Medeival manuscript doodles
Special Collections online
- The Life of King Edward the ConfessorFacsimile of only copy in Cambridge University Library.
- Medieval and Modern Thought Text ProjectContent digitized from the Stanford Libraries' collections.
- Early Manuscripts at Oxford UniversityTexts from the 9th to 16th centuries available online.
- Codices Electronici Sangallenses (CESG)Digital Abbey Library of medieval codices at St. Gallen, Switzerland with texts from 8th - 15th centuries online.
- The Digital ScriptoriumCollections online from UC Berkely: "The Digital Scriptorium is a growing image database of medieval and renaissance manuscripts that unites scattered resources from many institutions into an international tool for teaching and scholarly research. It bridges the gap between a diverse user community and the limited resources of libraries by means of sample imaging and extensive rather than intensive cataloging."
Finding Primary Sources
Below you will find a wide variety of resources online with digitized manuscripts, letters, theological texts, and much more. This is by no means a comprehensive list of what is now available online in terms of medieval manuscripts. These links, however, should serve as starting points.
If you'd like to search our catalog for more primary sources, please take note of the subject headings. Any subject heading such as
ending with "sources" in that Library of Congress listing will include references to primary source material that may prove useful.
Primary Sources and Texts
- Early English books online This link opens in a new windowEarly English Books Online (EEBO) contains digital facsimile page images of virtually every work printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and British North America and works in English printed elsewhere from 1473-1700.
- Library of Latin Texts A This link opens in a new windowThe Library of Latin Texts-Series A database contains more than 3100 Latin texts from classical antiquity (all Teubner texts), late antiquity (including patristic authors),and the Middle Ages (including the authors in the Corpus Christianorum). (Restricted to 3 simultaneous users.)
- Library of Latin Texts B This link opens in a new windowThe Library of Latin Texts-Series B database supplements Series A and contains texts from late Antiquity (including grammatical and medical texts), texts from the later Middle Ages and the Renaissance as well as texts in Neo-Latin. It will include travel narratives, legal texts, and theological, philosophical and scientific treatises from the medieval and early modern periods. (Restricted to 3 simultaneous users.)
- Parker Library on the web This link opens in a new windowThe Parker Library at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge contains 538 Old English and medieval manuscripts. This database provides full digital copies of each ms. along with thousands of citations to the relevant secondary literature on the mss. Individual user registration is required
- Catalogue of Digitized Medieval ManuscriptsUCLA project to make thousands of fully digitized manuscripts available online. A wide variety of sources digitized from libraries all over the world.
- Digital Atlas of Roman and Medieval Civilizations" The Digital Atlas of Roman and Medieval Civilization (DARMC) makes freely available on the internet the best available materials for a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) approach to mapping and spatial analysis of the Roman and medieval worlds. DARMC allows innovative spatial and temporal analyses of all aspects of the civilizations of western Eurasia in the first 1500 years of our era, as well as the generation of original maps illustrating differing aspects of ancient and medieval civilization. A work in progress with no claim to definitiveness, it has been built in less than three years by a dedicated team of Harvard undergraduates, graduate students, research scholars and one professor, with some valuable contributions from younger and more senior scholars at other institutions."
- Internet Medieval SourcebookThe Internet History Sourcebooks are wonderful collections of public domain and copy-permitted historical texts for educational use by Paul Halsall. The site and its documents are well organized and the breadth of materials is impressive. The Internet Medieval Sourcebook is organized as three main index pages, with a number of supplementary documents. There is an index of selected and excerpted texts for teaching purposes, a help page on use of the Sourcebook for research questions, a section devoted to secondary articles, texts on the history of law, copy-permitted maps and images, a guide to medieval-themed films and music, and more.
- Medieval & Renaissance at the Victoria and Albert MuseumMedieval and Renaissance artifacts at London's Victoria & Albert Museum.