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.
Archives
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.
Diplomata Belgica
Diplomata Belgica offers a critical survey of all the diplomatic sources, edited or still unpublished, and issued by both natural persons and legal bodies from the medieval Southern Low Countries. Diplomata Belgica covers present day Belgium as well as those areas which belonged historically to the Southern Low Countries but are part now of France (French Flanders, French Hainault), the Netherlands (parts of the provinces of Zeeland, Noord-Brabant, Limburg), the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, or Germany (parts of the Rhineland). At this stage,Diplomata Belgica contains metadata about almost 35,000 charters and deeds in Latin, Old-French, Middle Dutch and Middle High German, almost 19,000 full text transcriptions and almost 5,000 photographs of original charters. The database aims at exhaustivity for the period before 1250 and will, in the future, also include late medieval diplomatic materials without striving after completeness.
Handschriftencensus
Handschriftencensus is a German-language web platform published by a team at the University of Marburg. The site functions as a directory for medieval German-language manuscripts from 750CE to 1520CE in libraries around the globe. The platform itself does not contain images, but does contain detailed catalog entries for each manuscript in addition to links to available images and the host repository’s catalog entry for a manuscipt. Users can see the nearly 900 manuscripts on the site in list format, ordered by repository, author/work, and illustration type.
The project has an active social media presence on Twitter and is continuously updated, with new additions made weekly. Users can also find a regularly updated, in-depth bibliography of secondary sources on German-language medieval texts and manuscripts. Copyrights for manuscript images obtained through the site are still retained by a manuscript’s holding institution.
Klöster und Stifte des Alten Reiches und angrenzender Regionen, Germania Sacra
Germania Sacra offers an online Database of Monasteries, Collegiate churches, and Convents of the Holy Roman Empire. The scholarly database provides a research tool that contains basic data on religious houses in the territory of the Holy Roman Empire, from Late Antiquity up until secularization at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
The database provides basic information on the following aspects: affiliation to religious orders, duration of this affiliation, dates of foundation and dissolution, geographic location. The results of queries can be displayed on interactive maps that visualise the monastic landscape of the medieval and early modern periods. Temporal periodisation as well as regional and thematic criteria can be modified by the user.
Online Medieval Sources Bibliography
Repertorium Geschichtsquellen des deutschen Mittelalters
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