Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern Online Resources (AMEMOR)
About
Premodern history abounds with printed reference books: encyclopedias, dictionaries, atlases, bibliographies, yearbooks, and so on. In the past few decades, a number of online resources have come to supplement essential print reference tools in ancient, medieval, and early modern history (including resources for Byzantium and the Islamic World). The following is a partial list of some of the resources available online, originally designed for an advanced course on early medieval history, with my short descriptions. They are organized into twelve categories:
- Encyclopedias
- Musical and Art Historical Sources
- Bibliographies
- Databases of Texts
- Dictionaries
- Digital Manuscripts
- Guides or Link Aggregators
- Journals
- Maps, Dates, and Events
- Translated Sources
- Palaeography
Links requiring institutional access are accompanied by an asterisk (*). If you can think of additional resources to include, email me (sbobryck@fas.harvard.edu). Thanks to Eric Nemarich and Jake Ransohoff for their suggestions.
1. Encyclopedias
The Cambridge Histories series uses a multiple-author format to cover many single topics under the umbrella of a theme, region, or time period. In the early stages of research Cambridge History articles are an efficient way of developing bibliography on a topic, and the whole set of histories is searchable online with institutional access. There are many series which touch upon premodern history (Cambridge Ancient History, Cambridge Medieval History, New Cambridge Medieval History, etc.), making this a powerful research aid for ancient, medieval, and early modern specialists. Some relevant volumes include (to give only a small sample):
- Economic History of the Greco-Roman World
- Cambridge Ancient Histories (e.g. vol. 13)
- New Cambridge Medieval Histories (e.g. vol 2)
- Cambridge Histories of Christianity (e.g. vol. 4)
- New Cambridge Histories of the Bible (e.g. vol. 2)
- Urban History of Britain (vol. 1)
- History of Capitalism (vol. 1)
- History of the Book in Britain (vol. 1, vol. 2, etc.)
- Medieval Philosophy
- Fifteenth-Century Music
An encyclopedic gem, Germania Sacra (Latin for "Holy Germany") offers comprehensive overviews of the history, institutions, and prosopography of German religious houses from the early to the late Middle Ages in dozens of published books (it has several equivalents for other countries, though not all are available online: Gallia Christiana, Helvetia Sacra, Monasticon Belge, Monasticon Italiae, etc.). Since the 1920s, German medievalists have covered much of the foundations across Germany in three major series (now called the " Old Series," the " New Series," and the ongoing " Third Series"). Much of the New Series is fully digitized (and searchable in both Google Documents and PDFs posted online. A good place to start is their Guide to Using the Digital Functinos of the website.
Germanische Altertumskunde Online (GAO) *
The Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde is one of the very best “realia” encyclopedias with very wide coverage of the ancient and medieval world. The GAO publishes online the complete and searchable Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde and the 70 supplementary volumes that have been published so far. Extremely reliable entries with rich bibliographic and visual detail, and much wider coverage that the title suggests. An important port of call.
Lexikon des Mittelalters (LexMA) *
The Lexikon des Mittelalters is probably still the standard encyclopedia for the Middle Ages in Europe, with tens of thousands of articles written by thousands of international experts. Some ancient and early modern coverage (formally the project covers c. 300 to c. 1500 CE). The quality and reliability of the articles is exceptional. Lexikon des Mittelalters is available via the Brepolis hub, and its topics are searchable in English and German. On Brepolis the Lexikon can be paired with IEMA Online (=International Encyclopaedia for the Middle Ages), with many useful English-language entries.
How did ancient men and women brush their teeth? Measure things? Make roofs? Like the GAO (see above), New Pauly is a great place for questions about the nitty gritty of the distant past. The "old" Pauly is the Pauly-Wissowa Real-Encyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, available in print and in German, and many pre-copyright volumes are now available on Google Books. In general, the old Pauly is almost always more detailed (normally a page-long article in the New Pauly will extend over dozens of columns in the Old Pauly), but the New Pauly provides a quick overview (in English or German), with a short but updated bibliography.
Oxford Classical Dictionary, 4th edition (OCD) *
The Oxford Classical Dictionary is a terrific encyclopedia for all things Classical, with broad and reliable coverage. It is very useful for quick orientation and bibliography-formation. The formal list of abbreviations used by the OCD is one of the widely-used group of standard abbreviations in English publications (together with Année philologique and the Oxford Latin Dictionary).
Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium (ODB) *
The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium (in three volumes) is the standard reference on all things Byzantine, and a model of reference works of this kind. It is of course excellent for the Byzantine world, but its coverage for Late Antiquity and the West often rivals reference books specifically designed for those subjects. One of the great modern reference books.
Encyclopedia of Islam (EI) *
BrillOnline Reference Works makes available several successive editions of the very important Encyclopedia of Islam, including the First Edition of the Encyclopedia, the landmark Second Edition (with articles in English and French), the new Third Edition, and the Historical Atlas of Islam. The standard reference work for Islamic history.
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) *
A humongous and growing national biography for the British Isles. Articles written by experts are rich with detail and bibliographical information. This is a phenomenal source for any individual, whether ancient, medieval, early modern, or modern, who spent any time in the British Isles. The definition of “British” is extremely generous (Constantine, who was elevated to power at York, and Marx, who did his work in the British Museum, both have excellent entries). The ODNB is also a good place to look up scholars who spent time in Britain.
Dizionario biografico degli italiani (DBI)
The vast Dizionario biografico degli italiani, compiled from 1960 to the present (in alphabetical order), provides some of the best biographical entries on Italian individuals. As with the ODNB, what makes an individual "Italian" is often generously defined, especially for the Middle Ages. Very good entries by experts, with good bibliographies.
Deutsche Biographie (ADB and NDB)
The Neue Deutsche Biographie (NDB), begun in 1953 and continuing to the present day (they are up to the end of the letter "S"), produces short, scholarly signed articles on “German” individuals (broadly conceived). The Deutsche Biographie website publishes all existing articles from the NDB and it has also digitized all 56 volumes (1875-1912) of its predecessor, the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Many of these entries, by major nineteenth-century scholars, remain highly valuable, like the biography of Radegund by Ernst Dümmler (ADB 27, 1888, p. 114-116). In addition, their search tool will also trawl the online Dizionario biografico degli Italiani and other biographical sources.
Geschichtsquellen des deutschen Mittelalters (Digitales Repertorium)
This BSB-run repertorium provides rich detail on authors and works from the "German Middle Ages" (c. 750-1500). The basis of this project (although the coverage is less complete here) is the "New Potthast," the Repertorium Fontium Historiae Medii Aevi (11 volumes, 1962-2007). This means that coverage is selective, but "German" is relatively broadly defined: for instance, if the author makes it into the MGH, they are probably here. Entries are very detailed with extremely good and up-to-date bibliographies.
Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (ODCC) *
The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (latest version: 3rd edn, revised) offers authoritative information about all aspects of this vast and often complex subject from the origins of the church to the present day, with entries covering theology, churches and denominations, the bible, the church fathers, the liturgy, as well as individual popes, archbishops, saints, mystics, heretics, kings, and emperors. It provides trustworthy bibliographical information for each topic.
Oxford Dictionary of the Middle Ages (ODMA) *
The Oxford Dictionary of the Middle Ages is one of the most recent large-scale encyclopedias of the Middle Ages (in 2010). This dictionary is probably strongest for real-world topics (e.g. salt, charcoal, archaeology, etc.), with some very useful entries in high and later medieval history. Articles vary a great deal in detail and reliability, given the huge scope of the dictionary (three large physical volumes).
Oxford Encyclopedia of Medieval Warfare and Military Technology *
A handy recent encyclopedia of military history (500-1500 CE). This reference book is both very useful for the realia of medieval military history and quite helpful in providing bibliographical orientation. For instance, articles like “ Franks, Carolingian: Historiography (751–899)" provide a historiographical overview of the main lines of debate regarding Carolingian military history.
2. Musical and Art Historical Sources
ARTstor *
ARTstor compiles digital images and related metadata into a massive database. The ARTstor Digital Library includes hundreds of thousands of images which pertain to art history, archeology, and architecture, and is an excellent source of visual materials for ancient, medieval, and early modern history (and of course many other periods as well).
Carolingian Treasures at the Bibliothèque nationale de France
A personal favorite. This is a convenient public overview of some of the greatest Carolingian treasures in the huge national repository of France, the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians has always been an important resource for music history. This online project combines that dictionary with other databases to provide a handy guide to music history. The entries are helpful in explaining technical aspects of early music for non-specialists. If you want to understand how Modes work or why Isorhythm was so controversial, this is the place to go first.
Manuscrits notés en neumes en Occident (MANNO)
A handy list of digitized manuscripts, from the eleventh century to the twelfth century, in the Bibliothèque nationale de Paris which have neumes (medieval musical notation).
"Refrain" is a database of the vernacular musical culture of the high and later Middle Ages, mainly in a French-speaking context. It allows you to search for refrains through singer, manuscript, words, circumstance, or location.
The CANTUS database assembles assembles indices of manuscript and printed sources for the liturgy (antiphoners, breviaries, etc.). A useful tool for the history of music and also for liturgical studies. There is also a beta version for exploring the functions of the database.
Developed as a physical archive at Princeton for iconographic research since 1917, the Index of Christian Art is a growing database with digital images and metadata about Christian art up to the sixteenth century. Entries are organized by iconographic subject. An exceptional resource for iconography, and very helpful as a way to find high-quality, reliable images of early Christian art. The website also includes specific Digital Image Collections, by subject, theme, or material (e.g. embroideries, stained glass, wall paintings, historical collections).
Oxford Companion to Western Art *
The Oxford Companion to Western Art contains a few thousand entries which cover individual artists, movements, techniques, and materials in art history. A useful resource for non-specialists for the terms of art used by art historians.
Visual Information Access (VIA) *
The Visual Information Access (VIA) system is a catalog of visual resources at Harvard and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. For those with access, via Harvard, it is a very useful repository of images with good metadata.
The Rose Window (Medieval Stained Glass)
Tens of thousands of images of medieval and early modern stained glass.
Mapping Gothic France is an extraordinary database of images, text, timelines, and charts permitting you to explore the Gothic built-environment of high medieval (12C-13C) France. Lets you explore major Gothic cathedrals with plans and excellent photos.
3.Bibliographies
L'Année Philologique is a massive yearly index of bibliography on Greco-Roman Antiquity, generously defined. Entries are annotated (with a brief summary of the book or article’s key argument and other useful data), in multiple languages. It is the best bibliography for ancient history, and its standard abbreviations for ancient texts are widely used by ancient historians and classicists.
Carolingian English-Language Bibliography (to 1997)
An archived site (compiled by two prominent early medievalists, T.F.X. Noble and Julia Smith) with a large body of primary and secondary sources organized by theme on Carolingian history. The site is old (so its bibliography is a bit dated) and only accessible through a web archive, but it is still useful as a first orientation.
Chicago Manual of Style, 16th edition *
The latest guide to proper citation in History. The Quick Guide is available online for free without institutional access.
International Medieval Bibliography *
The International Medieval Bibliography is a very good bibliography for medieval studies, and often (but not always) contains short summaries of the books and articles. It is not always updated with the same frequency as the Italian Medioevo Latino or the German Regesta Imperii OPAC, but it is a critical tool in assembling any bibliography on a medieval topic. Available via Brepolis.
MLA International Bibliography *
The MLA International Bibliography offers very wide bibliographic coverage. Its strength is in identifying new books, since Année philologique, Medioevo Latino, and the International Medieval Bibliography tend to focus on articles. But it is helpful for conducting a final sweep when compiling your bibliography.
Medieval Liturgy (Bibliography)
A useful guide to the study of the liturgy (the structure of Christian prayer), compiled by John Romano, with a large bibliography, some interesting texts and translations, and links to other online resources.
Hagiography (Bibliography)
A handy bibliographic guide in English to the study of hagiography (texts on saints) compiled by Charles Wright at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. One of several tools on their helpful Medieval Studies website.
Medioevo Latino (MEL) *
Medioevo Latino (MEL, "the Latin Middle Ages") is an annual annotated bibliography produced by the prolific Italian medievalists of SISMEL (see under Link Aggregators MIRABILE, where the online MEL is held). While its coverage is less miraculously complete than the Regesta Imperii (RI) for historical sources, it offers one thing the RI does not: detailed summaries of articles. This makes it the medieval equivalent of Année Philologique. These summaries tend to be in Italian (although occasionally they are in English, French, or German). Because the MEL is produced annually, it tends to be most up-to-date at the beginning of the year, and slowly falls behind the Regesta Imperii and the International Medieval Bibliography.
Not an online resource per se but a book series. Nevertheless, the website usefully provides a reminder of the subjects covered so far. Nouvelle Clio is a series of bibliographic works published by PUF (Presses universitaires de France). Works provides status quaestionis and bibliography of historical themes as well as basic coverage. Extremely valuable series.
Online Medieval Sources Bibliography (OMSB)
This is a Fordham-based open searchable bibliography of medieval texts of all kinds: letters, wills, and household accounts, works of literature, philosophy, and history, administrated documents, etc. The entries provide brief descriptions of the authors or works, together with editions and available English translations. This is an especially good resource for instructors hoping to find English-language translations of medieval sources for their students.
Oxford Bibliographies Online (OBO) *
Oxford Bibliographies Online is a rich and growing series of discipline-focused, online guides to the essential literature in subjects in the humanities and social sciences. Entries are categorized by subject (e.g. Anthropology, Art History, Atlantic History, Biblical Studies, Classics, Education, Geography, International Relations, Islamic Studies, Jewish Studies, Linguistics, Medieval Studies, Military History, Music, Philosophy, Political Science, Renaissance and Reformation, Sociology, etc.). But it is best to search the whole OBO at once (since you may find relevant entries outside of expected sections). OBO entries are incredibly useful for bibliography formation, and narrative summaries, in the best entries, will quickly make you an expert in the historiography of a topic.
Regesta Imperii Bibliography (RI OPAC)
The Regesta Imperii, the extraordinary ongoing German yearbook series, has an amazingly up-to-date bibliography of medieval history, originally designed to accompany the Regesta Imperii but now much expanded. There is not much detail in RI OPAC entries (sometimes articles and books are organized by keywords), but the coverage is extensive and extremely up-to-date. Access is also free and the website works very quickly and smoothly.
Iter: Gateway to the Middle Ages and Renaissance
Iter is a powerful medieval and Renaissance bibliographical database, which includes the Iter Bibliography of secondary source material as well as Iter italicum, a database of uncatalogued humanistic manuscripts, and a Bibliography of English Women Writers, 1500-1640.
The Harvard Tozzer Library website offers useful research information for anthropology and archaeology, and the library itself is one of the finest collections of archaeological reports.
WorldCat is a collective catalog of records developed by tens of thousands of member libraries. It is one of the most complete bibliographies for books. If you are searching for an especially hard-to-find book, this is the place to look.
4. Databases of Texts
The Acta Sanctorum Database is an electronic collection of the centuries-old Bollandist project of editing saints lives, in Latin and Greek, organized by feast days. The Acta Sanctorum Database includes sixty-eight volumes of AASS between 1643 and 1940. You can also search both the AASS and the Patrologia Latina at once from the Patrologia Latina Database.
The "Analecta hymnica Medii Aevi" series was originally published from 1886 to 1922 in 55 volumes by Guido Maria Dreves, Clemens Blume, and Henry M. Bannister. The electronic edition contains both the searchable text and page facsimiles, along with bibliographic information. The database is a little clunky, and the results (as well as the interface) are entirely in Latin, but AH online remains the best place to search for hymns, a rich and underused source for medieval Latin.
Dumbarton Oaks Hagiography Database
The Dumbarton Oaks Hagiography Database is designed to provide Byzantinists with a large corpus of Greek saints’ lives. The work is ongoing, so at present the database is most useful for its metadata on saints’ lives (in English).
An important French-language online resource for Hagiography posted by Guy Philippart at Namur. Allows you to quickly search the probable date of saints' lives by BHL number. Not much detail, but very broad coverage.
Library of Latin Texts (Cetedoc) *
Cetedoc (Centre de traitement électronique des documents) was developed at the University of Louvain-la-Neuve by P. Tombeur and his team as a massive electronic database of Latin documents. The Library of Latin Texts on Brepolis (often called the CLCLT = "Cetedoc Library of Christian Latin Texts") is an enormous database of Latin texts from the beginning of Latin literature to the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). Coverage includes the classical period, patristic works, Medieval Latin, and some texts from the Reformation. The “Cross Database Tool” brings together several collections with medieval texts, including the Corpus Christianorum Series Latina (CCSL); Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Medievalis (CCCM); Corpus Scriptorum ecclesiasticorum Latinorum (CSEL); Patrologia Latina and supplement (PL); Sources chrétiennes (SC); Bernardi opera omnia (BOO); and the Weber Vulgate. This is a truly powerful tool for philological research as well as for reading Latin texts, and should be in frequent use by anyone hoping to identify allusions or patterns of use in Latin authors.
Loeb Classical Library Online *
The Loeb Classical Library of classical Greek and Latin texts with facing-page translations is now online. Treat yourself to some of the greatest works of literature of all time. Similar coverage to Perseus, but reproducing the Loeb page layout and with the latest publications in that series.
Monumenta Germaniae Historica (MGH)
The greatest collection of editions of medieval Latin sources. In Latin with Latin or German introductions. To the highest scholarly standards and now searchable, the MGH is entirely online.
Patrologia Latina Database (PLD) *
The Patrologia Latina Database is an electronic version of the first edition of Jacques-Paul Migne's Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Latina (PL). The PLD includes all editions of the PL and the indices, and covers Latin from the patristics to the death of Pope Innocent III in 1216. The texts are in Latin. It is sometimes worth consulting the scans of the books themselves: they are available via links to Google Books here (http://patristica.net/latina/).
Patrologia Graeca (PG) *
There is no exact equivalent to the PLD for the Patrologia Graeca (PG), but this site provides some texts from Migne's second great collection. In addition, since the PG is pre-copyright, its volumes are available on Google Books (often in poor-quality scans) and there are links to multiple scans here (http://patristica.net/graeca/).
The false papal decretals of "Isidore Mercator" are the largest body of forgeries in medieval canon law. Known as "Pseudo-Isidore" or the "Pseudo-Isidorean Decretals," they were probably compiled in Francia in the first half of the ninth century. Immediately they were used by bishops, archbishops, popes, and secular authorities as real canon law, and it took centuries before their legitimacy was ever questioned. Despite their importance, they have long remained poorly edited. Only recently, however, they have enjoyed a resurgence of study and editing by Karl-Georg Schon and Klaus Zechiel-Eckes (who sadly passed away in 2010), who set up this online edition (ongoing) of the texts. The introduction and background are superlative, and the online edition provides much more detail than Hinschius’ edition.
The Electronic Manipulus Florum
Thomas of Ireland's Manipulus Florum (bouquet of flowers) is an early fourteenth-century florilegium, or collection of quotations and sentences, bringing together the wise words of numerous auctores respected by the later Middle Ages. This text gives you a good sense of how medieval readers approached the classics, and this website makes using it convenient and straightforward.
Recueil des historiens des Gaules et de la France
A great national project begun in 1738, intending to offer the Latin texts of the history of France, edited by M. Bouquet, this collection has largely been superseded, but there are still some texts that can only be consulted in the Recueil des historiens des Gaules et de la France.
Searchable Monumenta Germaniae Historica (Brepols) (MGH Brepolis) *
The online MGH itself has its own search function, but it is not as easy to use as this more intuitive searchable MGH (see entry above). This Brepolis tool allows you to search (with wildcards) for phrases and words (in Latin) throughout this massive database. The Cross Database Search automatically includes the MGH.
A philological/palaeographical online tool developed by Max Bänziger to display digitized online manuscripts alongside their Latin texts. Currently a limited number of manuscripts and texts are available.
A still ongoing project, Brill's "New Jacoby" revises Felix Jacoby’s Fragmente der Griechischen Historiker, providing English translations along the Greek fragments, as well as metadata and bibliographical information about each entry.
Corpus Medicorum Graecorum/Latinorum (CMG/CML)
This website, titled "Galen of Pergamum: The Transmission, Interpretation and Completion of Ancient Medicine," provides editions and concordances of the main ancient/medieval Greek and Latin medical corpora, as well as useful biographical information about major figures in premodern medicine.
The Corpus Corporum is a Zürich-based medieval Latin “meta-collection” which displays Latin texts (and some test Greek texts) mainly from the Patrologia Latina. The benefit of Corpus Corporum is that it clearly differentiates between the text (in TEI xml) and the database into which the texts are loaded. A handy article in ALMA/Bulletin Du Cange 72 (2014): 289-304, describes how to use it.
Collatinus is an online lemmatizer and morphological analyzer for Latin text. It allows you to lemmatize, analyze, or metrically scan a chunk of text in Latin. Although the tool is not always perfect, it is very useful in analyzing meter or prose rhythm. The “scan” too, for instance, will add long and short accents to any length of text, saving a trip to the dictionary if you are scanning and have forgotten lengths. Of course, medieval authors do not always use the same lengths as classical ones (see Dag Norberg below).
Princeton Geniza Project (and other Geniza/Genizah tools)
The Princeton Geniza Project is a searchable database of texts from the famous Cairo Geniza, a large group of medieval manuscripts (in a variety of languages) kept in the storage room (Geniza chamber) of the Ben Ezra synagogue in Fustat (now Cairo). Because it was forbidden to destroy sacred documents, the Jews of the synagogue kept a range of documents with Hebrew on them, and this includes documents in Judaeo-Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic. For scholars with access to these languages, the Princeton Geniza Project is a powerful collaborative tool for research. This is because the documents not only shed light on Jewish religious life, but on all aspects of commercial, social, and administrative life in medieval Egypt. In addition to the Princeton collection (focused on texts), there are several online resources for Geniza research focused on manuscripts:
A very impressive meta-collection of early modern Latin texts hosted by the University of Mannheim. Brings together several collections of neolatin, mostly from German authors: 1. POEMATA: poetry, 2. HISTORICA & POLITICA: historical and political writings, 3. THESAURUS ERUDITIONIS: sixteenth- through eighteenth-century dictionaries and guidebooks, 4. CERA (Corpus Epistolicum Recentioris Aevi): Latin letters mainly by German authors, 5. ITALI-Renascentium Litterarum Libri Rariores: early printed editions of Italian Renaissance scholarship.
Early English Books Online (EEBO) *
Searchable digital facsimiles of books printed in the British Isles and British North America from 1473-1700.
17th-18th-Century Newspapers *
Historical issues of newspapers from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) *
Massive searchable digitized collection of printed materials from the eighteenth century. Very useful for early modern history, but also excellent for early scholarship on Antiquity, Byzantium, and the Middle Ages.
The Making of the Modern World (MOMW) *
Another large digitized searchable collection with tens of thousands of books from c. 1450 to c. 1850, mainly focused on economic and business history.
Database of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century works on British Commonwealth and American law, with tens of thousands of books.
5. Dictionaries
Dag Norberg, A Practical Handbook of Medieval Latin (Paris 1980)
Dag Norberg’s Manuel pratique de latin médiévale is a classic overview of the history of the Latin language after the fall of the Roman Empire. Here it is translated from the French by R.H. Johnson and published online informally. Norberg provides both an essential introduction to the major morphological, semantic, and syntactic changes to Latin and a corrective to the misleading notion of "bad" medieval Latin.
Database of Latin Dictionaries (DLD) *
The Database of Latin Dictionaries (DLD) provides access to a growing number of Latin dictionaries. This includes Lewis and Short and the massive collection of the revised Du Cange (also available elsewhere). Only recently, the excellent Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources has been added to this group of dictionaries. If you click “Help” in DLD you will be able to download a 100-page document which not only gives guidance to using the DLD, but provides very helpful information about the dictionaries included. Note that some of the DLD’s names for dictionaries are not in fact the printed dictionary’s name (e.g. “Blaise Médiéval” and “Blaise Patristique” are DLD shorthands for two dictionaries compiled by Alfred Blaise, the Lexicon Latinitatis Medii Aevi and the Dictionnaire latin-français des auteurs chrétiens respectively).
Du Cange (Sorbonne)
The great Latin dictionary of Charles du Fresne, sieur du Cange, the Glossarium mediæ et infimæ latinitatis, which first appeared in 1678 in three volumes, was successively edited over the generations. The Benedictines of Saint-Maur produced a revised edition in 1733-1736; Pierre Carpentier added a supplement in 1766; Louis Henschel made revisions between 1840 and 1850, and finally Léopold Favre completed the final edition between 1883 and 1887 (which has been reprinted in the twentieth century, e.g. 1938). The successive additions and changes are noted in the text using a variety of symbols. This vast dictionary is available on Brepolis's DLD portal (with a digitization of the edition), but it is also available on this convenient and fast-working site at the Sorbonne. If you know you only want to search within Du Cange (often still the best place for realia terms), this is a faster way to do it.
Novum Glossarium Mediae Latinitatis (NGML)
The Novum Glossarium Mediae Latinitatis is a slow-moving (so far they have gotten from "L" to "Plaka") but very high quality collective Latin dictionary established in 1957 by Franz Blatt and Francesco Arnaldi. The compilers took the unusual step of beginning mid-alphabet. Entries are very good and the coverage is impressive. Here are both HTML and PDF versions of the dictionary as it has appeared so far, hosted by the IRHT. In addition, a powerful secret weapon on the same site is the searchable Index scriptorum, an online version of the 2005 Supplement to the Index scriptorum novus, the NGML's house works index, edited by Bruno Bon et al. For many, many medieval Latin works (including the most obscure saints' lives), this will give you best edition and date estimate for many texts which are little discussed elsewhere.
Mediae Latinitatis Lexicon Minus (Niermeyer) Online *
"Niermeyer" as this 2002 revised version of the J. F. Niermeyer's 1972 Mediae Latinitatis Lexicon Minus is often called, is a dictionary of medieval Latin. The coverage is selective, and the dictionary tends to be better for administrative or technical terms. The whole dictionary is available online on BrillOnline.
Dictionnaire du Moyen Français (DMF)
The Dictionnaire du Moyen Français (1330-1500) is an online searchable dictionary of Middle French forms. Based at Nancy (University of Lorraine) and run by the CNRS Laboratoire ATILF ("Analyse et Traitement Informatique de la Langue Française"), it's entries offer hyper-links to digitized print dictionaries and texts. A very sophisticated and recently (2015) updated resource for medieval French.
French of England (FoE), French of Italy (FoI), and French of Outremer (FoO)
French of England is a Fordham-based website dedicated to the vast store of French material from the English and Norman worlds. It includes audio recordings, bibliography, publications, and useful links. It has now been joined by two other resources: French of Italy and French of Outremer (dedicated to French spoken in Crusading regions).
Frédéric Eugène Godefroy (1826-1897)'s massive Dictionnaire de l'ancienne langue française et de tous ses dialectes du IXe au XVe siècle is one of the landmarks of Old French lexicography. It is digitized and searchable here, as well as available in PDF via the Internet Archive.
Grand Robert de la Langue Française (Grande Robert) *
The "Grand Robert" is one of the essential reference sources for the French language, covering etymology, history, pronunciation, and usage of French words. The "Grand Robert" is considered one of the main dictionary of reference for the French language, together with the "Trésor de la langue française." It provides useful etymological information for Francophone researchers.
Oxford Duden German Dictionary (Duden) *
A useful German dictionary online. Includes etymological information.
Oxford English Dictionary (OED) *
English words can be a powerful tool for the examination of the past, even the past before English. The OED is an extraordinary historical dictionary with rich etymological information.
The Thesaurus Linguae Latinae (TLL) is the first comprehensive scholarly dictionary of ancient Latin from the earliest times down to AD 600. Far and away, the best dictionary of Latin, especially for the development of Latin in time. Three caveats. First, the entire dictionary is in Latin. Second, the dictionary, which is over a century old, is not yet complete. Entries are finished for A–M, O, P–pomifer, porta–pulso. N and the letters after P remain unfinished, but every year the contents of newly printed fascicles are added to the database. Third, the printed format is a bit more intuitive to use and the hierarchical sections are less clear online. It is helpful to familiarize yourself with the conventions of the physical version, and then the online TLL will be easier to use.
Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG) *
The Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG) is the most powerful tool for the study of ancient and medieval Greek. It is designed as a modern, electronic version of the sixteenth-century Thesaurus Graecae Linguae of Henri Estienne (Stephanus). The online TLG allows you to analyze Greek text, search through nearly the entire corpus of known premodern Greek, and access several lexica of ancient and medieval Greek. Access to the TLG varies by institution. At Harvard it is available at only certain computers; elsewhere access is broader.
The Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon Project (CAL)
If your research takes you into Aramaic, this resource (a work in progress) is a powerful tool. The CAL is a textual database of multiple dialects of Aramaic from between the ninth century BCE and the thirteenth century CE. Thanks to Stephen Shoemaker for this suggestion.
Crum's Coptic Dictionary (Crum)
W. E. Crum's classic Coptic Dictionary digitized online. Thanks again to Stephen Shoemaker for this one. This is hosted by TABS (the Tyndale Archive of Biblical Studies), with classic dictionaries for Hebrew, Aramaic, Coptic, Syriac, and Arabic.
6. Digital Manuscripts
Oxyrhynchus Online (POxy)
An Oxford-based imaging project for the papyri (mostly Greek) discovered at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt. See also the papyrology links provided by the Imaging Papyri Project.
Bibliotheca Legum Regni Francorum manuscripta (Leges)
Impressive new database of manuscripts from early medieval Francia which contain the barbarian leges, with short descriptions and some contextualizing metadata and bibliography. Useful for early medievalists.
Bibliothèque municipale de Laon (Digitized Manuscripts)
Digitized manuscripts from the collection of Laon, France. The quality of the scans is very high, and the Library plans to digitize more manuscripts.
Bibliothèque nationale de France - Archives and Manuscripts (BnF)
The catalogue of the manuscript holdings at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) in Paris, one of the single most enormous collections of medieval manuscripts in existence. The search tool has recently (Sept 19, 2016) been changed.
Capitularia (Edition of the Frankish Capitularies)
Database of capitularies and capitulary manuscripts. Excellent for Carolingian history.
[Catalogue of Digitized Medieval Manuscripts (UCLA)
A powerful cross-reference tool designed to catalogue digitized manuscripts online. Update: In 2015, this useful website was "retired," so the link above will take you to a memorial page: a sobering reminder of the challenges of coordinating ever-multiplying online resources, and of their ephemeral nature!]
Codices Electronici Ecclesiae Coloniensis (CEEC)
The Cathedral Library at Cologne (Köln) has digitized its substantial medieval holdings, calling the collection "electronic manuscripts of the church of Cologne" (Latin: Codices electronici ecclesiae Coloniensis). The interface is in German, but if you select the "manuscripts" (Handschriften) tab, you can search by kind of manuscript (Handschriftenart), author (Autor), title (Werktitel), time (Alter), point of origin (Entstehungsort), or language (Sprache).
Codices Electronici Sangallenses (CESG)
An online collection of facsimiles of manuscripts from one of the greatest surviving monastic libraries. Examine whole medieval manuscripts, including some of the most important Carolingian books, like a copy of the Rule of Benedict Charlemagne commissioned, an important copy of the canon law collection Dionysio-Hadriana, and a manuscript of laws with St-Gall's earliest library catalog.
Heidelberger historische Bestände
Digitized historical documents from the University of Heidelberg collection: includes manuscripts, charters, incunables (printed books from before 1500), and much else.
Consulting Medieval Manuscripts Online
A number of "links leading to collections containing fully digitized medieval manuscripts, one for digitized individual manuscripts, and one devoted to projects choosing to digitize selected pages."
Digital Papyri at Houghton Library
A digital exhibit of the eighty or so papyri dating from the third century BCE to the sixth century CE, mainly from Oxyrhynchus and other sites in Egypt. All are Greek except for one, MS Coptic 10 = P. Oxy. 6.987 (Coptic).
Digital Medieval Manuscripts at Houghton Library
Harvard's Houghton Library has digitized many of its medieval manuscripts, including its Carolingian examples (mainly fragments), like this collection of patristic texts (Houghton Typ 495). Houghton also maintains a very impressive digitized collection of Books of Hours. These digitizations are open access.
Handy glossary of terms in manuscript studies. Short but good for an introduction to the basic terms of art.
An inventory of manuscripts primarily in German collections with descriptions of over 20,000 medieval MSS. An extremely impressive resource.
Herzog August Bibliothek at Wolfenbüttel
The Wolfenbüttel Library is a major book collection in Germany. Its Digital Library offers a number of books and manuscripts in digital facsimile.
Karlsruhe, Badische Landesbibliothek
The Baden regional library at Karlsruhe contains several manuscripts from the early Middle Ages, particularly in the collection from Reichenau ( Provenienz Reichenau), the so called “Aug. Perg.” collection.
Manuscripta Mediaevalia is a hub coordinating several digitization projects in German libraries, including that of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich.
This database builds on the research of Jacques Payen and Michael McVaugh, examining the Latin-language medieval medical manuscripts within the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Over 500 MSS are included: each entry includes codicological details about the manuscripts and a list of contents. Note that it is necessary to sign in.
"Parker Library on the Web" aims to provide a high-resolution digital copy of every page of the manuscripts described by James’s Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (Cambridge University Press, 1912). The "Parker Library" is one of the premier collections of medieval manuscripts, and in addition to its famous medieval Anglo-Saxon and medieval English manuscripts, it contains many examples of interest to early medieval historians, including the beautiful Count Achadeus Psalter (CCCC 272).
An important tool for Greek-language manuscript research. Pinakes aims to catalogue all Greek manuscripts (not including papyri), from the beginnings of the language to the end of the sixteenth century, which are contained within printed library catalogues. The project began at PIMS in Toronto and since 1993 has been a project of the IRHT (Institut de Recherche et d'Histoire des Textes) in Paris. Pinakes allows you to search for information about some 13,000 works in 40,000 manuscripts around the world.
Mittelalterliche Handschriftenbestände (Switzerland)
A list of Swiss repositories containing manuscripts, with links to e-codices and inventories of manuscripts (when there are available). Part of the Codices.ch website dedicated to ancient and medieval manuscripts in Switzerland.
Digitized Greek Manuscripts (DGM)
One of the excellent resources for Byzantine studies published online by the Princeton University Library, Digitized Greek Manuscripts makes available over six thousand partially or fully digitized manuscripts containing Byzantine texts.
A large virtual archive of medieval manuscripts, organized by repository, with hundreds of thousands of entries.
An IRHT project, Calendoscope is a helping hand for analyzing liturgical manuscripts. For any individual day of the year, it will provide you a list of saints with feasts on that day in different calendars. It is currently in its beta version.
The St. Gall Plan is the earliest preserved and most extraordinary visualization of a building complex produced in the Middle Ages. Ever since the Plan was created (probably at the monastery of Reichenau sometime in the period 819-826), it has been preserved in the monastery of St-Gallen in Switzerland. This web site, created with the financial assistance of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation by scholars at the University of California, Los Angeles and the University of Virginia, presents the plan, its origins, components, and notations. The website also includes impressive virtual libraries of early medieval monasteries.
The Exon Domesday Book is one of the richest manuscript witnesses to the great survey of William the Conqueror. The "Conqueror's Commissioners" is a digital resource for this important source, with a digital facsimile, text and translation, and palaeographical description of the manuscript. The work is still in progress, but promises to be a major resource for Anglo-Norman history.
Models of Authority (Scottish Charters)
"Models of Authority: Scottish Charters and the Emergence of Government" provides an introduction to surviving Scottish charters from 1100-1200. Offers diplomatic and palaeographical analysis to charters in an age of govermental evolution.
Roman de la Rose Digital Library
"Many people say that dreams / are nothing but fables and lies" ("Maintes gens disent que les songes / Ne sont que fables et mensonges"). The Roman de la Rose, one of the most beloved literary texts of the later Middle Ages (composed in two stages in the early and late thirteenth century), begs to differ. This collaboration between the Sheridan Libraries of Johns Hopkins and the BnF in Paris aims to bring together all digitized manuscripts of the Roman de la Rose. It also serves as a useful introduction to this most influential of medieval French romances.
TELMA or "Traitement électronique des manuscrits et des archives" hosts several projects to publish digitizations of ancient and medieval manuscripts and the tools necessary to consult them. Their projects include Callythea (Greco-Roman iconography), Chartae Galliae (database of acts from France up to the end of the thirteenth century), Chartes originales (digitizations of original French charters from between 1120 and 1220), and RELMIN ("Le statut légal des minorités religieuses dans l'espace euro-méditerranéen" = documents relating to the legal status of religious minorities in Europe and the Mediterranean), and many others related to royal acts, cartularies, liturgical manuscripts, and Capetian inquests.
Annotated Books Online (ABO)
Annotated Books Online is a Dutch project focused on early modern historical reading practices, providing a digital archive of early modern books which have extensive annotations. Examples include famous texts (Homer, Aristotle, Lucretius) and famous readers (Erasmus, Montaigne, Casaubon), as well as lesser known but fascinating books and their readers.
7. Guides or Link Aggregators
BHL (Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina)
The standard catalogue for saints' lives, the BHL was originally a published book with supplements. This website, maintained by the Bollandists, allows you to quickly find the BHL number of any given saint's Life, which you should always do in parentheses after citing a life. You must sign in, but access is free.
Bayerische Staatsbibliothek - Catalogs
The Bavarian State Library (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek) coordinates a wealth of digitization projects, including manuscripts, reference works, encyclopedias, editions (especially of charters), periodicals, and collections (this includes the MGH). They have been at it since 1997, integrating their own holdings (in Munich) with regional library holdings and projects across Southern Germany. An example of the excellent resources available from this site is the website for the medieval administrative documents of Freising in Bavaria, an important Carolingian see. This is an amazing resource which allows you to look at the original capitulary and the standard scholarly edition side by side. The distance between the translated or edited documents and the manuscript originals is suddenly eliminated. Also worthy of note are the book illuminations from the monastery of Reichenau, the collection of Latin manuscripts at the BSB, the manuscripts from women's monasteries, the ongoing collection "Europaena regia" (including the digitisation of 425 masterworks from the main abbeys and bishop schools of the Carolingian Empire, a planned digitization of half the Carolingian manuscripts in Europe), the journal Francia, and the collection of books published by Francia.
Chancery Rolls on the Internet
A very handy meta-list of digitized chancery rolls (medieval English legal documents).
Brepolis *
Brepolis is the home of many online projects of Brepols Publishers. It contains several powerful tools for ancient and medieval history, including Vetus Latina Database, the Revue d'histoire ecclésiastique - bibliographie, Dictionnaire d'histoire et de géographie ecclésiastiques, International Medieval Bibliography, Europa Sacra (aka Gams), Lexikon des Mittelalters, International Encyclopaedia for the Middle Ages, searchable Monumenta Germaniae Historica, the Library of Latin Texts (CLCLT), which can be cross-searched using the Cross Database Searchtool, the Database of Latin Dictionaries, and the Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources.
Brepols Miscellanea Online is compromised of collections of scholarly essays on the subject of Medieval Europe. The database includes numerous volumes from 2011 onward, as well as an archive with thousands of articles from between 2000 and 2010. The majority of the articles are in English. There are several important collections of essays on the Carolingian entirely available in searchable PDFs from this website.
Dyabola *
A bit clunky but very powerful, this aggregator is a major research tool for archaeology. It offers access to the subject catalogs of publications on the history of art and classical archaeology. It includes subject catalogs of the German Archaeological Institute in Rome (1956-2004), the Bibliography of Iberian Archaeology from the German Archaeological Institute in Madrid (1991-2002), and the Archaeology of Roman Provinces from RGK Frankfurt (1992-2004). Dyabola also includes art historical databases of value: the “Database of Attic Grave Reliefs,” the “Census of Antique Art and Architecture Known to the Renaissance,” and the “Corpus of Antique Monuments Known to Winckelmann.”
Begun in 1997 as the major digitization project at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Gallica includes full-text and page-images of hundreds of thousands of volumes from the Middle Ages to the beginning of the twentieth century. A huge digitization project which covers manuscripts, printed books, and journals.
Google Book Search allows users to search the full text of all books available in Google Book Search. Use as a glorified index for books and for wildcard searching, as well as an excellent place to look up older scholarship.
Harvard has an enormous body of e-resources, beyond what I have listed here. If you have Harvard access, here you can identify, locate, and connect to Harvard's collection of e-resources and e-journals. You can also use new tools that allow you to search multiple resources at one time and to save sets of e-resources, e-journals, and citations.
Byzantine Titles Online (Dumbarton Oaks)
Run by Dumbarton Oaks, this website provides links to PDFs of many titles in Byzantine studies, including primary sources (such as Byzantine female saints' lives and military manuals), collected essays (on Crusades, garden culture, and more), and individual studies (e.g. numismatics). One of the most important links is to the seminal Economic History of Byzantium.
Inter Libros is a very useful Research Guide for Classics, Byzantine, & Medieval Studies, compiled for the use of Harvard students, professors, and researchers. It is a gateway to many of the University's most powerful online and paper resources for medieval history.
Europeans love their acronyms. Theleme, or "Techniques pour l'Historien en Ligne : Études, Manuels, Exercices, Bibliographies," is a guide from the French École nationale des chartes providing a wonderful overview of historical techniques, guides, and bibliographies.
MIRABILE - Archivio Digitale della Cultura Latina Medievale *
MIRABILE brings together several online databases created by the prolific Società Internazionale per lo Studio del Medioevo Latino (SISMEL). This acronym-loving society has created very useful tools for medievalists: Medioevo latino (MEL), a bibliographical bulletin covering publications on European culture from Boethius to Erasmus (6C-15C); the Bibliotheca Scriptorum Latinorum Medii recentiorisque Aevi (BISLAM), an authoritative list for names of Latin medieval authors, with more than 15,000 entries and 80,000 variants, and lists of works for each author; the Compendium Auctorum Medii Aevi (CALMA), an even more authoritative index of medieval authors and works, but still ongoing; as well as recent issues of the following journals in full text: Documenti e Studi sulla tradizione filosofica medievale; Filologia mediolatina; Hagiographica; Iconographica; Itineraria; Micrologus’ library; Stilistica e metrica italiana. New tools are always appearing on MIRABILE, and the website has been improved over the years to work more smoothly (though it sometimes requires a bit of patience to master its functions).
Oxford Reference Online Premium Collection (Oxford Reference) *
In various sections of this guide, I have listed references available through Oxford References Online. There are now a great number of resources available online through this aggregator. Oxford Reference Online is a searchable database of reference works published by Oxford University Press. It contains a very broad range of OUP titles, including those from the “Companions” series, and all of the Oxford Dictionaries mentioned about (OLD, ODB, ODMA, etc.).
Oxford's Handbooks series is conveniently cross-searchable and can be helpful with interdisciplinary research.
The Past Masters series comprises full-text electronic editions of works by major philosophical figures, in both original language and in English translation. This includes a few texts of potential interest, such as the complete works (Latin and English) of Augustine. New content is often added.
Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England
The Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England (PASE) is a database which aims to provide information on individuals in Anglo-Saxon England from the sixth through the eleventh century. It uses “factoids” from narrative sources, hagiography, charters, manuscripts, inscriptions, Domesday Book, and numismatic evidence.
TITUS (Thesaurus Indogermanischer Text- und Sprachmaterialien)
TITUS brings together linguistic materials, dictionaries, and texts for many vernacular languages used during the Middle Ages, including Germanic, Slavonic, and Celtic ones. An extremely important linguistic tool for anyone working in Indogermanic languages.
This cleverly-named website developed by Jack Tannous (Princeton), Scott Johnson (University of Oklahoma), and Morgan Reed (CUA) provides an annotated bibliography of Syriac resources online. The bibliographies give you the run-down of the main resources for Syriac, but the site provides much more than Syriac resources, and is a useful port of call in beginning any investigation of the ancient and late antique Near East.
The Society for the Study of Medieval Military History publishes translated primary sources, articles, syllabuses, and even some dissertations pertaining to medieval military history. Coverage is broad, from the late Roman period to the early modern period. A very useful source for anyone teaching military history.
Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum
A labor of Kristeller and Brown, the Catalogus provides accounts of the reception histories -- in the form of translations and commentaries -- of classical authors. This online version offers PDFs of individual entries. An indispensable resource.
8. Journals
Academic Search Premier (EBSCOhost) *
Academic Search Premier (ASP) is a large database with citation data from thousands of publications. It can be used as another JSTOR with somewhat different coverage. Although it lacks the coverage that JSTOR, it nevertheless can search some journals (Early Medieval Europe, Journal of Agrarian Change) that still are not currently in JSTOR or MUSE.
EME is an excellent journal with many useful articles on early medieval history. It is not on JSTOR, but it is searchable and available through Harvard eResources.
Google Scholar enables you to search for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all areas of research. Can be useful in finding articles and reviews, getting a rough sense of the impact of individual books and articles, as well as in building up a bibliography.
JSTOR *
Good old JSTOR. An ever-expanding archive of journals and now books in several languages. Includes some of the many journals that publish articles on ancient, medieval, and early modern history.
Another journal outside of JSTOR but worth having online for medievalists. Particularly for those with interest in medieval Latinity, the Journal of Medieval Latin is full of excellent articles about the fate of Latin in the Middle Ages.
Stuart Jenks developed this Table of Contents tool for historical journals, quite a useful tool for getting a sense of the historical contents of major historical journals. You can read journal tables of contents in JSTOR, MUSE, etc., but it is often quicker to use this handy early piece of digital humanities. (Cf. TOCS-IN below, a similar tool for Classics,)
Persée is a national digitization project of French academic journals in the Humanities and Social Sciences. The project makes PDFs available for complete runs of journals, though the dates of coverage vary and there is a moving wall of 3-5 years for recent issues.
Project Muse intends to provide networked access to the full text of multiple scholarly journals published by several university presses. It also includes several entire books. Includes several journals and books not in the JSTOR collection.
Speculum (Citation Guidelines)
The Journal Speculum is the premier journal for medieval studies in the United States. Its style guidelines are a variant of Chicago Style, geared toward the easy citation of medieval sources. A good option for instructors of medieval history who want their students to adhere to Chicago Style but who are looking for a more medieval-focused bibliographical style.
A Toronto website which assembles tables of contents for journals in Classics, Near Eastern Studies, and Religion. Very good to get the lay of the land in these subjects. (Cf. Magazine Stacks above)
Viator *
Viator is an excellent English-language journal for medieval studies. It is available online, although it is not currently available through JSTOR.
9. Maps, Dates, and Events
Medieval people did not calculate dates the same way we do today. Hermann Grotefend's Zeitrechnung des deutschen Mittelalters und der Neuzeit is the standard guide to calculating medieval and early modern dates. This website presents Grotefend in HTML form.
Like Grotefend, C.R. Cheney's Handbook of Dates for Students of English History, RHS Guides and Handbooks 4 (London, 1945; rpt. with corr. 1981) provides a useful English-language introduction to the way early medieval dating worked, and this website uses Cheney to calculate dates with an intuitive GUI (graphic user interface).
Digital Atlas of Roman and Medieval Civilization (DARMC)
The Digital Atlas of Roman and Medieval Civilization (DARMC), designed at Harvard by Prof. Michael McCormick and other Harvard faculty and students, is a tool that allows for a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) approach to mapping and spatial analysis of the Roman and medieval worlds. Includes several downloadable excel spreadsheets and shapefiles.
The Pleiades project is an open gazetteer/graph of ancient places. It allows users to add and share geographical and historical information about Greco-Roman Antiquity digitally. Currently there are tens of thousands of names, places, and locations to explore.
Orbis (Stanford)
Orbis is a Stanford-based Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World, a GIS project mainly aimed at estimating travel times and expenses in the Roman Empire. This very impressive tool allows you to re-create journeys by land and sea and estimate times and costs depending on season, route, and travel methods. You have to know the classical names of places involved (for this, see Graesse's Orbis Latinus below), but this is easily enough done. A very user-friendly GUI.
The abbreviated, online version of an important reference work, Johann Georg Theodor Graesse's Orbis Latinus: Lexikon lateinischer geographischer Namen des Mittelalters und der Neuzeit, expanded and edited by Helmut Plechl and Sophie-Charlotte Plech, 3 volumes (Braunschweig, 1972; but originally 1909). Graesse compiled a list of Latin placenames and their modern equivalents. Very important if you are working with Latin sources and you need to know where you are when sources talk about Suessonae (Soissons), Lutetia (Paris), Moguntiacum (Mainz), or Eboracum (York). Note that the online version is convenient, but vastly less complete than the hard copy (held in the Loker Reading Room of Widener at RR 4025.5.5).
Regesta Imperii (RI)
The Regesta Imperii is an incredibly powerful tool for those with even a smattering of German. It is a year-by-year accounting of events (with sources) organized by royal, imperial, and papl dynasties. Search by keywords (Stichwörter), phrase (Phrase), place of issue (Ausstellungsort), register number (Regestennummer), or date (Datum). There are now multiple series and subseries. While the information is only as accurate as the sources, the RI remains an extremely useful, and very powerful, source for medieval political history. The RI website also contains an amazing bibliography (RI OPAC, see above).
Interactive maps, linked to sources, for an astonishing variety of places and events in the Carolingian period. A labor of love, Regnum Francorum is much more than a map - it is a guide to several key sources of the Carolingian period.
Mapping the Republic of Letters (MRL)
Mapping the Republic of Letters is a Stanford based network visualization tool designed to represent the relationships between major early modern intellectual figures.
10. Translated Sources
Polyptyques are inventories that list the resources of great estates, especially monasteries, during the early Middle Ages. These documents provide insights into rural life and demography during the Carolingian period. This website, run from the University of Leicester by medievalists Joanna Story and James Palmer, translates into English large sections (though note: not complete) from 10 polyptyques, chosen to provide a geographical and chronological cross-section.
Older translations of early church fathers (the patristic authors). Useful for students, even though in many cases these translations have been superceded.
A major collection of translated medieval texts, undergoing a large re-haul to remove dead links. A very useful source of translations for otherwise untranslated Latin Carolingian texts. See especially the section on the Carolingians.
MARS Translated Sources and Studies (Bill North)
William ("Bill") North of Carleton College has produced and posted online a series of elegant teaching translations, both primary sources and secondary sources, which are hosted on the Carleton Medieval and Renaissance Studies (MARS) website. Careful bibliographies and notes make these extremely useful teaching tools. Particularly rich for Carolingian and Byzantine sources. (See also Courtney Booker's [UBC] translations of Carolingian sources at the bottom of the page of his publications site.)
New Advent Fathers of the Church
Another large database of translated patristic sources (mostly partial) - late antique Christian texts read heavily by medieval intellectuals. Useful as a quick resource for students, but generally better translations are now available for most of these texts.
Perseus Project (Tufts University)
The Perseus Project is an electronic book-text collection, one of the great early projects in digital humanities. It offers an enormous corpus of Latin and Greek texts (with older translations, which can be read side-by-side) for Antiquity, and very useful linguistic tools for Greek and Latin.
Perseus (University of Chicago)
Based on the Tufts Perseus, but using the PhiloLogic tool to search and browse texts, the Chicago version of Perseus sometimes offers an easier way to search for individual words or phrases than its Tufts equivalent.
Modern Language Translations of Byzantine Sources (MLTBS)
Another powerful tool for Byzantine studies made available by the Princeton University Library, MLTBS is a database of over two thousand translated Byzantine sources. Translations are not all in English, but it is possible to sort by English (or whichever languages).
11. Numismatics (Coins)
Fitzwilliam Museum Coin Collection
The Fitz in Cambridge has one of the world's greatest collections of early medieval coins. Their website contains a very good early medieval corpus, which you can search by date, kingdom, ruler, mint (location of minting), and findspot. Their site also has a cool checklist of coin finds in Great Britain. A very useful tool for budding numismatists.
Münzkabinett (coin collection), Berlin
The online catalog of the numismatic (coins) resources of the national museums of Berlin is searchable in English, and provides nice images and good information on its Carolingian coins.
DigiSig (Medieval Seals)
DigiSig is an impressive new digital database of medieval seals.
12. Palaeography
Jean Mabillon, De re diplomatica
Jean Mabillon (1632-1707) is usually regarded as the founder of palaeography (although in fact Bernard de Monfaucon gave birth to the name in his 1708 Palaeographia graeca). Mabillon's 1681 masterpiece De re diplomatica is a classic of palaeography and diplomatic(s) (i.e. the study of charters and diplomas), and it remains a useful overview to the present day. This is a very usable digitization of the first edition hosted by the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.
This website has been available for years. It is designed to introduce visitors to the basics of palaeography (the study of ancient handwriting). It is one of many such sites, but for beginners it is one of the very best. Learn the basics with the Index of Scripts.
The famous Vindolanda wood tablets were excavated from the Roman fort by Hadrian’s Wall in northern England. They preserve both fascinating text and palaeography from the first and second centuries CE.
Interpreting Ancient Manuscripts (IAM)
A venerable internet resource, started at Brown, to provide a basic introduction to ancient books. The focus is on the Greek Bible, but there is much here to help get your bearings with ancient codicology and palaeography.
This resource mainly deals with diplomatic (i.e. charter) palaeography in England (c. 1000-1100). DigiPal makes up for its narrow focus through a very impressive analytical tools. An explanation for how to use it is posted here.
Editions and Editing (Harvard)
While not strictly a palaeography tool, this guide to editing texts gives a great general overview of manuscripts and to palaeography, while also teaching guidelines for creating editions from handwritten texts.
A helpful introduction to the basics of palaeography, which provides a history of scripts in Europe with numerous examples.
Album interactif de paléographie médiévale
A very useful French-language introduction to palaeography from the ninth century to the sixteenth century.
This tool presents digitized early modern Spanish manuscripts (from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries), with transcriptions and sample alphabets. Another useful project is the BYU-hosted Spanish Script Tutorial.
Terminologie: Gotische Schriftarten (German Palaeography)
On the very useful Codices.ch website (dedicated to ancient and medieval manuscripts in Switzerland), this helpful guide to the terminology of Gothic script (with examples in images) will help you if you have dealings with German manuscripts from the high to the late Middle Ages.
Lublin w Dokumencie (Lublin in Documents)
Fourteenth- to sixteenth-century administrative documents from Lublin, Poland. The nice feature here is that by scrolling over the digitization you see transcriptions of the text.
Enigma is an experimental project aiming to assist scholars in deciphering manuscript readings. Type in the letters you can decipher, with letters you can't decipher represented by periods, and the tool will provide possible words.
An early modern guide to "secretarial" palaeography from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Very handy to anyone examining Scottish documents from this period, but also a useful introduction to a widely used writing style.