From the website:
The Italian Paleography website presents 102 Italian documents and manuscripts written between 1300 and 1700, with tools for deciphering them and learning about their social, cultural, and institutional settings. The site includes: digitized images of 102 manuscripts and documents; T-Pen, a digital tool to actively transcribe manuscripts and documents;
transcriptions and background essays for each item; a selection of calligraphy books and historical manuscript maps; a handbook of Italian vernacular scripts; additional resources, including a glossary, list of abbreviations and symbols, dictionaries, and teaching materials.
Les Archives de littérature du Moyen Âge (ARLIMA) ont été fondées à l’intention des étudiants et chercheurs spécialistes du Moyen Âge, pour qui la constitution d’une bibliographie sur un auteur ou un texte est devenue une tâche de plus en plus ardue, en raison de la multiplication non seulement des publications mais également des outils bibliographiques imprimés et électroniques à leur disposition.
The Archive of Literature of the Middle Ages (ARLIMA) was founded for the students and researchers of the Middle Ages, for whom the compilation of a bibliography on an author or a text has become an increasingly difficult task, because of the proliferation not only of the publications but also the printed and electronic bibliographic tools at their disposal.
The Manuscripts of Lichfield Cathedral Project presents digital surrogates and bibliography on two medieval manuscripts held in Lichfield Cathedral: the 9th-century St. Chad’s Gospels and the 15th-century Wycliffite New Testament. The project offers both standard and multispectral imaging of the manuscripts, alongside RTI, or Reflectance Transformation Imaging for selected openings from the books.
From the project: “MARGOT is a long-term research project devoted to publishing fully searchable editions of either generally inaccessible texts from the French Middle Ages and the Early Modern period (the Ancien Régime) or of texts in connection with a specific project from the same time period.”
MARGOT contains a number of other DH projects, including CANTUS, a database of medieval chant, French Women Writers, The Campsey Project, and Reading the Roman de la Rose in Text and Images, among others.
MARGOT makes its materials freely available under a Creative Commons license.
Measuring Polyphony is an ongoing project by researchers at Brandeis University and McGill University to digitally transcribe and notate polyphonic musical texts from manuscripts of the 13th and 14th centuries. As of 2020, the project presents around fifty musical pieces and has plans for growth. Currently, most of the transcribed musical texts are in Latin or French. Each entry presents musical texts in medieval mensural and modern notations. For some entries, the project presents manuscript images in IIIF format to compare against the marked-up scores. Pieces also include audio recordings of their performance in addition to downloadable data for each piece in MEI and PDF format.
Measuring Polyphony is committed to open-source data and has made the encoding process clear. The project also makes available all of its data in XML and MEI format and also provides access to its software apparatus on GitHub.
This database and website is a virtual museum of images produced between the late 15th through mid-20th century that document the architectural monuments of South Italy (the medieval Kingdom of Sicily) and their decoration (pulpits, mosaics, pavements) prior to destruction and restoration. The images, often produced during the Grand Tour or by artists and architects of a study journey to South Italy, are vital sources of information about the siting and character of the highly significant architecture sponsored by the Norman, Hohenstaufen, and Angevin rulers prior to the devastation of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and particularly the Allied bombardment of World War II.
The ultimate aim of the Ogham in 3D project is to digitise and record in 3d as many as possible of the approximately four hundred surviving Ogham stones and to make the resulting 3D models freely available on this website as part of a multi-disciplinary archive of Ogham stones.
* National History Day Selected Resource *
The premise of the Old English Poetry in Facsimile project is simple: produce a comprehensive collection of open-access, scholarly and rigorous digital facsimile editions that present digital manuscript images, transcriptions and translations of Old English poetry all in one place, to better allow people to study and explore these works. To do so, the project takes advantage of the new Digital Mappa 2.0 platform, which allows editors to make links and annotations across individual moments on related images and texts, and users to open and view multiple items side by side.
This project combines older editorial traditions with “bigger data” resources and research for more comprehensive lexical, dialectal and orthographic editorial readings.
Editions on this site practice “restorative retention” – privileging the text as written over emendation wherever possible, with an emphasis on description rather than prescription – in an effort to better preserve and understand linguistic and poetic heterogeneity in early medieval England.
Over 300 editions of Old English verse have been published, including examples of every genre: psalms, riddles, inscribed objects, charms, heroic verse, prayers, Boethian meters, wisdom poetry, marginal micro-texts, chronicle poems, homiletic verse, dialogues, and others.
The Prosopography of the Byzantine World projects creates a chronological, prosopographical reading of sources (predominantly seals) from the Byzantine World in the period 1025-1180. The project presents a description of the source and where it is held and also allows for text-based searching of materials.
Recovering the Earliest English Language in Scotland is a project that aims to uncover Old English place names in southern Scotland. Old English is the predecessor to both Middle English and Scots, and the project relies upon place names to provide evidence of the early Northumbrian dialect of the language. As of 2020, the database includes a list of over 500 place names in southern Scotland derived from Old English. Users can view the list of places alphabetically, by map, or through advanced searching for keywords and other salient qualities. Places can be displays on a map and frequently include a description of the place-name in addition to bibliography where available.
Users can download all project data through its API, and all data is made available under a Creative Commons license. One can also find a glossary of early place terms in addition to links to other projects with similar goals.
The “Registers of the Counts of Holland, 1299-1345” contains over 3500 digitized charters from Holland in this period. The site is fully keyword searchable and includes a list of documents one can view based on time and place. The website is in Dutch with English translation for some pages.
This project offers online diplomatic transcriptions of the texts of charters as recorded in a number of registers of the counts of Holland, now hold at the Dutch national archives, the Nationaal Archief, The Hague. There are also archival descriptions of these registers, and itineraries of the counts between 1395 and 1400 as reconstructed from these registers are presented, too. These registers can rightly been viewed as cartularies.
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 Rijmkroniek van Holland [Verse chronicle of Holland. Trans.] is an important source of information on the history of Holland during the latter half of the thirteenth century and the beginning of the fourteenth century. This was a turbulent time for the province, marked by events such as the violent death of Count Floris V in 1296 and the transition from the House of Holland to the House of Hainault at the end of 1299. These events were followed by years of local feuding and a war with Flanders, which came to a head on 10 August 1304 with a naval battle on the Gouwe. Moreover, in its capacity as one of the earliest historiographic works in the Dutch language, the chronicle is an important research tool for scholars of Middle Dutch.
The Rijmkroniek, as it has been handed down through the ages, evolved in several consecutive stages. In 1280-1282 an anonymous author employed at the court of Count Floris V wrote a chronicle in verse form about the earliest history of Holland up to 1205. In 1301-1302 and during, or shortly after, 1305 Melis Stoke, clerk to Count Jan II and Count Willem III, produced a sequel to the first chronicle, in which he presents a colourful and engaging account of the events that took place after 1205. This version of the Rijmkroniek was revised subsequently by Stoke himself.
The online edition presented here contains images of all the manuscripts and fragments in which the Rijmkroniek has been handed down. These images, which can be accessed via the list of contents are accompanied by a diplomatic transcript containing palaeographic remarks. It is also possible to place transcripts of different manuscripts and fragments side by side on the screen to compare them with each other. The search facility makes it possible to go to any numbered line in addition to browsing through the Rijmkroniek for a single word or combination of words, as well as via an index of names.
The Sharing Ancient Wisdoms (SAWS) project makes available digital texts from several philosophical traditions, especially texts derived from Arabic, Greek, and Arab-Spanish sources. The texts have been marked up in XML, which the project has made available for download in addition to the XML schemas they used to encode their texts. The project also includes a list of previous workshops, presentations, and publications that have been associated with the project.
“This website provides pedagogical resources for teachers who want to address the global history of slavery and captivity during the medieval period, broadly defined.”
The includes: “historical sources (texts, images, and audio files) that can be assigned as readings or used for in-class activities” and “a selected bibliography of scholarly works to help teachers present slavery and captivity in an appropriate, historically and culturally specific context.”
Bwriad y prosiect yw digido rhyddiaith Gymraeg o’r llawysgrifau rhwng cyfnod y prosiect Rhyddiaith Gymraeg 1300–1425 a chyfnod y prosiect Corpws Hanesyddol yr Iaith Gymraeg 1500-1850
The project aims to digitise Middle Welsh prose manuscripts in the period between the project Welsh Prose 1300–1425 and the period of the project A Historical Corpus of the Welsh Language 1500-1850
This project aims to gather, digest and interpret materials relating to the historical grammar of Welsh, and to promote and co-ordinate digitisation of texts.
A collection of digital resources for medieval studies organized by category, including Art, Armor, Crusades, Gender, Manuscripts, and many others. The site may be browsed by category or searched, and each link is accompanied by a brief description of its contents.
* National History Day Selected Resource *
The aim of the project is two-fold:
The first aim is to offer a single, unified database framework for the extraction of prosopographical and socio-economic data found in early medieval legal documents. Legal documents contain an extraordinary wealth of information for the political, social and economic history of this period, but they present significant challenges: practical ones, because they are scattered across many repositories, as well as methodological ones, because they can vary enormously across geographical regions, documentary types and traditions, and modes of transmission – all of which makes it hard to compare like with like. The aim of this project is to offer a common framework capable of extracting and comparing the data contained within legal documents, while still, at the same time, allowing users to identify and control for the most significant distortions typically affecting this material (such as modes of transmission, e.g. via an original or a later copy).
The second aim is to apply this framework to legal documents surviving from the reign of Charlemagne (25 September 768 to 28 January 814 AD). The reign of Charlemagne offers a particularly good case study, since it was a period of unprecedented expansion, leading to the absorption by the Frankish empire of many diverse regions within a short period of time. Over four thousand charters survive from the reign of Charlemagne (more than for the reign of any other early medieval European ruler); the database includes almost a thousand of them, selected for maximum variety in types of repository, modes of transmission, geographical area, recipients and issuers, etc.
The Migration of Faith project presents over 400 cases and 1100 people who experienced clerical exile in late antiquity. The project draws upon a wide range of sources to present the cases in a database, an interactive map, and a network map. The project also makes its data freely downloadable and usable under a Creative Commons license.
The Open Access Companion to the Canterbury Tales is a free resource for the study of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales written and curated by professional scholars of medieval literature. The project is imagined as a resource for undergraduate and graduate students encountering the Tales early in their academic careers. Teachers of Middle English literature may find the essays particularly useful and approachable for classroom use. Articles comprise essays and reference chapters. Essays cover a topic of import to Chaucer’s work, for example “Sisterhood and Brotherhood in the Knight’s Tale,” whereas reference chapters treat foundational cultural topics, like manuscripts and everyday life.
All of the texts on the Companion’s site are freely available and peer reviewed by scholars of Middle English literature.
The Wren Digital Library is the digital archive of the Wren Library at Trinity College, Cambridge. The Wren is home to over 1,000 medieval manuscripts from the 10th century onwards, of which the digital archive has published over 800 in addition to many early printed books and modern manuscripts. The ongoing project of the digital platform is to digitally publish all manuscripts in M.R. James’ 1901-1903 print catalog of the library’s holdings.
As of 2020, the library has no search function, but one can filter manuscripts by title, shelfmark, and date. Each entry includes catalog information in addition to a bibliography. Images are available in IIIF format and can be downloaded free of charge, though high-resolution images can only be obtained by contacting the repository.
From the creators: York’s Archbishops Registers Revealed provides free access to over 20,000 images of Registers produced by the Archbishops of York, 1225-1650, in addition to a growing searchable index of names, subjects, places and organisations. The registers are a valuable, and in many cases, unexploited source for ecclesiastical, political, social, local and family history – covering periods of war, famine, political strife and religious reformation in the Archdiocese of York and the wider Northern Province.
The site contains over 5000 entries cataloged and organized with subject headings, indexes, and searchable contents. The project also offers IIIF capability for its images.
