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.
The premise of the Old English Poetry in Facsimile project is simple: produce a comprehensive collection of open-access, scholarly and rigorous digital facsimile editions that present digital manuscript images, transcriptions and translations of Old English poetry all in one place, to better allow people to study and explore these works. To do so, the project takes advantage of the new Digital Mappa 2.0 platform, which allows editors to make links and annotations across individual moments on related images and texts, and users to open and view multiple items side by side.
This project combines older editorial traditions with “bigger data” resources and research for more comprehensive lexical, dialectal and orthographic editorial readings.
Editions on this site practice “restorative retention” – privileging the text as written over emendation wherever possible, with an emphasis on description rather than prescription – in an effort to better preserve and understand linguistic and poetic heterogeneity in early medieval England.
Over 300 editions of Old English verse have been published, including examples of every genre: psalms, riddles, inscribed objects, charms, heroic verse, prayers, Boethian meters, wisdom poetry, marginal micro-texts, chronicle poems, homiletic verse, dialogues, and others.
Searchable annotated bibliography of over 5000 modern print and online editions of medieval primary sources, intended for a broad audience including high school and college level instructors as well as more advanced scholars or enthusiasts.
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The Dictionary of Old Norse Prose (ONP) is an online dictionary containing over 50,000 words derived from texts of Old Norse prose. Published by the University of Copenhagen, the project is ongoing as of 2020 with new words added regularly. The dictionary is searchable in a number of ways: by headword, text, manuscript, type of word, and numerous others. ONP makes it corpus data freely downloadable and has added information like the genre of text from which the word derives or whether it used in poetry or legal texts as well. Users can also view the words contained in particular texts or manuscripts and download that data for research purposes. When available, the ONP links to images of manuscripts and freely available editions of texts. Dictionary entries contain a list of sources in which the word appears in addition to its grammatical qualities.
Additionally, the project includes an expansive bibliography and has an active social media presence that offers a word-of-the-day feature.
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.
Published by the Society for Early English and Norse Electronic Texts (SEENET), the Piers Plowman Electronic Archive is a collaborative, peer-reviewed, and open-source web platform for the study of the texts and manuscripts of the late Middle English poem, Piers Plowman. Piers Plowman is a poem rich in versions and variants, and the project sets as its goal the publication of digital editions of each of the over 50 manuscript witnesses to the poem. Thus far it has published eight manuscripts in addition to the a reconstructed digital edition of the archetype of the B text of the poem. Many other manuscript witnesses are in the process of being edited as of 2020.
Each manuscript’s edition displays the text and material features of the manuscript along with the images from that manuscript. Users can also compare the text of individual manuscripts to the edited version of the text, making the platform particularly useful for comparing variant readings. Users will also find teaching materials for Piers Plowman along with an extensive bibliography on textual and manuscript studies as they relate to the poem.
Though image copyrights are held by institutions, the edited editions are open for use with citation. The source code and markup for the Archive is also downloadable.
PASE is a web-accessible relational database of recorded inhabitants of Anglo-Saxon England from the late sixth to the late 11th century, drawn from sources like the Domesday Book, saints’ lives, inscriptions, chronicles, and other evidence.
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Description from creators: This project is a browseable directory of known copies of the Middle English Prose Brut chronicle, drawn from previous scholarly projects to describe and define the manuscript corpus. It contains links to projects, descriptions, and digital facsimiles of the manuscripts available on the web. A copy of the dataset is freely available for download and further experimentation.
During the later Middle Ages, the Middle English Prose Brut chronicle, commonly referred to as the Prose Brut, was possibly the most common source where a reader could learn about the history of England—from its legendary origins to the present dynasty. The Prose Brut survives in nearly two hundred manuscripts, compiled from the end of the fourteenth century on. This group of manuscripts has been the subject of extensive study for more than a century, as scholars and bibliographers have discovered new manuscripts and studied the Prose Brut’s relationship to other histories across a number of languages.
In the early 2000s, the multiyear digital humanities project “Imagining History: Perspectives on Late Medieval Vernacular Historiography” looked to put this information on the web in an open and expandable format. This most recent work has also been the most precarious. In 2017, the Imagining History Project’s data disappeared from the live internet. The handlist is the result of the project team’s work to remix the project data and to combine it with digitally available materials about the remaining manuscripts of the Brut, where possible. Since the project’s authors do not have direct control over much of the information, the project also illustrates the many different ways that institutions preserve data about medieval manuscripts.
For more on the project’s aims and goals, see Michelle Warren and Neil Weijer, “Re-Imagining Digital Things: Sustainable Data in Medieval Manuscript Studies” Digital Philology (Spring 2021): https://digitalcommons.dartmouth.edu/facoa/4056/
Recovering the Earliest English Language in Scotland is a project that aims to uncover Old English place names in southern Scotland. Old English is the predecessor to both Middle English and Scots, and the project relies upon place names to provide evidence of the early Northumbrian dialect of the language. As of 2020, the database includes a list of over 500 place names in southern Scotland derived from Old English. Users can view the list of places alphabetically, by map, or through advanced searching for keywords and other salient qualities. Places can be displays on a map and frequently include a description of the place-name in addition to bibliography where available.
Users can download all project data through its API, and all data is made available under a Creative Commons license. One can also find a glossary of early place terms in addition to links to other projects with similar goals.
A searchable catalog of digitized manuscripts containing the Roman de la Rose, an allegorical love poem in the form of a dream vision composed in Old French in the 13th century. The current collection of 130 manuscripts (of an estimated 320 total) may be browsed by repository, shelf mark, date, origin, or illustrations, allowing cross-manuscript comparison of illustrations and sections of text. Much of the data downloadable in .csv format.
* National History Day Selected Resource *
From the creators: As a monument to medieval kingship and a setting for parliamentary government, St Stephen’s Chapel in the Palace of Westminster has helped to shape the political culture of the nation. Funded by the AHRC (2013-17), our project explores the history, art and architecture of the royal chapel which became the first dedicated House of Commons. This website provides access to the 3D visualizations modeled from our research.
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The Canterbury Roll is a 15th-century, hand-written genealogy that begins with Noah and traces the rulers of England from the mythical Brutus to King Edward IV. The genealogy is accompanied by an extensive commentary in Latin. The five-metre long manuscript roll was purchased by the University of Canterbury, Aotearoa New Zealand in 1918 from a local family of British descent. The key products of the first stage of the Canterbury Roll Project are a new digital transcription and translation, both of which have been mapped to a high quality digital facsimile of the Roll. The ongoing project is a partnership between UC History, the UC Arts Digital Lab, the UC internship programme, the Collaborative Research Centre 933 of Heidelberg University, and Nottingham Trent University (UK).
The Open Access Companion to the Canterbury Tales is a free resource for the study of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales written and curated by professional scholars of medieval literature. The project is imagined as a resource for undergraduate and graduate students encountering the Tales early in their academic careers. Teachers of Middle English literature may find the essays particularly useful and approachable for classroom use. Articles comprise essays and reference chapters. Essays cover a topic of import to Chaucer’s work, for example “Sisterhood and Brotherhood in the Knight’s Tale,” whereas reference chapters treat foundational cultural topics, like manuscripts and everyday life.
All of the texts on the Companion’s site are freely available and peer reviewed by scholars of Middle English literature.
Published by the University of Glasgow, the Thesaurus of Old English Project is an online resource that thematically arranges definitions of terms. Drawing from standard dictionaries of Old English, the project has created thematic entries that are cross referenced with one another. The project is fully searchable; while searching, a user may go directly to the thesaurus’ data or be directed off-site to one of the major dictionaries of Old English. The project has well over 40,000 entries.
Though free to use for individual users, the project makes explicit that large-scale use of data from the project is not allowed. Should users wish to analyze the Thesaurus’ corpus data, they should contact the creators.
Three searchable databases for primary and secondary sources relating to the study of medieval science and medicine.
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The Wren Digital Library is the digital archive of the Wren Library at Trinity College, Cambridge. The Wren is home to over 1,000 medieval manuscripts from the 10th century onwards, of which the digital archive has published over 800 in addition to many early printed books and modern manuscripts. The ongoing project of the digital platform is to digitally publish all manuscripts in M.R. James’ 1901-1903 print catalog of the library’s holdings.
As of 2020, the library has no search function, but one can filter manuscripts by title, shelfmark, and date. Each entry includes catalog information in addition to a bibliography. Images are available in IIIF format and can be downloaded free of charge, though high-resolution images can only be obtained by contacting the repository.
From the creators: York’s Archbishops Registers Revealed provides free access to over 20,000 images of Registers produced by the Archbishops of York, 1225-1650, in addition to a growing searchable index of names, subjects, places and organisations. The registers are a valuable, and in many cases, unexploited source for ecclesiastical, political, social, local and family history – covering periods of war, famine, political strife and religious reformation in the Archdiocese of York and the wider Northern Province.
The site contains over 5000 entries cataloged and organized with subject headings, indexes, and searchable contents. The project also offers IIIF capability for its images.
