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Irish Script on Screen

The object of ISOS is to create digital images of Irish manuscripts, and to make these images – together with relevant commentary – accessible on a WWW site. The purpose of such a site is to provide an electronic resource which will:

  • provide exposure on the internet for a vital part of Ireland’s cultural heritage.
  • place these primary materials at the disposal of scholars and students.
  • contribute to the conservation of these valuable books and documents by creating images of high-resolution detail which, generally speaking, will reduce the need to handle the artefacts themselves.

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.

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.

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.

Mapping Gothic France

With a database of images, texts, charts and historical maps, Mapping Gothic France invites you to explore the parallel stories of Gothic architecture and the formation of France in the 12th and 13th centuries, considered in three dimensions: space, time, and narrative.

* National History Day Selected Resource *

Mapping Mandeville Project

The 14th century travel book and geography, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville provides readers with a fantastical tale of a man’s (supposed) journey from England to the farthest edges of the world.  Sir John, the books’ narrator, tells stories of the sanctity of the Holy Land, of the wickedness of distant pagans peoples, and amazing and monstrous races that inhabit the corners of the globe.  Taken as a whole, Mandeville’s book offers a remarkable insight into medieval ideas about geography, and about the way that the world was put together.

This project seeks to combine Mandeville’s text with one of the largest and most famous of the mappaemundi  — the Hereford Map — in an attempt to use the two media together to make them more individually comprehensible.  Using a legible copy of the Hereford map, I have annotated numerous locations on the map that also appear in Mandeville’s text.  Clicking on these locations will bring up relevant selections from the text, and allow views to both understand Mandeville’s text within its proper framework, and to explore the foreign geographies of the map with a guide.

MARGOT

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

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.

Medieval Kingdom of Sicily Image Database: A Visual Resource of Historical Sites c. 1100 – c. 1450

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.

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.

Médiévistes sur le net : sources, travaux et références en ligne

Aims :
- promoting European web-based resources for mediaeval studies, particularly in the French language; enhancing the international visibility of medievalists and their work; and bridging communication barriers between scholars;
- providing a free critical index of on-line resources in the field of medieval studies for the use of scholars, students and laymen alike.

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. 

MedMel: The Music of Medieval Vernacular Lyric

MedMel (The Music of Medieval Vernacular Lyric) contains digital editions of monodic melodies of Troubadours, Trouvères and Trobadores lyrics, and it is aimed at musicologists, philologists and performers. The MedMel database allows users to search lyrics and melodic patterns, customize their visualization, switch from modern to ancient notation, export the music in various formats (pdf, HTML, XML/MEI) and listen to the melody.

The digital editions are created with the MelMed Editor, which is made publicly available for scholars and musicians who need an expressive and simple tool to transcribe medieval music.

Metropolitan Museum of Art: Met Publications

Met Publications is the publishing house website of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. The site contains listings for many of the publications of the Met Museum dating back to 1911 on topics touching on all aspects of art history from all periods and regions. Included among these are numerous exhibition catalogs, collection catalogs, the Metropolitan Museum Journal, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, educational and pedagogical books, and other online publications. Titles that are currently in print by the Met are fully searchable, though one must purchase the books to see the entire text. For books that are out of print, the museum makes the fully text available online and for download for free.

The search function on the Met Publications site allows users to search the various types of publications by name, author, type of text, and date among other qualities. Publications are regularly updated.

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.

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.