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Lexis of Cloth and Clothing Project

Cloth and clothing have been integral to life for every person since civilization began.

In the Middle Ages dress was an identifier of occupation, status, gender and ethnicity; textiles ranged through opulent, symbolic, utilitarian and recycled. Cloth production and international trade constituted a major sector of the economy of medieval Britain.

Evidence for medieval textiles and clothing is sought in diverse academic disciplines: archaeology, archaeological textiles, art history, economic history, literature, languages.

The vocabulary of the various languages spoken and written in the British Isles is documented in different specialist dictionaries, yet geographical proximity and interaction through labour and trade would argue that this evidence should be categorised and analysed together.

The Arts and Humanities Research Council made an award of £765,576 within the Research Grants (Standard) Scheme to fund a 5-year Project to undertake a trans-disciplinary study with the purpose of  producing an analytical corpus of medieval dress and textiles terminology of the British Isles in the form of a searchable database, innovatively illustrated.

At its centre was the assembly and examination of textiles/clothing lexis in the early languages of Britain (Old and Middle English; Welsh, Old Irish and minor Celtic languages; Anglo-Norman/French, Medieval Latin, Anglo-Norse), investigating the genesis and subsequent development of the vocabulary.

The terms and their citations from both documentary and literary texts have been analysed in awareness of surviving textiles/dress accessories and graphic images in medieval art.


From the reviewer:

This website represents an ambitious project – “lexis” being the total stock of words in a language – in this case we are looking at words specific to the British Isles. The sections that focus on words are the best – the Dictionaries tab and the Search the Database are useful and provide data. The Gallery tab provides detailed photographs. The Research tab leads to interesting books – they are mostly dated from 2006 -2012, however.

Logeion

Logeion is a free online dictionary that aggregates the resources of all the Latin and Greek dictionaries available through the Perseus Classical collection in addition to other resources like the Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources. A user can search by headword or an inverse search and use the tabs to switch between dictionary sources, including: Lewis and Short, Gaffiot, and others. The website also provides basic corpus analysis, offering examples of the word in sentences as well as providing morphological analysis. Though not all sources in the project are medieval, some, like the Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, are predominantly medieval.

Mandragore

Les collections de la Bibliothèque nationale de France abritent plusieurs dizaines de milliers de manuscrits dont le décor constitue l’un des plus riches musées de peinture au monde. Par leur grande variété et leur intérêt iconographique, ces images composent aussi une véritable encyclopédie visuelle de leur temps. En accroissement continu, Mandragore compte aujourd’hui plus de 170.000 notices analysant des œuvres conservées au Département des manuscrits et à la Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, et dont les plus anciennes remontent à l’Égypte pharaonique et les plus récentes à l’époque contemporaine. Leur indexation repose sur un vocabulaire de plus de 18.000 descripteurs.

The collections of the National Library of France house tens of thousands of manuscripts whose decoration comprises one of the richest painting collections in the world. Through their wide variety and iconographic interest, these images also make up a veritable visual encyclopedia of their time. Growing continuously, Mandragore now has over 170,000 records analyzing works held in the Department of Manuscripts and the Library of Arsenal, the oldest of which date back to Pharaonic Egypt and the most recent from modern times . Their indexing is based on a controlled vocabulary of more than 18,000 descriptors.

Manuscripts of Lichfield Cathedral

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.

Matthew Paris’s Clickable Map: An Interactive Claudius Map

“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.

Medieval Bestiary

This web site deals with any and all aspects of the general topic “animals in the Middle Ages”, though there is an emphasis on the manuscript tradition, particularly of the bestiaries, and mostly in western Europe. The subject is vast, so this a large site, with well over 3000 pages, and perhaps the best way to explore it is to just wander around. The various pages making up the site are extensively linked; any text appearing in this blue color is a link (except for that one!). You can also click the green arrows at the top and bottom of each page; these will take you from one section to the next, or to the next page in a series. If you get lost, click the  button on any page to return to the table of contents. If you are interested in bestiary manuscripts, start wil the section on the manuscript families, which will link you to various other pages of interest. If you want to learn about a particular animal, start with the Beasts pages. If you are looking for something in particular, try the site search. For more help in navigating the site, click the green on any page.

Informal articles, opinionated reviews, and irreverent comments on the bestiary genre can be found in the bestiary blog, Chimaera.

 

Medieval Londoners

Medieval Londoners introduces resources available for research about medieval London and its people, focusing not only on documentary and narrative sources in print, but also archaeological, visual, and cartographic sources that illuminate the physical and material world inhabited by medieval Londoners.

An important component of the website is the Medieval Londoners Database (MLD), which records the activities of London residents between c. 1100 and 1520, and is searchable by name, gender, citizenship status, location (ward, parish, and street if available), craft, occupation, civic office, and craft office, among other variables.

Medieval Manuscripts in Dutch Collections

This database contains descriptions of all medieval western manuscripts up to c. 1550 written in Latin script and preserved in public and semi-public collections in the Netherlands. These include the collections of libraries, museums, archives, collections of monastic orders and some private institutions open to researchers. No censorship has been carried out: all literary, historiographical, academic, hagiographical, and (para-)liturgical texts, artes texts, ego-documents etc. written in Latin or one of the Western European vernacular languages qualify for inclusion. However, fragments of manuscripts are only included when possible and useful: the texts must be identifiable or the fragments should have already been catalogued as an object. Archival documents and letters are not recorded, except when already part of another included manuscript.

Medieval Nordic Text Archive

The Medieval Nordic Text Archive (Menota) is a digital repository for medieval texts from Nordic repositories. A user can navigate the repository in either English or Norwegian. A joint project among many libraries and universities across Scandinavia, Menota invites editors to submit medieval texts in the Nordic languages or Latin. All texts on the platform have been marked up in XML and users can select a variety of views, like diplomatic of facsimile. As of 2020, over 50 manuscripts have been digitally edited and the project is ongoing.

Beyond digital texts, the platform also provides a few translations of medieval texts, lexicographical resources, and links to some images of manuscripts in Nordic repositories. Menota makes its encoding practices clear in documents and handbooks available on the site. The XML of digital editions hosted on the platform are open-source and available for download.

Medium

A survey of microfilms and other images of medieval manuscripts kept at the Institute de Recherche et d’Histoire des Textes. Many of these reproductions are now available online, and accessible via the database. 

Mittelalterliche Handschriften in Österreich / Medieval Manuscripts in Austria

Der Relaunch von manuscripta.at 2014 bietet neue Daten und Funktionalitäten, darunter:

  • einen Viewer für Digitalisate (Handschriften, ungedruckte Verzeichnisse und Materialien, Printpublikationen). Optional können die Digitalisate auch im DFG-Viewer betrachtet werden. Auf dislozierte Digitalisate wird verlinkt.
  • die direkte Verknüpfung der Handschrifteneinträge mit der “Bibliographie zu österreichischen Handschriften” (über den Link “Literatur zur Handschrift” oder “Weitere Literatur zur Handschrift”). Der direkte Zugang zur Bibliographie erfolgt über das Menü links (“Bibliographie”). Der Menüpunkt “Kataloge” erstellt eine gesonderte Liste der Handschriftenkataloge, geordnet nach Bibliotheksorten.
  • verbesserte Suchfunktionen, etwa die Schnellsuche nach einer bestimmten Handschrift über Ort/Bibliothek und Signatur (Teil von Signatur).

manuscripta.at soll nach und nach zum zentralen Nachweis- und Rechercheinstrument für mittelalterliche Handschriften in Österreich ausgebaut werden.


The relaunch of manuscripta.at in 2014 offers new data and functionality, including:

  • a viewer for digital images (manuscripts, unpublished directories and materials, print publications).
  • the direct linking of manuscript entries to the “Bibliography on Austrian Manuscripts” (via the link “Literatur zur Handschrift” or “Weitere Literatur zur Handschrift”). Direct access to the bibliography is via the menu on the left (“Bibliography”). The menu item “Catalogs” creates a separate list of manuscript catalogs, sorted by library type.
  • improved search functions, such as the quick search for a specific manuscripts by location / library and signature (part of signature).

manuscripta.at will continue to be developed into the central evidence- and research-tool for medieval manuscripts in Austria.

Models of Authority: Scottish Charters and the Emergence of Government 1100-1250

Models of Authority is a joint research project by University of Glasgow, University of Cambridge, and King’s College, London. The project has brought together digital images of over 90 charters of particular import for the creation of Scottish government during the period 1100CE to 1250CE. The charters are held by a variety of institutions across the United Kingdom. Models of Authority’s platform allows users to tag and annotate the images of charters and many of them have scores of annotations crowdsourced by users.

The project uses Lightbox to allow users to save and annotate their own images of the charters and then save them for personal use or add their own annotations to the documents. Beyond providing images, descriptions, and links to the holding repository, the project also has a blog and articles written by project researchers. The platform is free to use, but image copyrights belong to institution in possession of the charter.

Monasterium Digital Archive

Monasterium is a collaborative digital archive containing charters and documents from over 2000 repositories across 17 European countries. The site can be used in 14 different languages. Not limited solely to documents of the Middle Ages, Monasterium brings together over 775,000 digital documents. After registering for a free account, users are able to interact with images of the archival documents, sharing comments on the platform. In order to join the archive, repositories must agree to metadata standards to ensure cohesion across collections. Monasterium is maintained by ICARUS, the International Centre for Archival Research.

Monastic Manuscript project

The Monastic Manuscript Project is a database of descriptions of manuscripts that contain texts relevant for the study of early medieval monasticism, especially monastic rules, ascetic treatises, vitae patrum-texts and texts related to monastic reforms. We provide lists of manuscripts for each of these texts, which are linked to manuscript descriptions. The purpose is to offer a tool for reconstructing not only the manuscript dissemination of early medieval monastic texts but also to give access to the specific contexts in which a text appears.

Monumenta Germaniae Historica (MGH)

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.

Old English Newsletter Bibliography Database

Compiled by Roy Liuzza at the University of Tennessee, the OEN Bibliography Database is a searchable catalog of the annual Old English Newsletter bibliography, published annually from 1973 to 2009. Once users have registered for a free account, they can search the newsletters’ over 23,000 entries for topics related to the study of Old English. Each entry includes publication information for articles, books, and digital projects. Users may also search by topic, date, or subject. The database is no longer updated, but is a useful resource for scholars and students of early English history, literature, and cultures.

Parker Library on the Web

The Parker Library on the Web project is a joint endeavor by the Parker Library at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge and Stanford University to publish images of the roughly 600 medieval manuscripts housed in the library. To date, they have digitized and made freely available over 500 of those manuscripts. The Parker Library is one of the richest collections of early English books in the world, having been gifted the collections by Matthew Parker, the 16th-century Archbishop of Canterbury.

Parker Library on the Web has been at the forefront of library digitization projects. It was an early adopted of the IIIF image format. In addition to a wide range of manuscript images, including detailed images of illuminations, each entry has a detailed cataloging information and a bibliography for the item. Additionally, the platform also presents past digital exhibitions in addition to copious information on how to use the site.

Patrologia Latina

A digitized version of volumes 1-217 of Migne’s Patrologia Latina, a collection of texts in Latin by church fathers, theologians, popes, councils, and many others from late antiquity through the high Middle Ages, indexed by volume. The texts, which are divided by author within each volume, may be read online or downloaded in .pdf format.

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