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Alberti Magni e-corpus

The aim of the Alberti Magni e-corpus project is to support research on Albert the Great by providing scholars the possibility: 1) to download image files of Albert’s works that can be found in editions no longer covered by copyright laws; 2) more importantly, to search 60 of those works electronically, using a Boolean search engine which gives access to a corpus of approximately 19,000 pages in print or 8.6 million words.

Amalarius’s Bells: An Old English and Medieval Latin Edition

This digital scholarly project is designed as a learning resource for students of all levels of Old English, medieval Latin, paleography, and medieval translation, and also as a detailed resource for scholars. It provides full transcriptions & editions of a short medieval Latin text and its subsequent Old English translation, digital facsimiles of both manuscript versions, Latin and Old English glossaries, editorial commentary, and detailed discussion of the manuscripts and their contexts. It also showcases the full power of the Digital Mappa 2.0 platform for digital publication and scholarship.

At its center are two texts: a piece of Old English prose from the eleventh century, partly erased, of some forty-five lines, that itself is a direct translation of a late tenth-century Anglo-Latin version of the same content. These texts detail the allegorical significance of the ringing of church bells, and derive from redactions of the Liber Officialis, a massive ninth-century treatise by Amalarius of Metz which figurally treats a vast range of objects and rituals related to the celebration of Mass. The Belltokens project offers students and scholars entry into the evolution of material in early medieval England from a number of scholarly and pedagogical perspectives, and will be of use to those interested in learning about Old English, medieval Latin, manuscript and paleographical studies. In this edition, every single word of the Old English and Latin texts has been edited, and interlinked between its occurrence on the manuscript page, an edited transcription, a full glossary, and its linguistic analogue in the Latin or Old English witness, respectively. The edition provides a rare window into the process of vernacular translation, where an Old English scribe had to translate a Latin text that they themselves understood to be corrupted. It also serves as a companion to the Four Anglo-Carolingian Minitexts project, as they overlap in their studies of the Cotton Vespasian D. xv manuscript, its content, and background.

Using the Digital Mappa platform, this project suggests new ways to conceive of a digital edition of medieval materials – e.g. granularly linking moments of digital manuscript facsimiles, transcriptions, translations and commentary, and also taking advantage of the capacity to link internally among the editions’ annotations and primary materials and then externally to other relevant online digital resources.

Bibliotheca Latina: Latinitas Mediaevalis

A free digital library providing medieval Latin texts from the 7th to the 14th centuries in an alphabetical list (by author). It is part of the larger IntraText Library digital collection published by Èulogos SpA (http://www.eulogos.net), which includes, among other archives, Biblioteca Italiana and Biblioteca religiosa. Texts are harvested from other websites—not all academic–as well as print matter. Searchable across entire collection. Includes linked notes, concordances, lists, and statistics related to texts. Although BL texts are also searchable by author, title, or general period of origin, the site offers no editorial or contextual information. Published under Creative Commons.

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Bibliothèque virtuelle des manuscrits médiévaux (BVMM)

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.

Books of Duchesses

Books of Duchesses is a collaborative project that collects, organizes, and presents data related to late-medieval laywomen and their books. Through an interactive map of Europe, users are able to visualize networks of manuscripts, texts, and readers and explore the libraries and peregrinations of woman book owners. The data collected in the project has the potential to shift scholarly paradigms by challenging narratives of national literary history and uncovering the active role played by women in creating and consuming literary and material culture and in circulating texts across national, geographic, and generational borders. The geographic scope of the project is currently mostly focused on Western Europe. The time frame of the project is 1350 and 1550, a period of intense political, interfamilial, and interpersonal changes and exchanges due to the Hundred Years War and its aftermath. The project focuses on laywomen and therefore excludes books owned by enclosed religious women and female religious institutions. At the moment, the core of the data concerns aristocratic laywomen, as this information is the most readily available. In the future, the scope of the project will expand to include women from other social classes, additional geographic and linguistic regions in and beyond Europe, and data from the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries.

The project’s research methodology is designed to accommodate the inherent ambiguity of women’s book ownership without sacrificing accuracy. The project includes both extant and non-extant books and both confirmed and possible instances of book ownership. Each instance of ownership is further defined by noting the type of evidence used to connect owner and book. Some ownership evidence is found in extant manuscripts (inscriptions, patron portraits, coats of arms etc.) while other ownership evidence comes from primary documents such as wills, inventories, household documents, and letters. “Other” evidence includes a secondary article or catalogue entry where evidence type in the source is not otherwise specified.

The project also accommodates ambiguity in textual identification. It is not always possible to identify a text found in a non-extant book. For example, a non-extant manuscript described as “a French book” in a woman’s inventory will be cataloged as including an “Unidentified French Text.”

Finally, the project includes both precise and approximate information about the geographical locations of women book owners and of books as possible. In some cases we are able to record the exact day, month, and year when a woman was at a particular location. In other cases, we make an educated guess about a woman’s whereabouts at a particular time. We choose to include this ambiguous data in order to make more women book owners visible on the map. For the books, we include information about their location when it is sufficiently well documented (as by a letter, inventory, will, or library catalog, for instance).

CANTUS Network: libri ordinarii of the Salzburg metropolitan province

The research project CANTUS NETWORK, based at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, aims to investigate the records of Christian medieval worship that have survived in manuscript form and describe the practice of liturgical and musical acts of worship. The key sources for this transmission are the liturgical “prompt books”, called liber ordinarius, which include a short form of more or less the entire rite of a diocese or a monastery. Here, prayers, readings and chants are given as in abbreviated form as text incipits.
A liber ordinarius usually includes all information necessary for the church services of an individual institution (church, monastery) or a group (diocese, group of monasteries). On the one hand, this includes the incipits of chants, readings and prayers for the liturgy of the hours, for mass and for processions. On the other hand, it also includes rubrics that provide instructions on how and when particular liturgical actions should be carried out. In a third column, libri ordinarii may contain commentaries on the liturgy taken from standard contemporary works, providing additional information for particular feast days or a particular liturgical activity. A fourth column may provide the unlined neume notation of the chant incipits. When dealing with parts of ordinals, the neumes are the only proof of which piece of music is actually concerned. “Local colour” is created by the combination of the three or four columns, that is, the chant and recital text tradition, the rubrics and the explanations of the liturgy. [the site is in German with an English option]

Christian Classics Ethereal Library (CCEL)

A searchable digital library of Christian texts in English translation, drawn from out- of-copyright editions. Texts are readable online, or downloadable as an ePUB, .pdf, or .txt. Each text also includes a brief summary and information about the author and edition. Searchable by title, author, scriptural passages, etc.., but not by date or period.

 

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.

e-codices: Virtual Manuscript Library of Switzerland

A collection of nearly 1,500 digitized manuscripts from Swiss libraries and collections. These manuscripts may be searched or browsed (by location, language, date, material, author, scribe, and others), including brief descriptions and annotations and bibliography where available. Libraries and collections include: St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek; Cologny, Foundation Martin Bodmer; Basel, Universitätsbibliothek; Einsiedeln, Stiftsbibliothek, and many others.

Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Index

Searchable bibliography/index of articles in over 500 journals, book reviews, and essays in books about women, sexuality, and gender during the middle ages published from c.1990 onwards. Excludes books by a single author (e.g., monographs). Many items include  brief annotations. Some images also indexed. Provides links to other resources on medieval women and gender (including masculinity and homosexuality).

 

Gallica (BnF)

Gallica is the digital library of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and makes available nearly thousands of manuscripts, printed books, and images that may be searched or browsed online, some of which are available for download as .pdf or .jpg.

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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.

Hebrew Fragments in Austria

A joint venture between the Austrian National Library, the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and the Institute for Jewish History in Austria, the Hebrew Fragments in Austria project provides images of Hebrew language fragments in Austrian manuscripts. The website functions in both English and German. There are over 500 images of fragments from over twenty repositories present in the database currently. Many of the fragments in the collection are contained in the bindings of other manuscripts and early printed books. Images are presented in JPG format and include catalog information. The projects also presents a list of the fragments arranged by text and manuscript.

The website for the project also includes a bibliography on the study of fragments generally and the study of fragments in Germanic countries specifically. Likewise, the website also presents a map of institutions in Austria holding fragments.

Internet Medieval History Sourcebook

The Internet Medieval Sourcebook is useful primarily as a source for short extracts, derived from public domain sources or copy-permitted translations, to be used for teaching (particularly for medieval survey courses). Also included are some complete documents, notably saints’ lives, or links to the full documents. The editor states that the early aim was to include a wide range of texts which address elite governmental, legal, religious and economic concerns. The resources now also include a large selection of texts on women’s and gender history, Islamic and Byzantine history, Jewish history, and social history. The texts, again according to the editor’s own statement, vary in quality, and do not always represent the best or most modern translation.

* National History Day Selected Resource *

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.