Medieval English literature resources

The primary purpose of this page is to support the Medieval English Literature (ENGL 2012/ENGL3012) courses which are offered by the English Department here at the University of Adelaide, and convened by Associate Professor Tom Burton.
There is a wonderful array of Web pages on medieval topics; here I've given you a selection of the ones that I have found to be most useful (or most breathtaking!). You may also find useful information on my Old English Literature and Culture website.

I have a separate page of Chaucer resources.

Contents
Major websites Search engines Texts Manuscripts and images	Electronic journals Dictionaries, glossaries Discussion groups and organisations

Major websites

The Labyrinth: Resources for Medieval Studies: This is the starting point for medieval studies resources on the Web. Sponsored by Georgetown University, the site provides access to over one million files located all over the world.
There are links to texts, pedagogical resources, organisations, conferences, discussion lists and other WWW sites.
A really useful feature: you can search the whole Labyrinth site for a particular topic, using an inbuilt search engine.
ORB: ORB is the Online Reference Book for Medieval Studies. Primarily it is a cooperative effort on the part of scholars to establish an online source of original essays in medieval studies, but there are also links to online bibliographies, texts and digitised images. All articles have been judged by at least two peer reviewers.
The whole of ORB may be searched with an inbuilt search engine.
The Medieval and Renaissance Internet
: Annotated links to the major sources plus some rather more esoteric ones. Maintained by Kathryn Talarico.
The Medieval Page: Sources for Medieval Studies on the WWW: Collection to links to websites "primarily for Western Medieval subjects, with a few Late Antique and Byzantine sites." Sites are organized by topic such as online journals, religion and philosophy, witchcraft, women, literature, music, and more. From an art history teacher and enthusiast.
Luminarium: Anthology of Middle English Literature (1350-1485): Anniina Jokinen has kindly suggested that I link to her Middle English Literature page; I'm delighted to do so. Anniina's page is a veritable treasure trove of useful links in this area.
NetSERF: Subtitled 'The Internet connection for medieval resources', NetSERF is an eclectic mix of links to all things medieval from Medieval Archaeology to Medieval Technology. It's especially good for links on Medieval Art, Civilisation and Culture.

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Search engines

Several Web sites have their own search engines built in (Labyrinth and ORB spring to mind) so that you can find a particular topic on that site.

If you need to do a wider search, there are several very efficient general Web search engines; I've selected the best of them on my Search engines page.
For an example of resources you can find using a wide area search engine, have a look at this page from the Yahoo Directory page on Medieval Literature.

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Texts

Labyrinth Library Middle English Bookcase: The Labyrinth Library has links to a wide-ranging collection of Medieval texts.
Corpus of Middle English prose and verse: This collection of Middle English texts was assembled from works contributed by University of Michigan faculty and from texts provided by the Oxford Text Archive, as well as works created specifically for the Corpus by the Humanities Text Initiative. Texts may be identified by Simple searches, Boolean Searches or Proximity Searches, or by consulting the Bibliography. All texts in the archive are valid SGML.
The Online Medieval and Classical Library (OMACL): The Online Medieval and Classical Library (OMACL) is a collection of some of the most important literary works of Classical and Medieval civilization. Search or Browse by Title, Author, Genre, or Language. Texts may be downloaded for further study.
The Middle English Collection: From the Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia. Some texts are available only to University of Virginia members.
There is a very handy facility to Search all publicly-accessible Middle English texts.
TEAMS Middle English Texts: A massive resource of online Medieval texts, published by TEAMS (The Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages) in association with the University of Rochester. 'The goal of the TEAMS Middle English text series is to make available to teachers and students texts which occupy an important place in the literary and cultural canon but which have not been readily available in student editions.'
Medieval literature: collections of works: Collections of works and textual research projects, hosted by NetSerf. Lists are listed under headings: Latin; Middle English; Old English; Poetry.

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Manuscripts and images

DScriptorium: Dscriptorium is devoted to collecting, storing and distributing digital images of medieval manuscripts. It provides links to several major collections of MSS and to other sources of manuscript images.
University of Kentucky Special Collections: Colour images from manuscripts in the University of Kentucky Special Collections Library, scanned from 35mm slides. Several superb Books of Hours.
Bodleian Library: About a thousand images can be reached from this page, arranged by century and country of origin.
Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry: A good example of how the Web can provide access to material that would otherwise be impossible to see. The original Riches Heures manuscript is stored in the Chantilly Museum, but is so degraded that it is no longer available to the public.
Les Très Riches Heures is the classic example of a medieval book of hours: a collection of the text for each liturgical hour of the day - hence the name - which often included other, supplementary, texts. The images on this Web site are from the calendar section which was painted some time between 1412 and 1416. In terms of historical and cultural importance Les Très Riches Heures is equal to more famous works such as the Mona Lisa, and marks the pinnacle of the art of manuscript illumination.
The Book of Kells: The manuscript Book of Kells is housed in the Old Library, Trinity College, Dublin. High quality images of pages from the manuscript can be downloaded to your browser from Paul DuBois' site at the Wisconsin Regional Primate Research Center.
The Barr Smith Library has copies of the 1974 Thames & Hudson facsimile edition with 126 coloured plates; feast your eyes at this call number: Main collection 096 S949b.2
The Electronic Beowulf: The The Electronic Beowulf was one of the very early manuscript images to appear on the Web. I often share it with Honours and Postgraduate English students here at the University of Adelaide when I am advising them on literature search techniques and resources. It has been part of my repertoire since 1995 and has never failed to elicit a similar reaction from the students to the one I had when I first saw it: awe verging on reverence...
The British Library, with two leading American Anglo-Saxon experts, Kevin Kiernan of the University of Kentucky and Paul Szarmach of the Medieval Institute, Western Michigan University, has issued a magnificent set of 2 CD ROMs which not only contains digitised images of the Beowulf manuscript, but also provides valuable research tools such as search engines and ultra-violet enhanced imaging. We have a set of the CDs in the Barr Smith Library: ask at the Reserve and Multimedia desk on Level 3 South.
The Brut Chronicle: The invaluable Humanities Text Initiative (HTI) at the University of Michigan is an organisation for the acquisition, creation, and maintenance of electronic texts. The Brut Chronicle is from their Images collection.
The celebrated Chronicles of England, or Brut, is the earliest prose chronicle in English and was the most popular history of England in the Middle Ages. The Chronicle traces the history of Britain from its earliest (mythical) time (Albinia), including stories of legendary kings such as Brutus of Troy (hence its name), Lear and Arthur.
There are some 135 folios to look at, and you can choose magnifications of 25%, 50%, 75% or 100%. The pages are quick to load and at 100% you can clearly read not only the text, but also the many marginal additions; you can even discern crease marks on the original pages.
Hill Monastic Manuscript Library: A rich source of images of illuminated manuscripts held at Saint John's University. Go to the Search Pages to explore the online collection of images.
Index of medieval manuscripts: This database allows the user to locate references to specific medieval manuscripts in a significant corpus of printed texts, including basic studies of French and English literature from the high and late Middle Ages. A good source of descriptive articles, the list gives the provenance and a bibliographic reference (and many other details) of each manuscript.
Medieval Writing: history, heritage and data source: 'An introduction to the history of medieval writing, including the origins of our written culture, the history of scripts and the nature of literacy and the written word in the middle ages. Manuscript books and documents, and the very process of writing itself, are part of the cultural heritage of the western world.'
This constantly growing project revolves around the culture of the written word in the middle ages. There is information on what people wrote about, as well as what they didn't write about but evidently knew anyway, some discussions on the working methods and materials of writing and concepts of literacy, and a steadily growing set of examples of historic scripts from around the 5th to around the 16th century.
The Medieval Bestiary: A bestiary is a compendium of beasts in which the real or fabulous characteristics of actually existent or imaginary animals (such as the griffin, dragon, siren, unicorn, etc.), and even rocks were figuratively treated as religious symbols of Christ, the devil, the virtues and vices.

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Electronic journals

The Medieval Review: The Medieval Review (TMR), formerly the Bryn Mawr Medieval Review, has been publishing work in all areas of medieval studies since 1993. TMR operates as a moderated electronic distribution list; subscribers receive reviews as e-mail and once posted, reviews are archived and are available for viewing, searching and printing.
Comitatus: a journal of Medieval and Renaissance studies: Full text of all articles from vol.1 (1970) onwards. Published under the auspices of the UCLA Library Digital Library Program.
Medieval Forum: An electronic journal for the promotion of scholarship in Medieval English Literature began publication in 2002.
MF is dedicated to providing a venue for the free exchange of ideas, a return to the original vision of a public forum informed by a collegial and cooperative spirit. Electronic format has been chosen to afford a wide circulation of articles by a broad range of contributors, particularly independent scholars, who wish to share their perspectives in a communal atmosphere.
Sadly, Volume 6 (January 2007) may be last issue; a note on the website states: 'Medieval Forum is not accepting submissions at this time, and no new volumes are anticipated in the near future.'
Traditio: A leading journal of ancient and medieval history, thought and religion. The Web page doesn't have the text of articles, but provides useful subject and author indexes to volumes 1-50 (1943-1995). We have Traditio, volumes 1-47, in the Barr Smith Library at call number 940.105 T76.

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Dictionaries, glossaries

The Middle English Dictionary edited by Hans Kurath and Sherman M. Kuhn, (University of Michigan Press, 1952- ) is nearing completion. You'll find it in the Barr Smith Library's Reference collection at call number 427 K97m.
There is a fantastic electronic equivalent, but unfortunately we are unable to afford a subscription to it.
Hint: if there is a well-off, grateful, former University of Adelaide English Department graduate reading this, you might like to consider donating a subscription to the electronic MED for the benefit of the current generation of Medieval Literature students !

NetSERF's Hypertext Medieval Glossary: A general medieval glossary with over 1,400 terms defined, covering all aspects of medieval life. Many terms have hypertext links to related entries in the glossary.
Glossarial DataBase of Middle English: Canterbury Tales: Prepared by Prof. Larry Benson as part of a larger Glossarial DataBase of Middle English which has not yet been completed.

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Discussion groups and organisations

Medievalists were among the first to organise global electronic discussion groups. Subscribe to one and you receive a copy of every message posted to the group. You may reply to the individual or to the whole group. The major discussion groups are:

MEDTEXTL (Medieval texts, philology, codicology, technology)
MEDIEV-L (Medieval history)

For a comprehensive listing you should consult:

Medieval academic discussion groups: Edwin Duncan's listing of medieval academic discussion groups that you may want to join, together with the addresses of the listservers that carry them.
If you would like more information about academic discussion groups, Edwin Duncan's article A word about academic networks is an excellent introduction.
ARC Network for Early European Research: The ARC Network for Early European Research (NEER) is a national framework for enhancing and supporting innovative Australian research into these long European histories and their place in the development of Australian society and culture.
Texas Medieval Association: Edwin Duncan maintains the interesting Texas Medieval Association (TEMA for short) page which has information about the annual TEMA Conference as well as links to research aids and other information that medievalists may find useful.

English Literature

Friday, February 12, 2010