Medieval History: Web Resources

The Avalon Project will mount digital documents relevant to the fields of Law, History, Economics, Politics, Diplomacy and Government.

Epistolae is a collection of letters to and from women dating from the 4th to the 13th century AD. These letters from the Middle Ages, written in Latin, are presented with English translations and are organized by the women participating. Biographical sketches of the women and descriptions of the subject matter or the historic context of the letter is included where available.

The Internet Medieval Sourcebook is organized as three main index pages, with a number of supplementary documents. Each individual section is still large - an organizational goal here is to avoid incessant "clicking" to get between pages and to information.

Selected Sources
This is the main entry to the resources here. It consists of an links to an organized "index of selected and excerpted texts for teaching purposes." For teachers who wish to refer students to the Sourcebook, this page is the best starting point.
Full Text Sources
Full texts of medieval sources arranged according to type.
Saints' Lives
Devoted to Ancient, Medieval and Byzantine hagiographical sources.

Almost all of these texts appear here in English translation for the first time, and in the case of the one or two which have previously been rendered into English (all in the Crusades section), the translation here is, with one exception (quoted with permission), entirely new and has been made without reference to previous versions.

These texts should be regarded very much as work in progress. They are made publicly available for study and teaching, but any use made of them should be properly acknowledged, and any quotation in print confined to short extracts only; copyright remains with the authors of these translations.

"Recognized internationally as an outstanding authority in the history of medicine, particularly for his studies of pre-Rennaissance [sic] illuminated medical manuscripts," stated The Bulletin of the University of North Carolina School of Medicine in 1957, "it has been said Dr. MacKinney has set medical history forward at least 150 years."5 Indeed, he devoted much of his career to expanding his photographic collection of medieval medical illustrations and producing scholarship on a wide variety of medical topics including anatomy, bloodletting, dentistry, animal doctors, ethics, nudes, pestles, tranquilizers, and many more. His major works on medieval history and medieval medical illustrations include Early Medieval Medicine (1937), The Medieval World (1938), Bishop Fulbert and Education at the School of Chartres (1957), Medical Illustrations in Medieval Manuscripts (1965), and more than fifty articles concerning mostly medical topics.

These open access sources are readily available to all -- without fees or subscriptions.
Links connect to European primary historical documents that are transcribed, reproduced in facsimile, or translated.
In addition you will find video or sound files, maps, photographs or other imagery, databases, and other documentation.
The sources cover a broad range of historical happenings (political, economic, social and cultural).
The order of documents is chronological wherever possible.

This bibliography (a partner site to the Camelot Project) will provide annotations of narratives that take their influence and inspiration from the historical crusades. The project is currently focused on English and American literature, but our long-term goal is to provide substantial annotated bibliographies and essay-based entries for other European (and eventually Middle-Eastern and Asian) countries as well.

A quick guide, involving primary sources, to the fall of Rome.

Use this website to view digitised copies of manuscripts and archives in the British Library’s collections, with descriptions of their contents.

Explore the Library's latest major acquisition, the St Cuthbert Gospel.

Some other highlights include the Harley Golden Gospels, Beowulf, the Silos Apocalypse, Leonardo da Vinci’s Notebook, the Petit Livre d’Amour and the Golf Book.

Holdings of particular interest to Medieval History include the following:
The Theodore Psalter (1066)
Gospel Manuscripts (12th and 13th centuries)
Human Anatomy Tract (15th century)
Le Roman de Tristan en prose (late 13th century)
John Chrysostom, Commentary on Paul's Epistles (13th Century)

The DMMapp, or Digitized Medieval Manuscripts app, links to more 300+ digital libraries home to 20’000+ medieval manuscripts! It’s easy to navigate and is constantly updated being, being based on [their] crowd-sourced data.

The Schøyen Collection crosses borders and unites cultures, religions and unique materials found nowhere else. The Collection, based in London and Oslo, contains over 20,000 significant manuscripts of major cultural importance and is an important part of the world’s heritage.

There is no public collection that has the Schøyen Collection’s unique array of manuscripts from all the greatest manuscript hoards, including the Dead Sea Scrolls, The Cairo Genizah of Hebrew MSS, The Oxyrhynchus hoard of classical papyri, the Dishna Biblical papyri, The Nag Hammadi Gnostic papyri, the Dunhuang hoard of Buddhist MSS, and many others. Nor is there one with such a variety, geographically, linguistically and textually, and of scripts and writing materials, covering so a great span of time — 5,000 years of history.

Many of the manuscripts have heavy annotations by scholars in the manuscript information.

The Online Medieval Sources Bibliography provides detailed information about modern editions - both in print and online - of medieval primary sources. Our goal is to help users find the sources and editions that are most suited to their needs.

Teachers and Professors: find the best texts and editions to assign to your students
Students of all levels: find sources for your research projects
Enthusiasts: find sources written in the Middle Ages to learn more about your favorite topics

For all texts, we provide more information than you can find in a typical library catalog, such as:

Summary of Contents: description of the information found in the text, its genre, and medieval author
Best Audience: whether the edition is appropriate for high school students, graduate students, or someone in between and how it is viewed by the scholarly community
Scholarly Apparatus: not just indexes and appendices, but bibliographies, glossaries, facsimiles, and introductions