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.
Met Publications is the publishing house website of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. The site contains listings for many of the publications of the Met Museum dating back to 1911 on topics touching on all aspects of art history from all periods and regions. Included among these are numerous exhibition catalogs, collection catalogs, the Metropolitan Museum Journal, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, educational and pedagogical books, and other online publications. Titles that are currently in print by the Met are fully searchable, though one must purchase the books to see the entire text. For books that are out of print, the museum makes the fully text available online and for download for free.
The search function on the Met Publications site allows users to search the various types of publications by name, author, type of text, and date among other qualities. Publications are regularly updated.
Der Relaunch von manuscripta.at 2014 bietet neue Daten und Funktionalitäten, darunter:
- einen Viewer für Digitalisate (Handschriften, ungedruckte Verzeichnisse und Materialien, Printpublikationen). Optional können die Digitalisate auch im DFG-Viewer betrachtet werden. Auf dislozierte Digitalisate wird verlinkt.
- die direkte Verknüpfung der Handschrifteneinträge mit der “Bibliographie zu österreichischen Handschriften” (über den Link “Literatur zur Handschrift” oder “Weitere Literatur zur Handschrift”). Der direkte Zugang zur Bibliographie erfolgt über das Menü links (“Bibliographie”). Der Menüpunkt “Kataloge” erstellt eine gesonderte Liste der Handschriftenkataloge, geordnet nach Bibliotheksorten.
- verbesserte Suchfunktionen, etwa die Schnellsuche nach einer bestimmten Handschrift über Ort/Bibliothek und Signatur (Teil von Signatur).
manuscripta.at soll nach und nach zum zentralen Nachweis- und Rechercheinstrument für mittelalterliche Handschriften in Österreich ausgebaut werden.
The relaunch of manuscripta.at in 2014 offers new data and functionality, including:
- a viewer for digital images (manuscripts, unpublished directories and materials, print publications).
- the direct linking of manuscript entries to the “Bibliography on Austrian Manuscripts” (via the link “Literatur zur Handschrift” or “Weitere Literatur zur Handschrift”). Direct access to the bibliography is via the menu on the left (“Bibliography”). The menu item “Catalogs” creates a separate list of manuscript catalogs, sorted by library type.
- improved search functions, such as the quick search for a specific manuscripts by location / library and signature (part of signature).
manuscripta.at will continue to be developed into the central evidence- and research-tool for medieval manuscripts in Austria.
Models of Authority is a joint research project by University of Glasgow, University of Cambridge, and King’s College, London. The project has brought together digital images of over 90 charters of particular import for the creation of Scottish government during the period 1100CE to 1250CE. The charters are held by a variety of institutions across the United Kingdom. Models of Authority’s platform allows users to tag and annotate the images of charters and many of them have scores of annotations crowdsourced by users.
The project uses Lightbox to allow users to save and annotate their own images of the charters and then save them for personal use or add their own annotations to the documents. Beyond providing images, descriptions, and links to the holding repository, the project also has a blog and articles written by project researchers. The platform is free to use, but image copyrights belong to institution in possession of the charter.
Monasterium is a collaborative digital archive containing charters and documents from over 2000 repositories across 17 European countries. The site can be used in 14 different languages. Not limited solely to documents of the Middle Ages, Monasterium brings together over 775,000 digital documents. After registering for a free account, users are able to interact with images of the archival documents, sharing comments on the platform. In order to join the archive, repositories must agree to metadata standards to ensure cohesion across collections. Monasterium is maintained by ICARUS, the International Centre for Archival Research.
Ongoing collection of texts (primary and secondary, in original and translation) and images of art and architecture related to religious women in medieval Europe.
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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.
The Munich DigitiZation Center (MDZ) is the digital imagining website of the Bavarian State Library and associated institutions. The website includes content in German, English, and Italian. The MDZ is responsible for digitizing and publishing images of the State Library’s rich medieval manuscript and early print book holdings, which total well over 15,000 items. The collections comprise items from across Europe particularly but also items from around the world. The library’s holdings are especially rich in early medieval manuscripts.
The MDZ has both an online catalog for searching in addition to regularly updated online exhibitions. New items are added to the digital collections continuously. The catalog allows for advanced searching by title, date, and author. Each entry in the image database contains a catalog entry as well as the ability to download images in differing sizes and format. Also included are IIIF-compliant images and a Mirador viewer.
Narrative Sources aims to offer an exhaustive and critical survey of all the narrative sources originating from the medieval Low Countries. The database is intended to inventory all texts which describe the past in a narrative way: annals, chronicles, letters, diaries, poems, saint’s lives, genealogies etc. Narrative Sources covers present day Belgium and the Netherlands as well as those areas which belonged historically to the Low Countries but are part now of France (French Flanders, French Hainault) or Germany (East Frisia, the northern Rhineland). The texts inventoried in Narrative Sources date from the sixth to the first half of the sixteenth century.
The New York Public Library’s Digital Collections is the NYPL’s digital image archive. It contains a continuously updated selection of digital exhibitions in addition to a collection of over 4,000 images of manuscripts and many more of early printed books. The NYPL’s digital collections are global in outlook, including manuscripts from across the globe. Its holdings range from the 1200s onward, with strengths in the later Middle Ages and early print as well as Jewish manuscripts and books.
Digital entries include catalog information, multiple options for download though only in JPG format, and a timeline of information about the item where available. Digital Collections entries also link back to the NYPL’s catalog entries. Items are made freely available with citations for each item available to copy and paste.
The ultimate aim of the Ogham in 3D project is to digitise and record in 3d as many as possible of the approximately four hundred surviving Ogham stones and to make the resulting 3D models freely available on this website as part of a multi-disciplinary archive of Ogham stones.
* National History Day Selected Resource *
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 Oxford Cantigas de Santa Maria project is a platform containing numerous resources for the study of the 13th-century poems and their musical notation. The 429 poems of the Cantigas are each given an entry and within each entry one can find a synopsis of the poem, description of the miniature, a list of associated miracles, and a bibliography for that poem. Sometimes the poems will have linked recordings of their performance. The project also provides a fully searchable database of the qualities of the Cantigas so that one may search by a number of features, like the miracles, narrative, keywords, or manuscript. Likewise, the website presents an extensive bibliography of work on the poems. The project does not have the rights to reproduce the images of the manuscripts but can provide information on how to access and use them.
The Oxford Genizah Collection contains some 4,000 fragments from the Cairo Genizah that were deposited in the Bodleian Library. The fragments cover a broad time period, from the 9th century to the 19th century. The online catalog is based on Neubauer and Cowley’s 1906 catalog and Cowley’s later 1926 catalog. The database allows users to browse the fragments or perform advanced searches based on keyword or various qualities of the fragments, like period or text. Some entries are digitized; however, most have only catalog descriptions of the fragments.
The Parker Library on the Web project is a joint endeavor by the Parker Library at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge and Stanford University to publish images of the roughly 600 medieval manuscripts housed in the library. To date, they have digitized and made freely available over 500 of those manuscripts. The Parker Library is one of the richest collections of early English books in the world, having been gifted the collections by Matthew Parker, the 16th-century Archbishop of Canterbury.
Parker Library on the Web has been at the forefront of library digitization projects. It was an early adopted of the IIIF image format. In addition to a wide range of manuscript images, including detailed images of illuminations, each entry has a detailed cataloging information and a bibliography for the item. Additionally, the platform also presents past digital exhibitions in addition to copious information on how to use the site.
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.
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.
The Prosopography of the Byzantine World projects creates a chronological, prosopographical reading of sources (predominantly seals) from the Byzantine World in the period 1025-1180. The project presents a description of the source and where it is held and also allows for text-based searching of materials.
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/
Recovering the Earliest English Language in Scotland is a project that aims to uncover Old English place names in southern Scotland. Old English is the predecessor to both Middle English and Scots, and the project relies upon place names to provide evidence of the early Northumbrian dialect of the language. As of 2020, the database includes a list of over 500 place names in southern Scotland derived from Old English. Users can view the list of places alphabetically, by map, or through advanced searching for keywords and other salient qualities. Places can be displays on a map and frequently include a description of the place-name in addition to bibliography where available.
Users can download all project data through its API, and all data is made available under a Creative Commons license. One can also find a glossary of early place terms in addition to links to other projects with similar goals.
A searchable database of medieval refrains, or fragments of music or text that circulated between songs of various types during the thirteenth century.
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The REGESTA IMPERII (RI) records all documented and historiographically documented activities of Roman-German kings and emperors from the Carolingians to Maximilian I (about 751-1519) and the popes of the early and early Middle Ages in the form of German-speaking regesta. The website is a portal for the Commission on the regesta imperii, including links to the RI Opac (bibliographical search engine), electronic publications (work in progress editions and data collections), and the searchable RI database (chronological entries relating to imperial history from the Carolingian to the fifteenth century, based on the 80+ published volumes).
The “Registers of the Counts of Holland, 1299-1345” contains over 3500 digitized charters from Holland in this period. The site is fully keyword searchable and includes a list of documents one can view based on time and place. The website is in Dutch with English translation for some pages.
This project offers online diplomatic transcriptions of the texts of charters as recorded in a number of registers of the counts of Holland, now hold at the Dutch national archives, the Nationaal Archief, The Hague. There are also archival descriptions of these registers, and itineraries of the counts between 1395 and 1400 as reconstructed from these registers are presented, too. These registers can rightly been viewed as cartularies.
RELMIN recueille, étudie et publie des textes juridiques définissant le statut des minorités religieuses dans l’Europe médiévale. Riche et varié, le corpus couvre dix siècles et s’étend sur une large zone géographique ; écrits en latin, arabe, grec, hébreu et araméen (ainsi qu’en espagnol, portugais, et en d’autres langues vernaculaires européennes), ces textes sont actuellement dispersés dans les bibliothèques et les dépôts d’archives de toute l’Europe. Ils sont maintenant recueillis dans la base de données RELMIN dans leur langue originale et accompagnés de traductions, ainsi que de commentaires. Ces textes sont ainsi mis à disposition de la communauté scientifique, des étudiants et des citoyens partout dans le monde, librement et de manière pérenne.
RELMIN collects, studies and publishes legal texts defining the status of religious minorities in medieval Europe. Rich and varied, the corpus covers ten centuries and extends over a wide geographical area; Written in Latin, Arabic, Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic (as well as Spanish, Portuguese, and other European vernacular languages), these texts are currently scattered in libraries and archives throughout Europe. They are now collected in the RELMIN database in their original language and accompanied by translations and comments. These texts are thus made available to the scientific community, students and citizens around the world, freely and permanently.
The Repertorium is a free German-language reference work for the history of the German Middle Ages from about 750-1500. It provides a large catalog of authors and works who discuss the history of the region that is today German. Entries frequently provide links to digitized manuscripts and texts on external websites when available. There are also a number of tags to sort entries, including by lists of saints and places in addition to a search function. An English version of the site can be accessed here: https://geschichtsquellen.de/start?s=en
