Genealogies have been constructed and used for hundreds of years to help families understand their ancestry and more recently to help scholars understand the relationships between medieval people and families. The Rusian genealogical database offers an update on this traditional discipline. The research underlying this database is new and is built on the primary sources in Old East Slavic, Latin, Greek, and Old Norse, as well as a thorough reading and understanding of the modern secondary literature. That information is then accessed through an XML database that allows the user to search through the variety of information presented here, including parentage, regnal dates, place of rule, and other data points. The end result is the most accurate genealogy of Rus′ yet developed, presented in an accessible and intuitive way for use by scholars, students, and others.
Archives
Saints in Scottish Place-Names
Saints in Scottish Place-Names is a research project published by the University of Glasgow that seeks to catalog all the place names in Scotland derived from saints. The majority of the over 13,000 place names cataloged derive from the medieval period and from the many historical languages of Scotland, including Norse, Scots, Latin, and Gaelic. Users are able to search by either place name or saint’s name in addition to a more robust advanced search. Further, users may view a list of places and saints. Individual entries include the place-name, saint, and the source that first lists the place-name. The project also provides a map on which users may see the hagiotoponyms overlaid.
All information on the site is provided free of charge with citation.
Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts
The SDBM continuously aggregates and updates observations of pre-modern manuscripts drawn from over 13,000 auction and sales catalogs, inventories, catalogs from institutional and private collections, and other sources that document sales and locations of these books from around the world. It may be searched or browsed by author, title, seller, provenance, date, and others, and the datasets may also be downloaded in .xlsx or .csv format. Members of our user community are invited to log in and help us to build, maintain, and improve this resource.
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St. Gall Project
Provides a digital reconstruction of the 9th-century libraries of the monasteries of Reichenau and St. Gall, including manuscript images, codicological descriptions bibliography, and virtual exhibitions of selections from the library. Also includes a high-resolution image of the Plan of St. Gall (Codex Sangallensis 1092) a detailed plan of the monastery complex, along with a modern diagram and a number of modern 2D and 3D models. [note: this site is no longer updated and has been archived]
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Syri.ac
This site aims to be a comprehensive annotated bibliography of open-access resources related to the study of Syriac. The primary goal of Syri.ac is to make research on Syriac literature, history, and culture as painless and direct as possible. The annotated bibliographies can be accessed through the list of authors and themes at the top right of the page (or through a dropdown menu on mobile devices). Each page offers direct links to editions and translations of the texts referenced. Our intention is to collate in one place a world-class scholarly library that can be accessed completely through the web.
Other tools for Syriac research are also available through the menu at the top of the page. The most significant is our database of Syriac manuscripts available in digitized form. The database is searchable and offers direct links to manuscripts, even specific folios of manuscripts, so that students and scholars can quickly consult high-quality images of physical Syriac texts online.
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 *
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 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
‘The Development of the Welsh Language (Datblygiad yr Iaith Gymraeg)’: Prose of c.1300-c.1425
Welsh Prose 1300–1425 is a site which presents a searchable corpus of Medieval Welsh prose.
Some 2.8 million words are covered in 54 manuscripts. The manuscripts contain over 100 texts – some repeated in different manuscripts – here categorised into different genres.
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.
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.
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.
Usuarium
vHMML (Virtual Hill Museum & Manuscript Library)
A collection of resources and tools for manuscript studies, including links to HMML manuscripts, pedagogical exercises, and research tools.
* National History Day Selected Resource *
eTK and eVK2: Thorndike and Kibre online (Voigts-Kurtz)
Wissensaggregator Mittelalter und Frühe Neuzeit (WIAG)
The Knowledge Aggregator for the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period is a German-language website that brings together groups of datasets about the Middle Ages. Currently, the aggregator makes freely available four datasets based on inscriptions, seals, and other prosopographic sources. Those are: the Bishops of the Holy Roman Empire, the Dioceses of the Holy Roman Empire, Canons of the Holy Roman Empire, and Priests of the Diocese of Utrecht. Datasets include a variety of data, including in some cases birth dates, death dates, and positions held by historical persons.
Works of St. Thomas Aquinas
The works of St. Thomas Aquinas, in English
Wren Digital Library
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.
York’s Archbishops’ Registers Revealed
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.