the way that the world was put together.
This project seeks to combine Mandeville’s text with one of the largest and most famous of the mappaemundi — the Hereford Map — in an attempt to use the two media together to make them more individually comprehensible. Using a legible copy of the Hereford map, I have annotated numerous locations on the map that also appear in Mandeville’s text. Clicking on these locations will bring up relevant selections from the text, and allow views to both understand Mandeville’s text within its proper framework, and to explore the foreign geographies of the map with a guide.
“This project presents an annotated copy of Matthew Paris’s c. 1250 map of Britain (BL Cotton MS Claudius D VI), made using Omeka’s Neatline extension.”
The annotated map is clickable with annotations that include text, images from medieval manuscripts, and sometimes modern photographs of locations depicted in Paris’s maps.
This project presents a bibliography, discussion, and links to a variety of digitized medieval maps representing maps of a number of styles and from various parts of the world.
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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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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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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This website gives access to data related to one of Rome’s most important churches: The Basilica of St. Paul’s Outside the Walls, purported to the resting place of one of Christianity’s most influential figures—the apostle Paul. Because the basilica burned tragically in 1823, what exists today is a vast reconstruction that has deliberately retained the footprint and volumes of its predecessor, but it preserves few of the historical artefacts that accrued there over the course of 1,500 years. Such loss has impeded scholars, students, tourists and pilgrims from gaining a more complete understanding of the building’s long history. The aim of this website is to make available some of the primary sources, digital reconstruction models, still-frame images, walk-through videos and interactive virtual reality environments, all of which help to shed light on this monumental structure.
From the creators: As a monument to medieval kingship and a setting for parliamentary government, St Stephen’s Chapel in the Palace of Westminster has helped to shape the political culture of the nation. Funded by the AHRC (2013-17), our project explores the history, art and architecture of the royal chapel which became the first dedicated House of Commons. This website provides access to the 3D visualizations modeled from our research.
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