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Amalarius’s Bells: An Old English and Medieval Latin Edition

This digital scholarly project is designed as a learning resource for students of all levels of Old English, medieval Latin, paleography, and medieval translation, and also as a detailed resource for scholars. It provides full transcriptions & editions of a short medieval Latin text and its subsequent Old English translation, digital facsimiles of both manuscript versions, Latin and Old English glossaries, editorial commentary, and detailed discussion of the manuscripts and their contexts. It also showcases the full power of the Digital Mappa 2.0 platform for digital publication and scholarship.

At its center are two texts: a piece of Old English prose from the eleventh century, partly erased, of some forty-five lines, that itself is a direct translation of a late tenth-century Anglo-Latin version of the same content. These texts detail the allegorical significance of the ringing of church bells, and derive from redactions of the Liber Officialis, a massive ninth-century treatise by Amalarius of Metz which figurally treats a vast range of objects and rituals related to the celebration of Mass. The Belltokens project offers students and scholars entry into the evolution of material in early medieval England from a number of scholarly and pedagogical perspectives, and will be of use to those interested in learning about Old English, medieval Latin, manuscript and paleographical studies. In this edition, every single word of the Old English and Latin texts has been edited, and interlinked between its occurrence on the manuscript page, an edited transcription, a full glossary, and its linguistic analogue in the Latin or Old English witness, respectively. The edition provides a rare window into the process of vernacular translation, where an Old English scribe had to translate a Latin text that they themselves understood to be corrupted. It also serves as a companion to the Four Anglo-Carolingian Minitexts project, as they overlap in their studies of the Cotton Vespasian D. xv manuscript, its content, and background.

Using the Digital Mappa platform, this project suggests new ways to conceive of a digital edition of medieval materials – e.g. granularly linking moments of digital manuscript facsimiles, transcriptions, translations and commentary, and also taking advantage of the capacity to link internally among the editions’ annotations and primary materials and then externally to other relevant online digital resources.

Anglo-Norman Dictionary

The Anglo-Norman Dictionary projects offer 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.

Art & Architecture of the Middle Ages: Exploring a Connected World

Art and Architecture of the Middle Ages: Exploring a Connected World (Cornell University Press, 2022) is the first textbook to dismantle the religious, political, and geographical walls that have separated medieval art and architecture into three distinct categories. It treats not only western Europe, the focus of most surveys; it also considers the Byzantine Empire and nine hundred years of art in the Islamicate world, beginning with the emergence of the new faith in the seventh century. These three categories—Islamic, Byzantine, and western European—are not treated as separate entities, without connections or contemporaneity; they are interwoven in a single chronological framework. The book also addresses religious and ethnic groups who rarely appear in introductory texts. This expanded view establishes the wide scope of visual, artistic, and architectural experiences in the Middle Ages among disparate makers, users, and viewers.

The website complements the book rather than duplicating it; it features galleries of medieval objects, buildings, and cities, selected for their relevance to contemporary interests and events, such as recent discoveries or interpretations. Each work is discussed and tagged in ways that will support classroom projects and student research, while also fostering interest in the field. Some features focus on pedagogy (plans, maps, timelines, glossary, translated primary sources), and others illuminate connections between medieval art and real-world professional practitioners (the podcast series Medieval Art Matters).

The website is updated regularly.

Bibliotheca Legum: A Database on Carolingian Secular Law Texts

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]

 

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.

Books of Duchesses

Books of Duchesses is a collaborative project that collects, organizes, and presents data related to late-medieval laywomen and their books. Through an interactive map of Europe, users are able to visualize networks of manuscripts, texts, and readers and explore the libraries and peregrinations of woman book owners. The data collected in the project has the potential to shift scholarly paradigms by challenging narratives of national literary history and uncovering the active role played by women in creating and consuming literary and material culture and in circulating texts across national, geographic, and generational borders. The geographic scope of the project is currently mostly focused on Western Europe. The time frame of the project is 1350 and 1550, a period of intense political, interfamilial, and interpersonal changes and exchanges due to the Hundred Years War and its aftermath. The project focuses on laywomen and therefore excludes books owned by enclosed religious women and female religious institutions. At the moment, the core of the data concerns aristocratic laywomen, as this information is the most readily available. In the future, the scope of the project will expand to include women from other social classes, additional geographic and linguistic regions in and beyond Europe, and data from the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries.

The project’s research methodology is designed to accommodate the inherent ambiguity of women’s book ownership without sacrificing accuracy. The project includes both extant and non-extant books and both confirmed and possible instances of book ownership. Each instance of ownership is further defined by noting the type of evidence used to connect owner and book. Some ownership evidence is found in extant manuscripts (inscriptions, patron portraits, coats of arms etc.) while other ownership evidence comes from primary documents such as wills, inventories, household documents, and letters. “Other” evidence includes a secondary article or catalogue entry where evidence type in the source is not otherwise specified.

The project also accommodates ambiguity in textual identification. It is not always possible to identify a text found in a non-extant book. For example, a non-extant manuscript described as “a French book” in a woman’s inventory will be cataloged as including an “Unidentified French Text.”

Finally, the project includes both precise and approximate information about the geographical locations of women book owners and of books as possible. In some cases we are able to record the exact day, month, and year when a woman was at a particular location. In other cases, we make an educated guess about a woman’s whereabouts at a particular time. We choose to include this ambiguous data in order to make more women book owners visible on the map. For the books, we include information about their location when it is sufficiently well documented (as by a letter, inventory, will, or library catalog, for instance).

Chaucer Hub

Chaucer Hub contains guidance in grammar and phonology to help beginners read Chaucer and other Middle English texts. It also has audio clips in which Chaucerians read Middle English illustrating Middle English’s sounds. The site also provides background information on Chaucer’s life. The site also has an online concordance to all of Chaucer’s works. This resource was formerly hosted on the Harvard Chaucer website but became defunct. New programming makes available “The Glossarial Concordance to the Works of Chaucer,” as well as the Gower’s Confessio Amantis, and makes it searchable with digital tools.

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.

Corpus Synodalium

Throughout the later Middle Ages, bishops across Latin Christendom promulgated provincial canons and diocesan statutes to guide the clergy and instruct the faithful. Offering direct access to more than 1700 of these texts (many transcribed directly from manuscripts or rare early printings), Corpus Synodalium allows users to explore and compare these texts using a variety of simple text analysis tools (including fuzzy and faceted searches, collocation, and time series). In addition, users can look for spatial patterns within the text corpus by exporting search results to the first-ever digital atlas of the dioceses and ecclesiastical provinces of late medieval Latin Christendom. The project website also includes a working repertory of the extant synodal statutes and provincial canons from 1200-1500, which lists their date, location, issuing authority, principal sources/editions, and more.

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.

Diccionario del Español Medieval electrónico (DEMel)

From project introduction: Based on the digitized data archive of the renowned Diccionario del Español Medieval (DEM), the DEMel provides access to over 31,000 lemmas with about 650,000 attestations. They were extracted from more than 600 literary and non-literary works or collections of texts and documents from the 10th to the beginning of the 15th century by the DEM editors. During the project DEMel, the approximately 865,000 paper slips were scanned. 700,000 of them indicate Medieval Spanish word forms with the context of use, the source and the dating. After developing a database model, the data on these paper slips was recorded manually by student research assistants. Finally, a web-based user interface was implemented. The DEMel portal now enables the users to search the attestations by using a series of search and filter functions. The User manual offers step-by-step instructions for this purpose. The Recording principles present detailed information about the data recording process. The Digitized Archive makes it possible to browse through the scans of all paper slips, as they were arranged in the original DEM boxes. It thereby provides insight into about 160,000 paper slips that were not included in the database and that contain additional material such as onomastics, references to etymological studies and word material from vocabularies.

Digitales Personenregister – Germania Sacra Online

With more than 80,000 entries, the Digital Index of Persons offers information on a broad spectrum of ecclesiastical and worldly personnel who were of importance for the history of dioceses, monasteries, convents and collegiate churches in medieval and the Early Modern times.
In prosopographical overviews and (short) biographies, the ecclesiastical staff of cathedral chapters, collegiate churches, convents and monasteries are described. This includes provosts, abbots and abbesses, and a multitude of cathedral canons, secular canons and canonesses as well as monks and nuns. Worldly rules, such as emperors and kings as well as a variety of local aristocracy are shown in the context of ecclesiastical history in the Holy Roman Empire.
Among other things, the database allows access to the comprehensive and fundamental biographies on the bishops of the Holy Roman Empire, which were published in the series of Germania Sacra volumes. The digital editions of the Germania Sacra Volumes can be read online, downloaded or searched in the full text mode.
Except where otherwise noted, content on this database is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Documentary Archaeology of Late Medieval Europe (DALME)

The Documentary Archaeology of Late Medieval Europe provides access to over 500 records, primarily household inventories, that are pertinent to the study of material culture in later medieval Europe. Records typically incorporate original images, facing-page transcriptions with TEI markup, record descriptions, and metadata. New records are added on a regular basis. The site also publishes brief essays that feature inventories and objects in the collection.

The project actively seeks contributors.

Eel-Rents Project

The Eel-Rents Project is a multimedia platform for an exploration of eels as a part of the economy and culture of eleventh-century Britain. The project presents an interactive map that shows the location of eel rents in the Domesday Books and also presents a bibliography and discussion of the importance of the aquatic animals to early English life.

Epistolae: Medieval Women’s Letters

Epistolae is a collection of medieval Latin letters to and from women.  The letters collected here date from the 4th to the 13th centuries, and they are presented in their original Latin as well as in English translation.  The letters are organized by the name and biography of the women writers or recipients.  Biographical sketches of the women, descriptions of the subject matter of the letters, and the historical context of the correspondence are included where available.

Dr. Joan Ferrante, Professor Emerita of English and Comparative Literature of Columbia University, has with her colleagues collected and translated these letters mainly from printed sources.  She has worked with the Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning to develop this unique open online collection for teaching and research purposes.  New letters continue to be added to the collection.  Users are invited to participate by sending material or inquiries to jmf2@columbia.edu.  Contributions, fully acknowledged, will be added to the database after review for accuracy and style by members of the Epistolae board.

Four Anglo-Carolingian Minitexts

This peer-reviewed project publishes a set of editions for four recently identified short Carolingian Latin texts in a late tenth-century English manuscript; three of these texts were not previously known to be in England before the Norman Conquest. The editions themselves link together digital manuscript facsimiles, transcriptions, editorial commentary and modern English translations.

French of England

The French of England project provides a variety of resources for the study of French in England from the Norman Invasion into the early modern period. The site seeks to unseat typical chronological and geopolitical boundaries in showing that the French of England was a long-lasting and wide-ranging phenomenon.

The project provides resources, including: bibliographies, syllabuses, audio recordings of Anglo-French texts, some translations, and editions, as well as a list of links to other sites that approach the study of the language and cultures associated with the French of England.

Glasgow Incunabula Project

The Glasgow Incunabula Project seeks to provide a catalog of the over 1000 incunabula in the University of Glasgow Library’s collections. The project provides multiple access points for the early printed materials. On the website, one can find lists of incunabula by authors, printers, dates, annotators, languages, prices, and multiple other qualities.

Most incunabula’s listings contain a detailed catalog entry and sometimes an accompanying image, all housed on Flickr. The project also has a blog that was active until 2017.

Global Medieval Sourcebook

“The Global Medieval Sourcebook (GMS) is an open access teaching and research tool. It offers a flexible online display for the parallel viewing of medieval texts in their original language and in new English translations, complemented by new introductory materials.

The GMS spans one thousand years (600-1600) of literary production around the world. It contains short texts of broad interdisciplinary interest in a variety of genres, almost all of which have not previously been translated into English.”

Global Middle Ages Project

The Global Middle Ages Project, or GMAP, aims to explore the whole world of the Middle Ages, from 500 to 1500CE, by exploring peoples, places, objects, and numerous other vectors for medieval research.

The website functions as a clearinghouse for projects hosted by GMAP with links to a variety of digital humanities projects from scholars of various aspects of the Middle Ages.

Historical Atlas of the Low Countries (1350-1800)

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.

Icelandic Saga Map

The Icelandic Saga Map project presents some thirty sagas from medieval Iceland with geotagged locations and images. The project aims to showcase the use landscape and eventually manuscript images alongside the places they represent.

The project presents a geo-tagged map and is free to use.

Innovating Knowledge Database

The Innovating Knowledge database contains structured information on all surviving and identified early medieval manuscripts transmitting the Etymologiae of Isidore of Seville (d. 636), the most important medieval Latin encyclopaedia. Released in 2021, it currently consists of almost 500 detailed descriptions of manuscripts, more than 350 manuscript images, and provides direct access to more than 250 digitized manuscripts via an integrated Mirador viewer. The data in the database can be filtered and downloaded for further reuse and visualized on a map. The database is interconnected with several additional resources including a digital edition of the glosses to book I of the Etymologiae and an EtymoWiki containing descriptions about some of the most important innovative features of the early medieval manuscript transmission of the Etymologiae.