Images of medieval manuscripts: Digital Scriptorium / CORSAIR

There are two databases that contain a wide range of digital images of medieval and renaissance manuscripts. They are:

The Digital Scriptorium is an 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 cataloguing.

Go to: http://www.scriptorium.columbia.edu/

CORSAIR: Thousands of digital images from The Pierpont Morgan Library’s renowned collection of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts are now available in CORSAIR. The collection spans some ten centuries of Western illumination, and contains manuscripts from all the major schools, including some of the great masterpieces of medieval manuscript art. The images and accompanying descriptions are the product of an extraordinary collaboration between the Library and the Index of Christian Art to photograph, digitize, and describe all significant illustrations within the Morgan’s medieval and Renaissance manuscripts. CORSAIR currently offers more than twenty thousand medieval images, and the number is constantly growing.

Go to: http://utu.morganlibrary.org/index.htm

Ancient petitions, Henry III - James I

This website, part of the National Archives Documents Online service, provides free access to over 17,000 digital images of ancient petitions in the National Archives.

These petitions date from the reign of Henry III (1216-1272) to James I (1603-25), with concentrations in the reigns of Edward I (1272-1307), Edward II (1307-1327) and Edward III (1327-1377). Petitions represent appeals for the righting of wrongs and for favours from the king, but additionally reveal social, political and linguistic information.

The website allows this extensive collection to be searched by name, place, occupation, date and keywords, images may be downloaded.

The resource was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council under the Resource Enhancement Scheme.

World Digital Library

The World Digital Library has just been launched. Over time, it will make available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from cultures around the world, including manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, archi­tectural drawings, and other significant cultural materials. The objectives of the World Digital Library are to promote international and inter-cultural understanding and awareness, provide resources to educators, expand non-English and non-Western content on the Internet, and to contribute to scholarly research.

To see what's available, go to: http://www.wdl.org/en/

Medieval Studies: new web-based resources

Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English, 1150-1325 (LAEME). LAEME aims to present information about the variation in space and time of linguistic forms found in early Middle English texts. We take early Middle English to cover the period ca. 1150-1325.

Go to http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/laeme1/laeme1.html for full details.

Catalogue of Digitized Medieval Manuscripts. The Catalogue of Digitized Medieval Manuscripts offers a simple and straightforward means to discover medieval manuscripts available on the web. Very much a work in progress, the database will initially provide links to hundreds of manuscripts, which we expect quickly to grow to thousands. Basic information about the manuscripts is fully searchable, and users can also browse through the complete contents of the database. As the project develops, a richer body of information for each manuscript, and the texts in these codices, will be provided, where available.

The address for this resource is:http://manuscripts.cmrs.ucla.edu/