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.
The aim of the Alberti Magni e-corpus project is to support research on Albert the Great by providing scholars the possibility: 1) to download image files of Albert’s works that can be found in editions no longer covered by copyright laws; 2) more importantly, to search 60 of those works electronically, using a Boolean search engine which gives access to a corpus of approximately 19,000 pages in print or 8.6 million words.
Bible Hub Online Parallel Bible, search and study tools including parallel texts, cross references, Treasury of Scripture, and commentaries. This site provides quick access to topical studies, interlinears, sermons, Strong’s and many more resources.
* National History Day Selected Resource *
A free digital library providing medieval Latin texts from the 7th to the 14th centuries in an alphabetical list (by author). It is part of the larger IntraText Library digital collection published by Èulogos SpA (http://www.eulogos.net), which includes, among other archives, Biblioteca Italiana and Biblioteca religiosa. Texts are harvested from other websites—not all academic–as well as print matter. Searchable across entire collection. Includes linked notes, concordances, lists, and statistics related to texts. Although BL texts are also searchable by author, title, or general period of origin, the site offers no editorial or contextual information. Published under Creative Commons.
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.
A database of manuscripts digitized by the British Library; see the website for the full range of its archival collection.
Provides summaries of the annual conference proceedings of Le Centre d’Etudes Historiques de Fanjeaux, dedicated to exploring the medieval religious culture of Languedoc. The site lists the conference proceedings (volumes 1/1966 – 49/2014) including table of contents, as well as abstracts in French for the articles in volumes 29-49. The Cahiers may also be browsed by author.
The Cambridge Genizah collection is one of the largest groups of medieval Jewish manuscript fragments in the world. Famously, Cambridge is the repository for most of the materials of the Cairo Genizah, which were brought there with the Jewish community’s permission in the early 20th century. Roughly 193,000 items from the Genizah are housed in the library today. The digital collections contain over 20,000 digitized and fully searchable items with downloadable metadata and a variety of image sizes in IIIF format. Further, Cambridge has encouraged community-driven metadata and allowed users to tag fragments with keywords, which has expanded search opportunities.
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.
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.
The Dartmouth Dante Project (DDP) is a searchable full-text online database that, in addition to incorporating the Petrocchi edition of Dante’s Commedia, collates commentaries on Dante’s poem from the earliest exegeses (in the 1320s), to those included in the most recent scholarly editions of Dante’s poem (up to Fosca, 2003-2015). Commentaries are included in the original language (Latin, English, or Italian) and are searchable by canticle, canto, verse line, word, or phrase. The DDP is a very useful resource for Dante scholars and a valuable portal into the commentary tradition, an important domain of critical scholarship on Dante.
* National History Day Selected Resource *
The Decretum Gratiani project sets as its goal the creation of an edition of Gratian’s Decretum. Though it is unclear whether the final edition will be digital or on paper, the project as of 2020 provides a PDF of a draft of the text with caveats for its use. There is also a list of manuscript sigla of the Decretum that link to outside repositories. However, many of the links in this list and elsewhere on the site are broken.
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).
From the creators: The purpose of the project is to collect all information relating to the books of Durham Priory, manuscript and printed work inherited, given, bought or created by the monks of the Benedictine priory of Durham, its predecessors and cells.
As of 2020, the project has made available catalog descriptions and IIIF-compliant images of over 150 of the manuscripts associated with Durham Cathedral. Currently items are not searchable but are arranged by shelfmark. The project is regularly updated as has an active blog associated with it.
e-Clavis is a bibliography of Christian apocrypha compiled in a list format, which users can use to find source material. The website is free to use under a Creative Commons license.
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.
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).
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:
Franciscan Women: History and Culture is a project of the Franciscan Institute and Bonaventure University to gather information on women’s Franciscan orders across the globe from the 13th century to the 18th century. The website provides a free database where users can find an extensive searchable bibliography on Franciscan women. There is also an encyclopedia of Franciscan women in addition to a list of convents across the globe with years of operation and references to secondary sources that treat the person or location. As of 2020, there are hundreds of entries available. Individual entries vary in length and contents based and can be anywhere from one sentence to several paragraphs long.
The project also has a list of helpful links for the study of women’s orders.
“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.”