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 aim of the Alberti Magni e-corpus project is to support research on Albert the Great by providing scholars the possibility: 1) to download image files of Albert’s works that can be found in editions no longer covered by copyright laws; 2) more importantly, to search 60 of those works electronically, using a Boolean search engine which gives access to a corpus of approximately 19,000 pages in print or 8.6 million words.
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 site provides downloadable data (MS Excel .csv format) of prices for many types of food, drink, raw materials, and manufactured goods from the central middle ages to the 20th century, collected largely from sources published in the 19th and 20th centuries.
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The Anglo-Norman Dictionary projects offers a free digital presence for the standard dictionary of Anglo-Norman French. Its first printed edition was published between 1977 and 1992. The second, revised, edition started in the late 1990s and is still ongoing: its work is published online in (bi-)yearly installments and is expected to be completed by 2029. The site provides coverage for areas of francophone activity in the British Isles from 1066 up to 1500.
The site also provides a detailed Bibliography of all Anglo-Norman primary sources currently available, an introduction to Anglo-Norman for a non-academic public, a range of searchable Anglo-Norman texts, unpublished transcriptions and academic articles.
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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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.
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.
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The Bibliotheca legum regni Francorum manuscripta aspires to do so with a focus on the legal knowledge that was disseminated in the Frankish Kingdom. The website presents descriptions of manuscripts which contain the so-called leges or barbarian law-codes. At present, 327 short descriptions are available. In addition to that, the database also provides contextualizing informations and tries – for example by means of a comprehensive bibliography – to represent the current state of research as complete as possible. External resources like online catalogues and digital images are also included.
[website is in German with an option to display in English]
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.
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.
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.
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This synoptic edition of Boethius’ De Consolatione Philosophiae aims to provide to new readers with a text that is both accessible and enlightening: accessible in the sense that while the original Latin is provided, so is a modern English translation which may be read parallel to to the original. This will allow the casual learner of Latin to more easily appreciate the beauty of Boethius’ poetry, or simply enjoy the wide range of translations provided.
This is an online edition of An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, or a dictionary of “Old English“. The dictionary records the state of the English language as it was used between ca. 700-1100 AD by the Anglo-Saxon inhabitans of the British Isles.
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 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.
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.
A collection of Latin chant inventories from medieval and early modern antiphoners, breviaries, and other liturgical sources.
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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.
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 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.
