A digitized version of volumes 1-217 of Migne’s Patrologia Latina, a collection of texts in Latin by church fathers, theologians, popes, councils, and many others from late antiquity through the high Middle Ages, indexed by volume. The texts, which are divided by author within each volume, may be read online or downloaded in .pdf format.
People of Medieval Scotland 1093-1371 is a research project administered by King’s College London, University of Glasgow, and University of Edinburgh. The project has created an online database of all Scottish people mentioned in the over 8600 extant documents from the period 1093CE to 1371CE, though names and documents extend into the early 15th century. The database allows a user to search by keywords, people, places, sources, or “factoids,” which are legal events committed to documents. Each entry provides a list of associated people, the type of document, dates, and other documentary evidence as well as the holding institution for the document. When available, the project includes images of the documents in an on-screen viewer.
The project also presents an interactive network map that allows a user to visualize social connections in medieval Scotland. Additionally, the project presents a map of Scotland that a user may lay over with places and events as derived from the documentary evidence.
The database and its materials are free to use. The project is ongoing with the period under consideration extended in recent updates.
Published by the Society for Early English and Norse Electronic Texts (SEENET), the Piers Plowman Electronic Archive is a collaborative, peer-reviewed, and open-source web platform for the study of the texts and manuscripts of the late Middle English poem, Piers Plowman. Piers Plowman is a poem rich in versions and variants, and the project sets as its goal the publication of digital editions of each of the over 50 manuscript witnesses to the poem. Thus far it has published eight manuscripts in addition to the a reconstructed digital edition of the archetype of the B text of the poem. Many other manuscript witnesses are in the process of being edited as of 2020.
Each manuscript’s edition displays the text and material features of the manuscript along with the images from that manuscript. Users can also compare the text of individual manuscripts to the edited version of the text, making the platform particularly useful for comparing variant readings. Users will also find teaching materials for Piers Plowman along with an extensive bibliography on textual and manuscript studies as they relate to the poem.
Though image copyrights are held by institutions, the edited editions are open for use with citation. The source code and markup for the Archive is also downloadable.
Project Gutenberg, first begun in the 1970s, aims to provide free access to reading materials via the internet. The project currently includes over 50,000 open-access works, covering multiple subjects and representative of many time periods. Some of the works will be of interest to medievalists; editions of the Divine Comedy can be found in Italian on the site, for example, and other works of potential interest, both primary and secondary, are certainly to be found within the large collection. However, both the search and browse functions are outdated given current search engines. Even given the large number of volumes included, medieval works are more sparse than one might desire for inclusion in the MDR.
Description from creators: This project is a browseable directory of known copies of the Middle English Prose Brut chronicle, drawn from previous scholarly projects to describe and define the manuscript corpus. It contains links to projects, descriptions, and digital facsimiles of the manuscripts available on the web. A copy of the dataset is freely available for download and further experimentation.
During the later Middle Ages, the Middle English Prose Brut chronicle, commonly referred to as the Prose Brut, was possibly the most common source where a reader could learn about the history of England—from its legendary origins to the present dynasty. The Prose Brut survives in nearly two hundred manuscripts, compiled from the end of the fourteenth century on. This group of manuscripts has been the subject of extensive study for more than a century, as scholars and bibliographers have discovered new manuscripts and studied the Prose Brut’s relationship to other histories across a number of languages.
In the early 2000s, the multiyear digital humanities project “Imagining History: Perspectives on Late Medieval Vernacular Historiography” looked to put this information on the web in an open and expandable format. This most recent work has also been the most precarious. In 2017, the Imagining History Project’s data disappeared from the live internet. The handlist is the result of the project team’s work to remix the project data and to combine it with digitally available materials about the remaining manuscripts of the Brut, where possible. Since the project’s authors do not have direct control over much of the information, the project also illustrates the many different ways that institutions preserve data about medieval manuscripts.
For more on the project’s aims and goals, see Michelle Warren and Neil Weijer, “Re-Imagining Digital Things: Sustainable Data in Medieval Manuscript Studies” Digital Philology (Spring 2021): https://digitalcommons.dartmouth.edu/facoa/4056/
A searchable catalog of digitized manuscripts containing the Roman de la Rose, an allegorical love poem in the form of a dream vision composed in Old French in the 13th century. The current collection of 130 manuscripts (of an estimated 320 total) may be browsed by repository, shelf mark, date, origin, or illustrations, allowing cross-manuscript comparison of illustrations and sections of text. Much of the data downloadable in .csv format.
* National History Day Selected Resource *
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.
The Community of the Realm in Scotland 1249-1424 is an ongoing project hosted by King’s College, London that seeks to provide digital editions of important Scottish documents from the middle and later medieval period. The creators of the project have begun with the Declaration of Arbroath, a seminal document in the foundation of a community of the realm of Scotland, and Regiam Majestatem, the foundational legal document for the realm. Rather than privileging stemmatic editing and its search for an archetypal version of a text, the Community of the Realm’s edition of the Declaration allows a user to compare versions of the document as it appears in different manuscript witnesses. When in comparison mode, a user can view others’ annotations or make their own. Likewise, users can view the document in Latin or in an English translation for comparison.
The project does not limit itself to just its viewer. The creators envision the platform as providing a space for discussion of Scotland in the high Middle Ages and beyond. The site provides a biweekly podcast, an active blog, multimedia videos on the history of Scotland, and the XML data they have used to create the editions. The site is free to use for non-commercial purposes.
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
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 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.
A searchable database of noble officeholders in the city of Venice from 1332-1524, drawn from the nine registers of the Segretario alle Voci, and elections to the Senate, the Council of Ten, and the Great Council, and originally published as Rulers of Venice, 1332-1524: Interpretations, Methods, Database (Renaissance Society of America, 2007).
A collection of resources and tools for manuscript studies, including links to HMML manuscripts, pedagogical exercises, and research tools.
* National History Day Selected Resource *
An ongoing set of linked and annotated digital editions of medieval world maps, published as open-access scholarship, and undertaken in collaboration with the British Library, and hosted by the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies.
Each map edited in the project is available as a fully annotated digital facsimile edition, with every inscription many other features of interest highlighted, and linked to an annotation that includes a transcription, translation, and additional notes.
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.