An online collection of nearly 4,700 secondary and primary works sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies, available with an institutional subscription. Individuals without a subscription may still view table of contents free of charge, and hundreds of books are added each year.
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.
Searchable database of the manuscripts held at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in the Departement des Manuscrits and the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, some with links to digitized versions of the manuscripts. Database includes full descriptions of manuscripts and bibliographical information, as well as incipit and explicit.
Searchable database of tens of thousands of images and records of objects in the British Museum collection, spanning thousands of years and from all across the world.
* National History Day Selected Resource *
Part of e-codices, the Virtual Manuscript Library of Switzerland, this site provides images and codicological descriptions of the medieval manuscripts contained at the Abbey Library of St. Gallen, Switzerland.
Named after Pierpont Morgan’s yacht, CORSAIR is a single database providing unified access to over 250,000 records for medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, rare and reference books, literary and historical manuscripts, music scores, ancient seals and tablets, drawings, prints, and other art objects. Records continue to be added for the balance of the collection as well as for new acquisitions.
The depth of detail is unusual for an online catalog. Many records include summaries of the content of individual letters, lengthy notes about provenance, and detailed descriptions of bindings. Specialized indexes enable researchers to find all of the Morgan’s holdings associated with a given name, date, or place. For example, with a single search a scholar interested in Dickens can find records for manuscripts and letters in the author’s hand, early printed editions of his novels, original illustrations, photographs, and personal possessions such as Dickens’ ink pot and cigar case.
CORSAIR also serves as the gateway to one of the largest repositories of medieval images on the Internet, providing access to more than 57,000 digitized images from the Morgan’s collection of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts. Users may page through every illustrated leaf within a manuscript, or search for individual images by place or date of creation, artist’s name, illustration type, and subject. The images and descriptions may be accessed directly through CORSAIR, or by visiting Images from Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts.
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).
DigiVatLib is a digital library service. It provides free access to the Vatican Library’s digitized collections: manuscripts, incunabula, archival materials and inventories as well as graphic materials, coins and medals, printed materials (special projects).
A collection of nearly 1,500 digitized manuscripts from Swiss libraries and collections. These manuscripts may be searched or browsed (by location, language, date, material, author, scribe, and others), including brief descriptions and annotations and bibliography where available. Libraries and collections include: St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek; Cologny, Foundation Martin Bodmer; Basel, Universitätsbibliothek; Einsiedeln, Stiftsbibliothek, and many others.
Epistolae is a collection of medieval Latin letters to and from women. The letters collected here date from the 4th to the 13th centuries, and they are presented in their original Latin as well as in English translation. The letters are organized by the name and biography of the women writers or recipients. Biographical sketches of the women, descriptions of the subject matter of the letters, and the historical context of the correspondence are included where available.
Dr. Joan Ferrante, Professor Emerita of English and Comparative Literature of Columbia University, has with her colleagues collected and translated these letters mainly from printed sources. She has worked with the Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning to develop this unique open online collection for teaching and research purposes. New letters continue to be added to the collection. Users are invited to participate by sending material or inquiries to jmf2@columbia.edu. Contributions, fully acknowledged, will be added to the database after review for accuracy and style by members of the Epistolae board.
Searchable bibliography/index of articles in over 500 journals, book reviews, and essays in books about women, sexuality, and gender during the middle ages published from c.1990 onwards. Excludes books by a single author (e.g., monographs). Many items include brief annotations. Some images also indexed. Provides links to other resources on medieval women and gender (including masculinity and homosexuality).
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.
Fragmentarium’s primary objective is to develop a digital library specialized for medieval manuscript fragment research. Although based on the many years of experience of e-codices — Virtual Manuscript Library of Switzerland, the Fragmentarium Digital Library has an international orientation. First and foremost it is conceived as a social platform for libraries, scholars and students to do scholarly work on fragments. It conforms to the latest standards set by digital libraries and will set new standards, especially in the area of interoperability.
The web application contains a series of tools:
A French-language, searchable catalog of manuscript illuminations found in manuscripts in French public libraries, excluding the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. The catalog may be searched by corpus, manuscript, decoration, or bibliography, and results include the manuscript citation, brief description, date, title, and images of the illumination.
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 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
On this website you can hear, chant by chant, the whole early repertory of Gregorian chant, the standard repertory of nearly six hundred chants for the Propers of the Roman Mass. This is a study edition for enjoying and comparing recorded solo performances by Richard Crocker and three or four friends, of Gregorian chant sung according to current tradition updated with the results of current research on the earliest medieval notation.
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]
A collection of digital resources for medieval studies organized by category, including Art, Armor, Crusades, Gender, Manuscripts, and many others. The site may be browsed by category or searched, and each link is accompanied by a brief description of its contents.
* National History Day Selected Resource *
Based on the Treasures of Heaven exhibit (2011) at the Cleveland Museum of Art, this website offers a multimedia exploration of medieval art, architecture, and the cult of saints including high resolution images, explanatory essays, video, and links to related primary and secondary sources. Additional support by the British Museum and the Walters Art Museum.
* National History Day Selected Resource *