Skip to content

Archives

Archivio Segreto Vaticano: The Papal Archives

An informational site that provides descriptions of and guide to the holdings of the Archivio Segreto Vaticano (ASV) and its publications, including a history of the archive and procedures for consultation or requests for photographic or digital reproductions of any holdings. Descriptions of the major projects are accompanied by images of representative manuscripts. The downloadable guide lists the over 600 different collections, but not individual manuscripts of their contents.

Read More →

SfarData: The Codicological Data-Base of the Hebrew Palaeography Project

The goal of the project was to locate all the medieval codices written in the Hebrew script, which contained explicit production dates or at least scribe names; to study and document all their visual and measurable material features and scribal practices in situ, i.e. in the libraries in which they were kept; and classify these features and practices in order to expose a historical typology of the hand-produced Hebrew book and provide users of Hebrew manuscripts with a tool for identifying the production region and assessing the period of the studied manuscripts. Indeed, since the initiation of the project, almost all the dated manuscripts that were located have been studied and documented in some two hundred and fifty libraries and private collections.

Bibliotheca Legum: A Database on Carolingian Secular Law Texts

The Bibliotheca legum regni Francorum manuscripta aspires to do so with a focus on the legal knowledge that was disseminated in the Frankish Kingdom. The website presents descriptions of manuscripts which contain the so-called leges or barbarian law-codes. At present, 327 short descriptions are available. In addition to that, the database also provides contextualizing informations and tries – for example by means of a comprehensive bibliography – to represent the current state of research as complete as possible. External resources like online catalogues and digital images are also included.

[website is in German with an option to display in English]

 

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.

Biblissima

Bibliothèque virtuelle des bibliothèques, ce portail vous invite à découvrir l’histoire d’une partie des textes et livres qui ont été écrits, traduits, enluminés, collectionnés ou inventoriés depuis l’Antiquité jusqu’au XVIIIe siècle.

A virtual library of libraries, this portal invites you to discover the history of a portion of the texts and books  that were written, translated, illuminated, collected or catalogued from Antiquity to the eighteenth century.

Bloomsbury Medieval Studies

Bloomsbury Medieval Studies is a subscription-based platform that provides a number of sources for the study of the Middle Ages across the globe and within all subperiods. Among the resources is the Encyclopedia of the Global Middle Ages, over 200 ebooks on a variety of topics, images of digitized primary sources including manuscripts and incunables, and research and learning tools.

British History Online

A digital library and index of primary and secondary sources and British and Irish history resources, which currently (Jan. 2016) contains material from over 1,250 printed volumes. Also provides  digitized versions of guides and calendars held at the National Archives at Kew, and historic maps, including the 19th-century Ordnance Survey. Augmented by scholarly born-digital resources like browsable datasets compiled from taxes, references to medieval market privileges, and central courts such as the Court of Common Pleas. Also includes useful subject guides to local, parliamentary, urban, and religious history with essays and bibliography. A small amount of content is restricted to subscription holders.

* National History Day Selected Resource *

Cambridge Genizah Digital Collection

The Cambridge Genizah collection is one of the largest groups of medieval Jewish manuscript fragments in the world. Famously, Cambridge is the repository for most of the materials of the Cairo Genizah, which were brought there with the Jewish community’s permission in the early 20th century. Roughly 193,000 items from the Genizah are housed in the library today. The digital collections contain over 20,000 digitized and fully searchable items with downloadable metadata and a variety of image sizes in IIIF format. Further, Cambridge has encouraged community-driven metadata and allowed users to tag fragments with keywords, which has expanded search opportunities.

Cantus Index

Cantus Index is a catalogue of chant texts and melodies for Office and Mass. Multiple online medieval music databases have been connected together through unique “Cantus ID numbers”. Chant texts and melodies can be searched on this Cantus Index website, and matches in any of the partner databases will be returned.

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]

Cantus Planus at University of Regensburg

Cantus Planus at the University of Regensburg presents a variety of tools and databases for the study of plainchant. The site offers a number of datafiles containing antiphons, responsories, and the texts of various liturgical books from across Europe. Likewise, the site presents databases for searching various aspects of the liturgy, including saints’ feasts or the type of liturgy used for a particular day. Likewise, the site contains search apparatus for notation as well as a number of bibliographies on chant.

The site is free to use, though it has not been recently updated.

Carolingian Canon Law

The Carolingian Canon Law project is a searchable, electronic rendition of works of canon law used by Carolingian readers. This project maps the extent of variation in “standard” legal texts known to Carolingian readers, and identifies particular points of variation. In addition to clarifying the textual history of medieval canon law, the project will provide historical and bibliographic annotation of several hundred canons used by jurists before, during, and after the Carolingian period. We invite all scholars of medieval canon law to contribute translations, annotations, transcriptions, and comments. All such contributions are publicly credited. To contribute, please register for an account.

Celtic Digital Initiative

The aim of the Celtic Digital Initiative (CDI) is to make scarce resources available in an electronic format to students and scholars, both within UCC and beyond. This initiative has been jointly funded by the Department of Early and Medieval Irish and by the Quality Promotion Unit (from its Quality Improvement Fund) and is an ongoing project; material is continually added to the site as time and finances allow.

There are four major sections: Images (digitised pictures of interest to Celticists), Text Archive (links to PDF files of rare material), Celtic Noticeboard(an area devoted to announcements of forthcoming conferences, events, vacancies, publications etc.) and Celtic journals (tables of contents of Celtic Studies journals).

* National History Day Selected Resource *