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Anglo-Norman Dictionary

The Anglo-Norman Dictionary projects offers a free digital presence for the standard dictionary of Anglo-Norman French. Its first printed edition was published between 1977 and 1992. The second, revised, edition started in the late 1990s and is still ongoing: its work is published online in (bi-)yearly installments and is expected to be completed by 2029. The site provides coverage for areas of francophone activity in the British Isles from 1066 up to 1500.
The site also provides a detailed Bibliography of all Anglo-Norman primary sources currently available, an introduction to Anglo-Norman for a non-academic public, a range of searchable Anglo-Norman texts, unpublished transcriptions and academic articles.

Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources

An Oxford-based research project, the Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources is a dictionary of medieval Latin in the British Isles from 540CE to 1600CE based entirely on original research. Published through Brepolis, the online version presents the contents of the print dictionary in a searchable format. Drawing only on sources from the British Isles, the dictionary shows localized usages of Latin words.

There are two versions of the DMLBS. The free version is available through Logeion and can only be searched by keyword. The paid version published by Brepols has more extensive search features and is accessible through Brepolis. On that version, a user may create advanced searches that include or exclude terms as well as browse an index of headwords.

Dictionary of the Welsh Language

GPC is the only standard historical dictionary of the Welsh language.
It is broadly comparable in method and scope to the Oxford English Dictionary.

It presents the vocabulary of the Welsh language from the earliest Old Welsh texts, through the abundant literature of the Medieval and Modern periods, to the huge expansion in vocabulary resulting from the wider use of Welsh in all aspects of life in the last half century.

This vocabulary is defined in Welsh, and English equivalents are also given. Detailed attention is given to variant forms, collocations, and etymology.

The work is based on an ever-expanding collection of over two million citation slips gathered from a range of texts over many years.

Digital Bodleian

The Bodleian Libraries’ collections are extraordinary and significant—both from a scholarly point of view and as material that has an historic and aesthetic richness that holds value for non-academic users. Each year the Libraries serve more than 65,000 readers, over 40% of them from beyond the University, while its critically-acclaimed exhibitions attract almost 100,000 visitors annually. In an effort to make portions of our collections open to a wide variety of users from around the world for learning, teaching and research, the Bodleian Libraries have been digitizing library content for nearly twenty years. The result is over 650,000 freely available digital objects and almost another 1 million images awaiting release.

Like many academic libraries, though, our freely available digital collections have been placed online in project-driven websites, with content stored in discrete ‘silos’, each with their own metadata format, different user interfaces, and no common search interface enabling users to discover content or navigate across collections. Some of our collections are linked at portal pages, but each collection remains, with a few exceptions, isolated and difficult to search. In addition, only a few collections offer a machine-readable interface, or any way to link their data with similar data in other Bodleian collections, or with collections at other institutions.

Digital.Bodleian aims to solve these problems by:

  • Bringing together our discrete collections under a single user interface which supports fast user-friendly viewing of high resolution images.
  • Standardizing the metadata for each collection to facilitate faceted browsing and searching across collections.
  • Converting all of our images in a variety of formats to JPEG2000 and migrating them to a robust scalable storage infrastructure.
  • Allowing users to tag and annotate images and group together content into their own virtual collections which can be shared with other users.
  • Allowing users to export metadata and images.

All of these tasks have been carried out using standards-compliant file formats and methods and with a view to future expansion, scalability and robustness.

Early English Laws Online

Early English Laws Online has as its goal the publication in print and translation of all English legal codes up to Magna Carta in 1215. Currently, the project has digitized and indexed a number of legal texts from the period in Latin, Old French, and Old English. One can search by text name, abbreviation, category, or by the king under whose reign the laws were written. Likewise, one can view catalog data and links to other repositories containing manuscripts of the legal codes. A few of these manuscripts have images that can be viewed in the site’s manuscript viewer.

The project also contains a bibliography on English law, a glossary, contextual essays, and links to other related projects.

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).

 

Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru: A Dictionary of the Welsh Language

Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru: A Dictionary of the Welsh Language (GPC) is the online version of A Dictionary of the Welsh Language, the historical dictionary of Welsh similar in scope to the Oxford English Dictionary. Funded by the Welsh government, the decades-long print project was completed in 2001 and the digital version was begun in 2011 and is an ongoing project. The GPC contains entries dating back to the earliest references to Welsh and contains many entries spanning the medieval period. Entries contain grammatical information as well as a definition and dated historical sources to the words under consideration. Users may search entries in either Welsh or English.

The project is free to use and has an active web presence that updates users on the project’s status.

Guto’r Glyn Website / Gwefan Guto’r Glyn

This is a freely available online bilingual (Welsh and English) standard critical edition of the poetry of Guto’r Glyn (c.1435-c.1490). Guto’r Glyn is regarded as one of the most accomplished poets of late medieval Wales. As well as providing the user with translations of the poetry and paraphrases into modern Welsh, there are copious notes on the poems, the patrons, their homes, on the historical background and any notable linguistic features. Each poem is also accompanied by images from the most important manuscript witnesses (provided by the National Library of Wales), as well as transcriptions.

 

Matthew Paris’s Clickable Map: An Interactive Claudius Map

“This project presents an annotated copy of Matthew Paris’s c. 1250 map of Britain (BL Cotton MS Claudius D VI), made using Omeka’s Neatline extension.”

The annotated map is clickable with annotations that include text, images from medieval manuscripts, and sometimes modern photographs of locations depicted in Paris’s maps.

Medieval Welsh Law

The project has two aims. Firstly, to present a guide to Cyfraith Hywel, medieval Welsh law, by explaining what Welsh law was, how the law worked, and suggesting further reading by listing subject-specific academic publications for several fields within this broad topic.

The second aim is to look at the law manuscripts, the starting point for working on Cyfraith Hywel. A short description of each manuscript is presented, along with a detailed list of contents for the individual manuscripts. It will be possible for anyone who is keen to learn more about the laws to turn to these tables to see exactly what is in the manuscripts, and also to see where else those sections may occur.

It is possible to use the explanatory sections together with the detailed work on the manuscripts to offer a fuller picture of what the texts of Cyfraith Hywel contain.

‘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