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St. Stephen’s Chapel, Westminster: Visual & Political Culture, 1292-1941

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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Teaching Medieval Slavery and Captivity

“This website provides pedagogical resources for teachers who want to address the global history of slavery and captivity during the medieval period, broadly defined.”

The includes: “historical sources (texts, images, and audio files) that can be assigned as readings or used for in-class activities” and “a selected bibliography of scholarly works to help teachers present slavery and captivity in an appropriate, historically and culturally specific context.”

Middle English Text Series (METS)

The TEAMS Middle English Texts are published for TEAMS (The Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages) in association with the University of Rochester by Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Michigan. The General Editor of the series is Russell Peck of the University of Rochester. The texts are made available here by permission of the Executive Committee of TEAMS and The Medieval Institute at Western Michigan University.

The goal of the TEAMS Middle English text series is to make available to teachers and students texts which occupy an important place in the literary and cultural canon but which have not been readily available in student editions.

The focus is upon literature adjacent to that normally in print, which teachers need in compiling the syllabi they wish to teach. The editions maintain the linguistic integrity of the original works but within the parameters of modern reading conventions.

We are grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities for its generous support in creating and maintaining this site.

* National History Day Selected Resource *

TEAMS (Teaching Association for Medieval Studies)

TEAMS was originally founded as a committee of the Medieval Academy of America to develop new ways to support the teaching activities of its members. It was later re-organized as an independent nonprofit educational corporation whose mission continues to be the support of teaching in medieval studies at the undergraduate, secondary, and elementary school level through the provision of resources and the sharing of techniques.

Its current programs include the publication of TEAMS Teaching Texts in cooperation with Medieval Institute Publications, the maintenance of an online library of Middle English texts, and the establishment of a committee for outreach to secondary schools. It sponsors several sessions of papers at the annual International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University. TEAMS also publishes a peer-reviewed electronic journal, The Once and Future Classroom: Resources for Teaching the Middle Ages in Grades K-12, and sponsors an annual teaching prize to recognize excellence in teaching medieval studies in the K-12 classroom.

TELMA – Traitement electronique des manuscrits et des archives

L’objectif de TELMA est de mettre en ligne à la disposition de la communauté scientifique des corpus de sources primaires et les instruments de recherche nécessaires à leur exploitation. De ce fait, TELMA intègre deux types de corpus : des répertoires de ressources et des éditions critiques de sources manuscrites associées ou non à des images numérisées des documents.

The objective of TELMA is to make available to the scientific community a corpus of primary sources and research tools necessary for their exploitation. As a result, TELMA integrates two types of resources: databases and critical editions of handwritten sources with or without digitized images of documents.

 

The Canterbury Roll – A Digital Edition

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 Community of the Realm in Scotland 1249-1424

The Community of the Realm in Scotland 1249-1424 is an ongoing project hosted by King’s College, London that seeks to provide digital editions of important Scottish documents from the middle and later medieval period. The creators of the project have begun with the Declaration of Arbroath, a seminal document in the foundation of a community of the realm of Scotland, and Regiam Majestatem, the foundational legal document for the realm. Rather than privileging stemmatic editing and its search for an archetypal version of a text, the Community of the Realm’s edition of the Declaration allows a user to compare versions of the document as it appears in different manuscript witnesses. When in comparison mode, a user can view others’ annotations or make their own. Likewise, users can view the document in Latin or in an English translation for comparison.

The project does not limit itself to just its viewer. The creators envision the platform as providing a space for discussion of Scotland in the high Middle Ages and beyond. The site provides a biweekly podcast, an active blog, multimedia videos on the history of Scotland, and the XML data they have used to create the editions. The site is free to use for non-commercial purposes.

‘The Development of the Welsh Language (Datblygiad yr Iaith Gymraeg)’: Fifteenth-century prose

Bwriad y prosiect yw digido rhyddiaith Gymraeg o’r llawysgrifau rhwng cyfnod y prosiect Rhyddiaith Gymraeg 1300–1425 a chyfnod y prosiect Corpws Hanesyddol yr Iaith Gymraeg 1500-1850

The project aims to digitise Middle Welsh prose manuscripts in the period between the project Welsh Prose 1300–1425 and the period of the project A Historical Corpus of the Welsh Language 1500-1850

European Library

Provides access to the contents of 48 European national libraries as well as a number of research libraries such as Oxford University’s Bodleian Library, including catalog entries and some full-text content. The European Library also provides the basis for the Europeana portal, which provides links to digitized books, including many early printed books.

The Index of Medieval Art

The Index of Medieval Art houses, contextualizes, and presents images and information relating to the iconographic traditions of the medieval world. Founded in 1917 and maintained by a specialized staff of art historians, it serves iconographic researchers through both its physical archive on the Princeton University campus and an expanding online database. Its ongoing program of conferences and publications provides opportunities for continuing scholarly and public discourse about the visual culture of the Middle Ages. Once a subscription service, the online database has been freely available to the public since 2023. Online holdings comprise 177, 306 (to date) online records of works of art from early apostolic times to ca. 1600. While western European and Byzantine Christian art remain most heavily represented, secular, Jewish, and Islamic art is also being added.

The International Collection of Digitized Hebrew Manuscripts

The International Collection of Digitized Hebrew Manuscripts is a resource that aggregates catalog entries and images of Hebrew manuscripts from repositories around the world. The project currently has entries for over 400,000 manuscripts of all types and genres from 123 collections; manuscripts in the collections comprise a wide range of medieval dates, from the 9th century to the 16th century. Data and images are pulled from the holding institution’s catalog. Thus, image and data quality varies among institutions. Entries are searchable by a number of qualities, including author, date, type of text, language, and many others. Links to the document’s holding institution are frequently present.

Holding institutions retain the copyright on data and images in the database and users must follow their guidelines for use. The Collection often provides links to holding institutions for copyright information.

Labyrinth: Resources for Medieval Studies

A collection of digital resources for medieval studies organized by category, including Art, Armor, Crusades, Gender, Manuscripts, and many others. The site may be browsed by category or searched, and each link is accompanied by a brief description of its contents.

* National History Day Selected Resource *

Making of Charlemagne’s Europe

The aim of the project is two-fold:

The first aim is to offer a single, unified database framework for the extraction of prosopographical and socio-economic data found in early medieval legal documents. Legal documents contain an extraordinary wealth of information for the political, social and economic history of this period, but they present significant challenges: practical ones, because they are scattered across many repositories, as well as methodological ones, because they can vary enormously across geographical regions, documentary types and traditions, and modes of transmission – all of which makes it hard to compare like with like. The aim of this project is to offer a common framework capable of extracting and comparing the data contained within legal documents, while still, at the same time, allowing users to identify and control for the most significant distortions typically affecting this material (such as modes of transmission, e.g. via an original or a later copy).

The second aim is to apply this framework to legal documents surviving from the reign of Charlemagne (25 September 768 to 28 January 814 AD). The reign of Charlemagne offers a particularly good case study, since it was a period of unprecedented expansion, leading to the absorption by the Frankish empire of many diverse regions within a short period of time. Over four thousand charters survive from the reign of Charlemagne (more than for the reign of any other early medieval European ruler); the database includes almost a thousand of them, selected for maximum variety in types of repository, modes of transmission, geographical area, recipients and issuers, etc.

The Migration of Faith: Clerical Exile in Late Antiquity, 325-600

The Migration of Faith project presents over 400 cases and 1100 people who experienced clerical exile in late antiquity. The project draws upon a wide range of sources to present the cases in a database, an interactive map, and a network map. The project also makes its data freely downloadable and usable under a Creative Commons license.

The Open Access Companion to the Canterbury Tales

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.

The Public Medievalist

The Public Medievalist is a volunteer, scholar-run online magazine that treats topics on the Middle Ages that may be of interest to the general public. Taking no particular political or disciplinary stance, the magazine invites articles on a wide array of topics, all of which touch upon the ways the Middle Ages resonate in our cultures today. Recently, the magazine has run special series on gender and sexuality, race, and games in the Middle Ages. All articles are peer reviewed by at least two scholars with an advanced degree. The magazine also publishes a podcast that treats topical intersections of contemporary culture and their intersections with the medieval period.

The Romaunt of the Rose

The Romaunt of the Rose project provides images and a side-by-side transcription of the Romance of the Rose from the University of Glasgow’s MS Hunter 409. The project also contains images of the library’s William Thynne’s 1532 edition of the Romance. Additionally, the website provides a description of the manuscript and a brief discussion of the text of the poem.

Rulers of Venice, 1332-1524

A searchable database of noble officeholders in the city of Venice from 1332-1524, drawn from the nine registers of the Segretario alle Voci, and elections to the Senate, the Council of Ten, and the Great Council, and originally published as Rulers of Venice, 1332-1524: Interpretations, Methods, Database (Renaissance Society of America, 2007).

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Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum

The Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum is a database of digitized medieval Latin texts on the topic of music, broadly imagined. Housed at the University of Indiana, the project transcribes and digitizes texts on all topics related to medieval music from the 5th to 17th centuries and provides a database to house them. A user may search by title, author, topic, century, and numerous other qualities. Each text entry offers a brief synopsis and bibliography, including manuscripts in which the text appears.

The TML clearly outlines their transcription policies and provides all their material for free via a Creative Commons license.

Thesaurus of Old English

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.