Wikipedia:WikiProject Middle Ages/Resources
This page is for sharing and discussing resources of Medieval history available online (or otherwise). Please add and share your knowledge!
Encyclopedias and dictionaries
Resources in this section provide broad overviews of topics relevant to the Middle Ages. Entries may be useful starting points when creating a new page.
Dictionary of the Middle Ages
A 14-volume Middle Ages Encyclopedia released in the 1980s by pre-eminent medievalists. Borrowable online from the Internet Archive lending library:
- v. 1. Aachen -- Augustinism
- v. 2. Augustinus triumphus -- Byzantine literature
- v. 3. Cabala -- Crimea
- v. 4. Croatia -- Family sagas, Icelandic
- v. 5. Famine in the Islamic world -- Groote, Geert
- v. 6. Grosseteste, Robert -- Italian literature
- v. 7. Italian Renaissance -- Mabinogi
- v. 8. Macbeth -- Mystery plays
- v. 9. Mystery religions -- Poland
- v. 10. Polemics -- Scandinavia
- v. 11. Scandinavian languages -- Textiles, Islamic
- v. 12. Thaddeus legend -- Zwart Noc
- v. 13. Index
- v. 14. Supplement 1
Comment: I recently read on a popular Medievalists list a discussion of Wikipedia and someone mentioned why bother when there is the Dictionary of the Middle Ages. In many respects this is what Wikipedia's Medieval section could be, covering over 100,000 people/places/things. An excellent reference. --Stbalbach 09:13, 24 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages
A two-volume Oxford Reference encyclopedia published in 2000. Borrowable online from the Internet Archive:
- volume 1
- volume 2
Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium
A three-volume reference work on the Byzantine world. Borrowable online from the Internet Archive:
- volume 1
- volume 2
- volume 3
Routledge Encyclopedias of the Middle Ages
Links, where available, lead to a borrowable version on the Internet Archive.
- Medieval Scandinavia: An Encyclopedia ed. Phillip Pulsiano and Kirsten Wolf
- Medieval France: An Encyclopedia ed. William W. Kibler, Grover A. Zinn, Lawrence Earp and John Jr. Bell Henneman
- Medieval England: An Encyclopedia ed. Paul E. Szarmach, M. Teresa Tavormina and Joel T. Rosenthal
- Trade, Travel and Exploration in the Middle Ages: An Encyclopedia ed. John Block Friedman and Kristen Mossler Figg
- Medieval Archaeology: An Encyclopedia ed. Pam J. Crabtree
- Medieval Germany: An Encyclopedia ed. John M. Jeep
- Medieval Jewish Civilization: An Encyclopedia ed. Norman Roth
- Medieval Iberia: An Encyclopedia edited by E. Michael Gerli
- Medieval Italy: An Encyclopedia – Volume I & II ed. Christopher Kleinhenz
- Medieval Science, Technology, and Medicine: An Encyclopedia ed. Thomas F. Glick, Steven Livesey, Faith Wallis
- Medieval Ireland: An Encyclopedia ed. Seán Duffy
- Key Figures in Medieval Europe: An Encyclopedia ed. Richard K. Emmerson
- Women and Gender in Medieval Europe: An Encyclopedia ed. Margaret Schaus
- Medieval Islamic Civilization: An Encyclopedia - Volume I & II ed. Josef W. Meri
Encyclopedia Britannica
Encyclopedia Britannica Online
The full Encyclopedia Britannica (latest version) is available online for free. The trick is, you have to link to the EB article from an external site (explained here). EB encourages linking to it from Wikipedia articles. See for example The EB article on Wikipedia.
Encyclopedia Britannica 1911
See 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica. Scanned versions are online and fully in the public domain.
Comment: I picked up a set from a local bookseller for $100. Fun to browse, but converting the Victorian language is tiresome and often unrewarding results in the end, YMMV. Nationalistic biases. There is little summation of significance and importance and context, rather a focus on events, dates and names. Old red leather books are impressive. --Stbalbach 09:13, 24 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Google Books:
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The Cambridge History of English and American Literature
See The Cambridge History of English and American Literature. Similar to EB1911 and fully available online.
Comment: Excellent resource to find significant and important authors and documents of Medieval literature and art. Again, nationalistic biases to watch out for. --Stbalbach 09:13, 24 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Oxford DNB
See Oxford DNB and Dictionary of National Biography. Biography database. Subscription based but can be found for free through large university libraries. They offer a free email subscription called "Oxford DNB life of the day" with one new biography sent via email daily.
Comment: I have access; ask me by email from my page.DGG 05:02, 24 January 2007 (UTC)
Scholarly articles and books
Resources in this section are typically more focused in scope. Consulting these resources can be helpful for filling in gaps not covered by encyclopedia entries, digging into specific topics, or examining differing scholarly opinions on the same issue.
Google Scholar
Google Scholar is a search engine for scholarly articles and grey literature that contains metadata information for roughly 390 million papers and often links to full-text versions.
JSTOR
JSTOR contains over 12 million journal articles, books, and other primary documents. Access is often available online, from home, through your local library or university membership. Unaffiliated JSTOR accounts may read up to 100 articles every month for free.
Comment: Indespensible. Academic journals are second only to books as source materials, many of the most important writings on subjects are only found in these Journals. I obtain access for free at home through a familys library membership in another city. If you (or someone you know) can get a library card, chances are you have access to JSTOR. --Stbalbach 09:13, 24 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Comment: If you cite JSTOR, always use digital object identifier. They are recognizable via JSTOR's Dublin Core metadata. ––Bender235 (talk) 17:10, 14 August 2008 (UTC)
Google Books
Google Books has over ten million books available for free, plus metadata or partial access for tens of millions more.
The Internet Archive
The Internet Archive provides access to over 44 million books and texts accessible for download or for limited-time borrowing through its library borrowing program.
HathiTrust
HathiTrust has digitized over 18 million items from the collections of research libraries.
Persée
Persée is a database of various French-language journals. They have the journal which gave the Annales School its name (1975-1993), the Bibliothèque de l’École des chartes (1979-2000), Mélanges de l’École française de Rome (1881-1961) and a lot of useful modern history resources.
Primary sources: Texts
Resources in this section contain links to medieval texts and occasionally translations.
Medieval Sourcebook
Medieval Sourcebook at fordham.edu- A large collection of source texts from the Middle Ages, part of Fordham University's source book collection. External links are often outdated and broken, but still contains hundreds of source texts that are otherwise hard to find.
Digital Library of Late-Antique Latin Texts
DigilibLT is a project hosted by the University of Eastern Piedmont. The site contains downloadable Latin-language texts from the second through seventh centuries.
Perseus Digital Library
The Perseus Digital Library is an open-source website containing prose and poetic texts in Greek, Latin, Arabic, and vernacular languages, from classical texts to 19th- and 20th-century Neo-Latin texts.
University College Cork's CELT Project
The CELT Project: Annals of Ulster, Annals of Tigernach, Chronicon Scotorum, Annals of Innisfallen, Annals of the Four Masters, the Irish (or is it Scottish ?) version of Nennius, among others. There are also some papers by Donncha O Corrain on Vikings in Ireland and Scotland, pre-Norman Irish kingship, various papers from Celtica and other useful stuff. Even real historians use this, in preference to printed versions.
Monumenta Germaniae Historica online
There are two ways to access the Monumenta Germaniae Historica online. The digital MGH website is one. The other is to download pdf files from Gallica, the Bibliothèque nationale de France website. Gallica has an incredible amount of C19th and earlier material in French, Latin, German and English, some very poorly scanned.
As of March 2008, a new version of DMGH is now available in beta test at http://mdzx.bib-bvb.de/dmgh_new/ with a quite usable search engine although some other aspects perhaps not so good.
Corpus Corporum
The Corpus Corporum, hosted by the University of Zurich, is a digital repository of Latin texts and dictionaries. The dictionaries are integrated into the text browser, so clicking on a word brings up its lemma form and provides several definitions.
Bibliotheca Augustana
The Bibliotheca Augustana contains a number of texts from a variety of locations across medieval Europe. Note that site is written in Latin, though primary source texts are recorded in their original language.
Digital Patrologia Latina
There is a digital edition of Migne's Patrologia Latina available, along with a whole lot more material, at http://www.documentacatholicaomnia.eu/_index.html which may be of use to someone. All manner of antique, medieval and later Latin writings on religious themes. An alternate link can be found here.
The Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon Project
The Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon Project (CAL) is a dictionary and text base of Aramaic texts from the 9th century BCE through the 13th century CE.
A Digital Corpus for Graeco-Arabic Studies
The Digital Corpus contains parallel-text Greek philosophical writings and medieval Arabic translations and commentaries.
The Complete Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Poetry
Part of sacred-texts.com, this page contains every known example of Anglo-Saxon poetry.
The Global Medieval Sourcebook (GMS)
The Global Medieval Sourcebook is an open-source text repository with parallel English translations.
Individual texts
- The full text of Leontios Makhairas's chronicle, a very useful source on the affairs of the Kingdom of Cyprus.
Primary sources: Digitized manuscripts
BnF Gallica
Gallica, a project of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, hosts a large number of digitized medieval manuscripts.
Digital Vatican Library
DigiVatLib contains thousands of digitized manuscripts held at the Vatican. Note that older scans may have lower-quality or black-and-white images.
Digital Bodleian
Oxford's Digital Bodleian library website contains "over a million images" of manuscripts and rare books.
Virtual Hill Museum and Manuscript Library (vHMML)
The vHMML Reading Room contains thousands of digitized manuscripts. An account is required to view manuscripts, but no institutional affiliation is required.
Syri.ac digitized manuscripts
Syri.ac, a digital annotated bibliography for resources involving the Syriac language, maintains a list of digitized manuscripts relating to Syriac.
Individual manuscripts
- Codex Aureus: High-resolution scans of Codex Aureus have been published by the National Library of Sweden.
Prosopographical databases
Prosopography is the study of persons and their shared contexts. The resources below aim to collect primary sources related to individuals in their respective locations.
Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England
Inspired by the Prosopography of the Byzantine World (below), there is now a prosopographical database for Anglo-Saxon England available here. Very useful for finding primary sources to flesh out articles. Use the template {{PASE}} to link to PASE person pages.
Prosopography of the Byzantine World
The Prosopography of the Byzantine World covers Byzantium between 642 and 1265.
Other
This section is for resources that don't fit into the above categories.
Medieval academic discussion groups
Medieval academic discussion groups - Medieval listservs for community discussion groups.