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.
Les Archives de littérature du Moyen Âge (ARLIMA) ont été fondées à l’intention des étudiants et chercheurs spécialistes du Moyen Âge, pour qui la constitution d’une bibliographie sur un auteur ou un texte est devenue une tâche de plus en plus ardue, en raison de la multiplication non seulement des publications mais également des outils bibliographiques imprimés et électroniques à leur disposition.
The Archive of Literature of the Middle Ages (ARLIMA) was founded for the students and researchers of the Middle Ages, for whom the compilation of a bibliography on an author or a text has become an increasingly difficult task, because of the proliferation not only of the publications but also the printed and electronic bibliographic tools at their disposal.
A database of manuscripts digitized by the British Library; see the website for the full range of its archival collection.
Chaucer Hub contains guidance in grammar and phonology to help beginners read Chaucer and other Middle English texts. It also has audio clips in which Chaucerians read Middle English illustrating Middle English’s sounds. The site also provides background information on Chaucer’s life. The site also has an online concordance to all of Chaucer’s works. This resource was formerly hosted on the Harvard Chaucer website but became defunct. New programming makes available “The Glossarial Concordance to the Works of Chaucer,” as well as the Gower’s Confessio Amantis, and makes it searchable with digital tools.
The Chinese Text Project is an open-access digital library whose goal is to make available a wide variety of Chinese texts from ancient periods. Though the site focuses on ancient texts in particular, texts from the Tang, Song, and Ming dynasties are well represented as well. Texts are generally taken from open-source documents published elsewhere on the internet, but there are also original transcriptions as well.
The CTP also brings together a variety of resources for the study of ancient Chinese texts, including dictionaries, bibliographies, and other resources. There is also an active discussion board where questions of transcription and translation are frequently asked. The site continues to be updated regularly.
The Christine de Pizan Digital Scriptorium is an ongoing project to make available digital surrogates of all the manuscripts of Christine de Pizan’s literary work. Currently, the project offers digital surrogates of 56 of the manuscripts of Christine de Pizan’s work, including all the manuscripts held in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Manuscripts are presented in a IIIF viewer.
Copyright to individual manuscripts and their images is retained by the institution that holds the material.
CollateX is a software to
- read multiple (≥ 2) versions of a text, splitting each version into parts (tokens) to be compared,
- identify similarities of and differences between the versions (including moved/transposed segments) by aligning tokens, and
- output the alignment results in a variety of formats for further processing, for instance
- to support the production of a critical apparatusor the stemmatical analysis of a text’s genesis.
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.
CPI is a database of conductus, sacred but non-liturgical chants used in the processions; conductus were especially popular in France from the 12th to the 13th century. The database is presented in a column arrangement through which one can search by conductus, manuscript, form, “syllabic/melismatic,” and the stanzas transmitted. For each entry, CPI presents the text of the poem, the music format, rhyme scheme, metrics, and other information about the text and music of the chant. There is also basic search functionality and a PDF guide for using the catalog. The catalogue may be searched or browsed by the incipit of the conductus, source manuscript, stanzaic form, syllabis/melismatic, and stanzas transmitted. Each entry includes the author, title, and text, information about editions if available, and manuscript witnesses, some with linked images on third-party websites (copyright may vary).
An online database of the works of the poet Dafydd Ap Gwilym, with manuscript notes and images available for the poems.
The Database of Byzantine Book Epigrams is an ongoing project that seeks to compile all metrical poems in Byzantine manuscripts that self-reference the book in which they are found. The database currently has over 12,000 “occurrence” records that include the text of the epigrams and information on the manuscripts in which they are found. Occurrences are linked to “type” records that group identical or similar epigrams preserved in different manuscripts. There is a catalog searchable by occurrence, type, manuscripts, and people. There is also a substantial bibliography on Byzantine epigrams provided.
A dictionary of Middle French (1330-1500) comprising more than 65,000 entries with 470,000 contextual examples. The search function is flexible and allows for orthographic variants. Definitions are given in modern French.
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).
The fourth edition of Electronic Beowulf 4.0 is a free, online version of Electronic Beowulf that supersedes all previous editions. The online edition is designed to meet the needs of general readers, who require a full, line by line, translation; of students, who want to understand the grammar and the meter and still have time in a semester to study and appreciate other important aspects of the poem; and of scholars, who want immediate access to a critical apparatus identifying the nearly 2000 eighteenth-century restorations, editorial emendations, and manuscript-based conjectural restorations.
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 cataloging tool that enables libraries, collectors, researchers and students to gather and describe fragments via a CMS.
- A tool for curated and social tags, facets and keywords, allowing efficient research through comparison and cross-checking.
- A tool to link and assemble fragments offers the possibility to arrange cuttings, fragments of leaves, and individual leaves in any order.
The French of England project provides a variety of resources for the study of French in England from the Norman Invasion into the early modern period. The site seeks to unseat typical chronological and geopolitical boundaries in showing that the French of England was a long-lasting and wide-ranging phenomenon.
The project provides resources, including: bibliographies, syllabuses, audio recordings of Anglo-French texts, some translations, and editions, as well as a list of links to other sites that approach the study of the language and cultures associated with the French of England.
“The Global Medieval Sourcebook (GMS) is an open access teaching and research tool. It offers a flexible online display for the parallel viewing of medieval texts in their original language and in new English translations, complemented by new introductory materials.
The GMS spans one thousand years (600-1600) of literary production around the world. It contains short texts of broad interdisciplinary interest in a variety of genres, almost all of which have not previously been translated into English.”
Handschriftencensus is a German-language web platform published by a team at the University of Marburg. The site functions as a directory for medieval German-language manuscripts from 750CE to 1520CE in libraries around the globe. The platform itself does not contain images, but does contain detailed catalog entries for each manuscript in addition to links to available images and the host repository’s catalog entry for a manuscipt. Users can see the nearly 900 manuscripts on the site in list format, ordered by repository, author/work, and illustration type.
The project has an active social media presence on Twitter and is continuously updated, with new additions made weekly. Users can also find a regularly updated, in-depth bibliography of secondary sources on German-language medieval texts and manuscripts. Copyrights for manuscript images obtained through the site are still retained by a manuscript’s holding institution.
The Icelandic Saga Map project presents some thirty sagas from medieval Iceland with geotagged locations and images. The project aims to showcase the use landscape and eventually manuscript images alongside the places they represent.
The project presents a geo-tagged map and is free to use.
The Index to Welsh Poetry in Manuscript
Manuscripts of the West Midlands is an online catalog of the vernacular manuscript books of the West Midlands from c. 1300 to 1475. Created by a team at the University of Birmingham (UK), the project presents catalog entries of around 150 manuscripts associated with the region. Catalog entries include information on the text contained within a manuscript in addition to the physical features of the manuscript and its shelfmark at the institution of which it is a part. Users may find lists of manuscripts by repository, title, people, and bindings. There is also a keyword search function as well as a means to search by IMEV number.
Mapping Metaphor is a project hosted by the University of Glasgow and represents the portion of the Mapping Metaphor project devoted particularly to the study of Old English. Deriving its data from the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, the project aims to provide useful data and data visualizations that map words and their usage as metaphors in Old English. The project presents over 70,000 metaphorical words in several visual formats. Users can also see which metaphorical words pair most frequently with a variety of statistical analyses.
The project has several tutorials and glossaries that teach a user how to use the database. Though the data itself is not available for download, the project includes several modes of searching its findings.
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.
