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.
Published by the University of the Basque Country, the Becerro Galicano Digital project provides a digital edition, facsimile, and downloadable data derived from the cartulary. The Becerro Galicano is an extensive cartulary from the monastery of San Millan de la Cogolla, which is situated in the Rioja area on the border between Navarre and Castille. The monastery played a large role in the history of large swathes of northern-central Spain (Navarre, Rioja, Basque Country, Castile), and the Becerro is one of the most important sources for the region’s history from the 8th century to the 13th century.
The digital project provides an image of each folio of the manuscript in addition to an accompanying critical text. The website also makes available a bibliography on the cartulary as well as a brief introduction to its importance. Data from the project, including the critical text and indices of names and places, can be downloaded in RTF and TEI format. The website is available in Spanish, English, and Basque.
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.
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.
Provides a variety of primary and secondary resources on medieval military history, created and maintained by the Society for Medieval Military History, publisher of the Journal of Medieval Military History (JMMH).
Created by scholars at the University of Birmingham, the Estoria de Espanna Digital project has created a digital edition of nine of the medieval manuscript witnesses to the text of the Estoria de Espanna, the 13th-century Spanish-language chronicle commissioned by Alfonso X. The chronicle details the history of the Iberian peninsula from Roman times up to Alfonso’s reign. The project presents the versions in diplomatic or facsimile format and allows a user to view texts side by side for comparison.
The project includes methodological and introductory information in both Spanish and English. The project has also made its data open-source, allowing users to download complete textual versions in XML. The project was recently updated in June 2020.
This peer-reviewed project publishes a set of editions for four recently identified short Carolingian Latin texts in a late tenth-century English manuscript; three of these texts were not previously known to be in England before the Norman Conquest. The editions themselves link together digital manuscript facsimiles, transcriptions, editorial commentary and modern English translations.
Housed at Johns Hopkins University, the Glossarial Concordance to Middle English is a database of words and their locations in texts derived from the Chaucer and Gower’s poetic works. The creators hope to expand the platform to other Middle English authors in the future. Drawing primarily from Larry Benson’s Riverside Chaucer in addition to the compiled works of Gower, the database allows a user to make complex searches for terms and phrases in those authors’ works. For an entry, the Concordance presents the text’s title and the line number at which it appears.
The site also interacts with the Middle English Dictionary to allow a user to search by dictionary headword. Searching is made simpler through the use of predictive text, so that as a user begins typing, the Concordance offers possible matches in the search box. The site invites users to contact the creators if they would like to add a text. Additionally, the source code for the project is made available on GitHub.
The Historical Atlas of the Low Countries includes GIS datasets that represent various areas of the low countries including Brabant, Holland, Zeeland, Hainaut, Artois and others. The sets are made freely available for download and use under a Creative Commons license.
Measuring Polyphony is an ongoing project by researchers at Brandeis University and McGill University to digitally transcribe and notate polyphonic musical texts from manuscripts of the 13th and 14th centuries. As of 2020, the project presents around fifty musical pieces and has plans for growth. Currently, most of the transcribed musical texts are in Latin or French. Each entry presents musical texts in medieval mensural and modern notations. For some entries, the project presents manuscript images in IIIF format to compare against the marked-up scores. Pieces also include audio recordings of their performance in addition to downloadable data for each piece in MEI and PDF format.
Measuring Polyphony is committed to open-source data and has made the encoding process clear. The project also makes available all of its data in XML and MEI format and also provides access to its software apparatus on GitHub.
Medieval Londoners introduces resources available for research about medieval London and its people, focusing not only on documentary and narrative sources in print, but also archaeological, visual, and cartographic sources that illuminate the physical and material world inhabited by medieval Londoners.
An important component of the website is the Medieval Londoners Database (MLD), which records the activities of London residents between c. 1100 and 1520, and is searchable by name, gender, citizenship status, location (ward, parish, and street if available), craft, occupation, civic office, and craft office, among other variables.
The Medieval Nordic Text Archive (Menota) is a digital repository for medieval texts from Nordic repositories. A user can navigate the repository in either English or Norwegian. A joint project among many libraries and universities across Scandinavia, Menota invites editors to submit medieval texts in the Nordic languages or Latin. All texts on the platform have been marked up in XML and users can select a variety of views, like diplomatic of facsimile. As of 2020, over 50 manuscripts have been digitally edited and the project is ongoing.
Beyond digital texts, the platform also provides a few translations of medieval texts, lexicographical resources, and links to some images of manuscripts in Nordic repositories. Menota makes its encoding practices clear in documents and handbooks available on the site. The XML of digital editions hosted on the platform are open-source and available for download.
MedMel (The Music of Medieval Vernacular Lyric) contains digital editions of monodic melodies of Troubadours, Trouvères and Trobadores lyrics, and it is aimed at musicologists, philologists and performers. The MedMel database allows users to search lyrics and melodic patterns, customize their visualization, switch from modern to ancient notation, export the music in various formats (pdf, HTML, XML/MEI) and listen to the melody.
The digital editions are created with the MelMed Editor, which is made publicly available for scholars and musicians who need an expressive and simple tool to transcribe medieval music.
A database of the volumes of the Monumenta Germaniae Historia (MGH), a collection of meticulously edited primary sources for the study of the Middle Ages with an emphasis on the German lands. The database may be searched or browsed by the department, and the volumes (published 1826-2010) may be read online or downloaded as .pdfs.
Provides an index of volumes published in University of Copenhagen’s Monumenta Musicae Byzantinae series, dedicated to scholarship about Byzantine chant. Also includes extensive bibliography, an inventory of the microfilms and photos of manuscripts housed at the University for the study of Byzantine chant, and the standard abridged version of the Sticherarion (Byzantine notated chant book) downloadable in .pdf format.
The premise of the Old English Poetry in Facsimile project is simple: produce a comprehensive collection of open-access, scholarly and rigorous digital facsimile editions that present digital manuscript images, transcriptions and translations of Old English poetry all in one place, to better allow people to study and explore these works. To do so, the project takes advantage of the new Digital Mappa 2.0 platform, which allows editors to make links and annotations across individual moments on related images and texts, and users to open and view multiple items side by side.
This project combines older editorial traditions with “bigger data” resources and research for more comprehensive lexical, dialectal and orthographic editorial readings.
Editions on this site practice “restorative retention” – privileging the text as written over emendation wherever possible, with an emphasis on description rather than prescription – in an effort to better preserve and understand linguistic and poetic heterogeneity in early medieval England.
Over 300 editions of Old English verse have been published, including examples of every genre: psalms, riddles, inscribed objects, charms, heroic verse, prayers, Boethian meters, wisdom poetry, marginal micro-texts, chronicle poems, homiletic verse, dialogues, and others.
The Dictionary of Old Norse Prose (ONP) is an online dictionary containing over 50,000 words derived from texts of Old Norse prose. Published by the University of Copenhagen, the project is ongoing as of 2020 with new words added regularly. The dictionary is searchable in a number of ways: by headword, text, manuscript, type of word, and numerous others. ONP makes it corpus data freely downloadable and has added information like the genre of text from which the word derives or whether it used in poetry or legal texts as well. Users can also view the words contained in particular texts or manuscripts and download that data for research purposes. When available, the ONP links to images of manuscripts and freely available editions of texts. Dictionary entries contain a list of sources in which the word appears in addition to its grammatical qualities.
Additionally, the project includes an expansive bibliography and has an active social media presence that offers a word-of-the-day feature.
A digitized version of Migne’s Patrologia Graeca, a collection of texts in Greek by church fathers, theologians, councils, and many others from late antiquity through the high Middle Ages, as well as other Greek medieval texts, in the original Greek with some translations into English, German, and French. The texts are indexed alphabetically by author and may be read online or downloaded in .pdf format.