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Lexis of Cloth and Clothing Project

Cloth and clothing have been integral to life for every person since civilization began.

In the Middle Ages dress was an identifier of occupation, status, gender and ethnicity; textiles ranged through opulent, symbolic, utilitarian and recycled. Cloth production and international trade constituted a major sector of the economy of medieval Britain.

Evidence for medieval textiles and clothing is sought in diverse academic disciplines: archaeology, archaeological textiles, art history, economic history, literature, languages.

The vocabulary of the various languages spoken and written in the British Isles is documented in different specialist dictionaries, yet geographical proximity and interaction through labour and trade would argue that this evidence should be categorised and analysed together.

The Arts and Humanities Research Council made an award of £765,576 within the Research Grants (Standard) Scheme to fund a 5-year Project to undertake a trans-disciplinary study with the purpose of  producing an analytical corpus of medieval dress and textiles terminology of the British Isles in the form of a searchable database, innovatively illustrated.

At its centre was the assembly and examination of textiles/clothing lexis in the early languages of Britain (Old and Middle English; Welsh, Old Irish and minor Celtic languages; Anglo-Norman/French, Medieval Latin, Anglo-Norse), investigating the genesis and subsequent development of the vocabulary.

The terms and their citations from both documentary and literary texts have been analysed in awareness of surviving textiles/dress accessories and graphic images in medieval art.

From the reviewer:

This website represents an ambitious project – “lexis” being the total stock of words in a language – in this case we are looking at words specific to the British Isles. The sections that focus on words are the best – the Dictionaries tab and the Search the Database are useful and provide data. The Gallery tab provides detailed photographs. The Research tab leads to interesting books – they are mostly dated from 2006 -2012, however.

Logeion

Logeion is a free online dictionary that aggregates the resources of all the Latin and Greek dictionaries available through the Perseus Classical collection in addition to other resources like the Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources. A user can search by headword or an inverse search and use the tabs to switch between dictionary sources, including: Lewis and Short, Gaffiot, and others. The website also provides basic corpus analysis, offering examples of the word in sentences as well as providing morphological analysis. Though not all sources in the project are medieval, some, like the Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, are predominantly medieval.

Medieval Welsh Law

The project has two aims. Firstly, to present a guide to Cyfraith Hywel, medieval Welsh law, by explaining what Welsh law was, how the law worked, and suggesting further reading by listing subject-specific academic publications for several fields within this broad topic.

The second aim is to look at the law manuscripts, the starting point for working on Cyfraith Hywel. A short description of each manuscript is presented, along with a detailed list of contents for the individual manuscripts. It will be possible for anyone who is keen to learn more about the laws to turn to these tables to see exactly what is in the manuscripts, and also to see where else those sections may occur.

It is possible to use the explanatory sections together with the detailed work on the manuscripts to offer a fuller picture of what the texts of Cyfraith Hywel contain.

Middle English Dictionary

Welcome to the electronic Middle English Dictionary. The print MED, completed in 2001, has been described as “the greatest achievement in medieval scholarship in America.” Its 15,000 pages offer a comprehensive analysis of lexicon and usage for the period 1100-1500, based on the analysis of a collection of over three million citation slips, the largest collection of this kind available. This electronic version of the MED preserves all the details of the print MED, but goes far beyond this, by converting its contents into an enormous database, searchable in ways impossible within any print dictionary.

Ogham in 3D

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 *

Patrologia Graeca

A digitized version of Migne’s Patrologia Graeca, a collection of texts in Greek by church fathers, theologians, councils, and many others from late antiquity through the high Middle Ages, as well as other Greek medieval texts, in the original Greek with some translations into English, German, and French. The texts are indexed alphabetically by author and may be read online or downloaded in .pdf format.

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Project Gutenberg

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.

Richard L. Crocker, A Gregorian Archive

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.

Rusian Genealogy

Genealogies have been constructed and used for hundreds of years to help families understand their ancestry and more recently to help scholars understand the relationships between medieval people and families. The Rusian genealogical database offers an update on this traditional discipline. The research underlying this database is new and is built on the primary sources in Old East Slavic, Latin, Greek, and Old Norse, as well as a thorough reading and understanding of the modern secondary literature. That information is then accessed through an XML database that allows the user to search through the variety of information presented here, including parentage, regnal dates, place of rule, and other data points. The end result is the most accurate genealogy of Rus′ yet developed, presented in an accessible and intuitive way for use by scholars, students, and others.

TEAMS (Teaching Association for Medieval Studies)

TEAMS was originally founded as a committee of the Medieval Academy of America to develop new ways to support the teaching activities of its members. It was later re-organized as an independent nonprofit educational corporation whose mission continues to be the support of teaching in medieval studies at the undergraduate, secondary, and elementary school level through the provision of resources and the sharing of techniques.

Its current programs include the publication of TEAMS Teaching Texts in cooperation with Medieval Institute Publications, the maintenance of an online library of Middle English texts, and the establishment of a committee for outreach to secondary schools. It sponsors several sessions of papers at the annual International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University. TEAMS also publishes a peer-reviewed electronic journal, The Once and Future Classroom: Resources for Teaching the Middle Ages in Grades K-12, and sponsors an annual teaching prize to recognize excellence in teaching medieval studies in the K-12 classroom.

The Community of the Realm in Scotland 1249-1424

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.

‘The Development of the Welsh Language (Datblygiad yr Iaith Gymraeg)’: Fifteenth-century prose

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