Below are online resources medievalists have created to share knowledge about the Middle Ages. For podcasts, lectures, and asynchronous digital activities, see our Linked Resources – Teaching page.
General Resources for Medievalists
- The Medieval Academy of America (MAA)‘s MDR provides a list of digital resources available online
- Online Medieval Sources Bibliography (OMSB), An annotated bibliography of printed and online primary sources for the Middle Ages
- TORCH humanities center at Oxford has a list of online resources for medievalists, including podcasts, videos, and websites, compiled by Karl Kinsella.
- Students’ Guide to Late Antique and Medieval Historical Narratives features a listing of narratives by year, many with links to online sources
- Medieval Index Website, edited by Nick Smith.
- Bodleian History Faculty Library , lists over 190 searchable, tagged websites
- The MEMS researcher Open Access Cheat Sheet, by David Hitchcock.
- MEMSlib from the University of Kent, a collection of resources for students of the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period, especially strong in literature, art, paleography/codicology, and English topics.
- Incunabula Short Title Catalogue, of an estimated 28,000 surviving editions of 15th century printed books, there are more than 12,000 links to digitized editions on this site.
- La corónica Commons, Medieval Iberian Languages, Literatures, and Cultures with general advice for teaching online.
- Legal History Miscellany is a blog with several medieval entries, by Sara Butler and Krista Kesselring.
- Lectures on Medieval Studies and the current political environment from the RaceB4Race Appropriations Conference.
- Dave Jenkins, the Classics and Byzantine Studies Librarian at Princeton University, has a fantastic Library Guide for Byzantine Studies
- Oxford Google Books Project, over 150 million pages from out of copyright books available from the Bodleian Libraries.
- London Medieval Murder Map tracks late medieval homicides
- Bibliographies on De-Centering the Global Middle Ages
- Women of 1000 AD, a visually stunning project that tells the stories of women from around the world.
- Teaching Medieval Slavery and Captivity, by Hannah Barker
- Medieval and Early Modern Orients an introduction to three medieval empires – Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal
- Virtual Church Crawl, featuring over a dozen medieval churches to walk through online
Pandemics & Plague
- Infectious Historians offers a website and podcast with information on the history of pandemics and thematic issues of interest.
- Oxford Academic Journals’collection on the History of Outbreaks includes several articles that remain open-access (including articles on the Black Death, Early Modern England, and a broader Historical Reflection)
- Cambridge Economic History Research on Pandemics and Health Shocks has made articles available as well
- The Black Death, reflections and reading list by Carrie E. Beneš
- Disease Transmission, Epidemics and Plague in Pre-Modern Islam, by Elaine van Dalen.
- Brill has made their disease and pandemics collection open-access through April of 2021
- El Museo Vasco de Historia de la Medicina has a series of podcast on the Black Death available in Spanish.
Museums with significant medieval holdings
- via Google Arts and Culture
- The British Museum
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art
- J. Paul Getty Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago
- Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery
- State Hermitage Museum
- Bibliothèque nationale de France
Digitized Manuscript Repositories
- Bodleian Library, Oxford
- University of Pennsylvania’s Kislak Center COVID-19 Resources Page links to manuscripts and other special collections resources
- Albrecht Diem’s Website has a list digital manuscripts along with other sources on early medieval monasticism
- e-codices
- Digital Mapping of existing medieval manuscripts
- Cambridge, England’s manuscripts
- Vatican Library, Rome
- Peter Kidd’s Manuscript Provenance blog
- Mt. Athos repository
- Rebeca Cubas-Peña’s Becky’s Medieval World looks at York Minster’s holdings, focused on medical manuscripts, women, and literature.
- Ad Fontes provides online transcription tutorials. See especially those for English-speaking audiences, on Gregory’s Dialogues, Papal Petitions, and materials from the Carthusian Monastery in Basel.
- #Breakfast Paleography, a series of morning reflections on medieval handwriting by Lisa Fagin Davis.
- The Rare Books School podcasts
- Digital Silk Road, a bilingual English-Japanese open-access website and valuable portal to online resources, including the Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books
- The Dunhuang Star Atlas manuscript containing the oldest star atlas known today dating from around 700 CE. It shows a complete representation of the Chinese sky in 13 charts with over 1300 stars
- Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts, Library of Congress
- South Asian Manuscripts, Library of Congress
- Conservation of the Gandhara Scroll, Library of Congress (illustrated essay on a birch bark manuscript uncovered in Afghanistan)
- Richard Salomon lecture, “One Buddha, 15 Buddhas, 1,000 Buddhas,” on the Library of Congress Gandharan birch bark manuscript
- Chinese Rare Book Digital Collection, Library of Congress
- The World of the Japanese Illustrated Book: The Gerhard Pulverer Collection, Freer Gallery of Art
- Harvard University, Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts
Subject Specific Libraries and Lists
- Syri.ac is an annotated bibliography of open-access resources related to the study of Syriac. The primary goal of Syri.ac is to make research on Syriac literature, history, and culture as painless and direct as possible
- The Leeds Dante Podcast is aimed at undergraduates (or other interested listeners). Short episodes are highlights of specific moments in the Commedia, interviews with scholars, or reviews of new publications. Subscribe on any podcast app, or download individual episodes at their website.
- Digital Dunhuang 360 degree views of 30 Buddhist cave shrines in northwestern China. Allows for self-guided virtual visits to examine mural paintings closely
- Adam Bishop’s Library; For linked sources on the Crusades
- Digital Repositories for Book History Teaching, compiled by Meghan L. Cook
- International Center of Medieval Art, with a special section on online teaching
- Legal History Miscellany Medieval Primary Source Materials in Print
- Some Notes on Medieval English Genealogy, collection of links to published, digitized medieval English records
- Civil Law, Common Law, Customary Law, 5-10 minute podcasts on medieval legal concepts and terminologies
- The Carolingian Canon Law Project Abigail Firey’s searchable, electronic rendition of works of canon law used by Carolingian readers.
- International Dunhuang Project a worldwide partnership to preserve the archaeological legacy of Chinese Central Asia; over 470,000 high-resolution images and metadata pertaining to Silk Road artifacts from Dunhuang and other sites
- The Medieval Canon Law Virtual Library digitized and searchable original manuscripts provided by David Freidenreich.
- Yale Silk Road online database of over 11,000 images of major Silk Road sites
- Sources for the history of the Angevin Empire
- CNRS’s Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes has a list of various resources
- Manuscript Studies Select Bibliography, by Elaine Treharne
- Dumbarton Oaks has a large collection of Hagia Sophia Resources, including archival material, books and manuscripts, seals, and online exhibitions.
- The Soldier in Later Medieval England is a database with the names and identities (where possible) of thousands of English soldiers from 1369-1453. They also host short profiles and studies created using the database, available here.
Maps
- Historia Cartarum – Medieval Maps and Mapping Resources by Helen Davies, Chris Rouse, Tobias Hrynick, John Wyatt Greenlee
- Colin McEvedy’s The Penguin Atlas of Medieval History Penguin Atlas of Medieval History, includes several maps for teaching the medieval period.
- Ian Mladjov’s Resources, an excellent resource of historical maps.
COVID-19 Era Open Access Publishing
- Public Books has created a database that lists open-access books, but we have highlighted a few of particular interest to medievalists below
- Princeton University Library is keeping track of open-access resources in their library guide as well
- Manuscript Studies: A Journal of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies.
- Gorgias Press has an Open Repository of books
- Librarians in the United Kingdom have put together a Google Sheet list of all resources that are open access
- Two other crowd sourced lists of library resource can be found here and here.
Adjacent Fields with Resources
- Online Resources for Classics, The Open University has a list of online resources for classics
- A Classics Wiki has a number of resources for research, teaching, and lists of DH projects
- General resources for teaching, from the American Historical Association.
- A #coronavirussyllabus is now online and updated about teaching (mostly modern) pandemics
- A Coronavirus Sociology Syllabus
- A Coronavirus Humanities Syllabus
- ORBIS is a digital mapping website from Stanford University used to calculate travel and movement around the Roman Empire
- European Research Council list of funded projects with a relationship to the coronavirus
- The American Historical Association has started an AHADigital Wiki for all history fields
- Early Christianity (including late antiquity) scholars have created a Slack for sharing resources. To get on it email Prof. Jamey Walters: jwalters@rc.edu
- Historians of Science have created a similar website with teaching and research pages
- A Coronavirus and Engineering Syllabus has been posted
- Moitessier Research Group COVID-19 Info Page lists scientific journal articles on the ongoing pandemic
- Asia for Educators has a great website with lesson plans and primary sources
COVID-19 Era Special Online Presentations
- Medieval Academy of America 2020 Virtual Annual Meeting has some of their plenary meetings online.
- Fragments and Fragmentology in the Twenty-First Century, a presentation by Lisa Fagin Davis sponsored by Stanford University, with accompanying documentation.
