Good Stuff for Medievalists: Digital Humanities Collections on the
Internet
Digital Humanities or the intersection of traditional humanities topics and sources
combined with computing is in vogue, funded by major granting agencies both private and
public. More on-line collections of data, recovery of lost works via special scanning, and
digitized access to rare works are transforming the work of many medieval art historians. Below
are a selection of some of the most exciting work being done on medieval works using the best
of technology.
British Library: to access the fully digitized manuscript,
click on: http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/ Here is a list of over
1,000 digitized manuscripts (with full free access) from the
British Library: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/files/blmedieval-and-earlier-digitised-manuscripts-master-list10.04.13.xls
Theodore Psalter Add MS 19352, BL
The Bodleian Library at Oxford University and the Vatican Library are digitizing their
collections planning on making 1.5 million images available, starting with Hebrew manuscripts,
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Greek manuscripts, and 15th-century incunabula. Because the fragility of the manuscripts, they
are using a special imaging technique: http://bav.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/news/imaging-techniques-atthe-bodleian For further information and access, see: http://bav.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/
Greek Bible Reginensis Graecus 1 held at Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 10th century
The Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford is also making available digitized images of
the incredible collection from the Cairo Genizah: http://genizah.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/
Maimonides’ autograph draft of his
legal code, Mishneh Torah (from the
Cairo Genizah), in cursive Sephardic
script (Egypt, c. 1180), Bodleian
Library
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More focused on a particular topic is the 100,000+ images found on the site from the Wellcome
Trust, a leading British health organization. Many of these are from the Middle Ages and the
images are being released under the Creative Commons Attribution license, allowing users to
freely copy, distribute, edit, manipulate and build upon as they wish, and are available for
personal or commercial use. See http://wellcomeimages.org/
Bloodletting man in center
of circle of the zodiac,
MS 49, folio 41r, c. 142030, Wellcome Trust
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Wroclaw University Library in Poland is digitizing nearly 800,000 pages of European
manuscripts, books, and maps dating back to the Middle Ages, including over 1100 medieval
manuscripts. Treasures to be digitized include: the 1475 Statuta synodalia episcoporum
Wratislaviensium with everyday prayers printed for the first time in Polish, the 1504 Legenda
major de Beata Hedwigi, and thousands of old printed maps, including the Portolan Atlas by
sixteenth-century cartographer Battista Agnese. http://www.bu.uni.wroc.pl/en
The Great Missal, Church of Mary Magdalene in Wroclaw, c. 1470, Wroclaw University Library
Adding to these libraries and their great collections are specialized projects that focus on
single masterpieces, such as the Book of Kells online,
http://digitalcollections.tcd.ie/home/index.php?DRIS_ID=MS58_003v
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Other specialized databases make available personal collections of photographs taken by such
medievalists as Andre Chastel and others, http://www.centrechastel.parissorbonne.fr/gallery/images-darchitecture-etsculpture-romanes-despagne
Barcelona (Région de Catalogne, province de
Barcelone), Portal of the Church of SaintMartin de Sarroca, 12th-13th centuries
There are also excellent secondary sources on medieval art available for free downloads:
http://www.digitalbookindex.org/_SEARCH/search010areamedievalarta.asp and for a festival of
medieval sites on the internet, see http://mittelalter.hypotheses.org/1023
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While these developments are exciting and potentially field-altering, they are found in
disparate places. To remedy this, the Medieval Electronic Scholarly Association is slowly
bringing together these many sites and databases. http://www.mesa-medieval.org/ Currently one
can access such databases (images and texts) as the Gothic Ivories Project and the Roman de la
Rose Digital Library all backed up with a metadata supported search engine. See
http://peregrinations.kenyon.edu/vol4_3/DavisPeregrinations43.pdf
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