May 19, 2004

WEB RESOURCES THAT MIGHT HELP WITH A MEDIEVAL HISTORY TERM PAPER

For a general introduction to what electronic resources can do, see Susan Hockey, Electronic Texts in the Humanities: Principles and Practice. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Pp. 216. ISBN 0-19-871195-6. $22.95.  For an introduction to sites concerning Latin culture, see Tra 'volumen' e byte: per una didattica sostenibile della cultura latina: una guida a piu di 50 siti web (seri, divertenti, kitsch) che ospitano il latino. ed.Roberto Danese, Andrea Bacianini, and Alessio Torino.  Rimini:  Guaraldi, 2003.  Pp. 192 (with a diskette containing links to all the sites).  ISBN 88-8049-209-8.  EURO 12.00.

Primary sources are among the most helpful web offerings. Although advanced historical researchers prefer to use printed scholarly editions in the original languages, linguistically challenged students may welcome English translations. These are increasingly available on the Web, although often in the form of partial texts and excerpts. The Medieval Sourcebook offers the greatest variety of links to medieval sources in English translation. For medieval military history, a great data base of relevant translated texts is available at the De Re Militari site.  Some other internet on-line translated texts, many searchable, are listed on the North American Patristics Society Internet Resources. The "Features" section of the New Advent Catholic site has many Church fathers and Aquinas's Summa Theologica in translation.
        For posted original Latin texts see Mittelalter Virtuell:  Mediävistik im Internet's lists of Antike und spätantike Literatur and Mittellateinische Literatur vom 6. bis 14. Jh.   Proprietary databases exist--CD ROM, Web, or both--for some of the most important original language medieval document collections, including Migne's Patrologia Latina, the Acta Sanctorum,  the text editions published by Corpus Christianorum, and other major collections.  Even the Monumenta Germaniae Historica is going online.  Unfortunately, access requires either pricey individual subscriptions or trips to libraries which do have institutional subscriptions.
        Some free data bases of medieval Latin texts are becoming available.  A pdf text of the Acta Sanctorum can be obtained free through the Bibliothèque nationale Web site, by scrolling down to "Religions chrétiennes."  A free beta version of Migne's Patrologia (Greek, Latin, and Oriental) is on line in Documenta Catholica Omnia, with an improved version scheduled to go online later in 2008.

Electronic serial bibliographies are great because, unlike standard library catalogs, they also index journal articles. There are two major proprietary medieval history serial bibliographies, the International Medieval Bibliography (unfortunately not available at Texas Tech) and, somewhat more oriented toward the Renaissance, ITER, to which we do now have an institutional subscription. If you go the home page of the University Library and choose "Find Articles" from the Research Menu on the left of the screen, and then in the Electronic Databases index click "I" on the "Beginning with" alphabet,  ITER will be the last item listed under "I.".  It contains over a half million article references. 
        Another way to locate material in historical journals is to go to JSTOR (history periodicals on line) and use the word search function:  although this gives you access to a far less comprehensive data base, you may appreciate that what you find will be largely from English-language journals and will be available in full text copies on-line.  Note that if you use Google or other search engines, references to articles listed in JSTOR will appear, but you will not be allows to access the text beyond one page--you can get into those texts if you copy the title, log in to the University Library system, use the "Find Articles" access at screen left, click "J" on the "Beginning with" alphabet, and log into the University's JSTOR account.

Good free gateway sites are available. The Labyrinth site at Georgetown is the best overall gateway to medieval electronic resources, and its topical organization is convenient to use for research. Also helpful is the Medieval and Renaissance Web produced by the Western European Specialists of the Association of College and Research Libraries.   Das Mittelalter im Internet is another general site, more focused on Continental resources.  Mediaevum offers a guide to medieval studies, with some introductory English pages that take the reader to German-language formatted bibliographical pages.  An online Yale medieval studies bibliography includes electronic and print resources.

Note also the following examples of more specialized gateway sites:

Archives of medieval documents have a bibliography concerning their utilization and medieval "diplomatic" in general, but oriented toward French sources, at Bibliographie d'archivistique médiévale. 

ArchNet claims to be the World Wide Web Virtual Library for Archaeology, providing access to archaeological resources available on the Internet. See also Archaeology on the Net.

Art History Resources on the Web offers pages of links to medieval images.

Bibliographical Information Base in Patristics / Base d'Information Bibliographique en Patristique is an online searchable database of articles on patristic topics with some 30,000 entries culled from 325 academic journals. Search terms must be submitted in French.

Bible Commentaries from the Middle Ages in English Translation are listed in "Medieval Christian Biblical Exegesis in English Translation," a site maintained by Jonathan Hall, University of Virginia.

Bibliographies for Theology offers topical bibliographies, especially strong for the early and medieval church.

The Bollandists, a scholarly society founded in the seventeenth century dedicated to the study of saints, maintain a website dealing with hagiography, writings on the saints, and their own particular projects in this field.

Byzantium, based at Fordham University, is a website prepared by Paul Halsall, the editor of the Medieval Sourcebook, as a WWW gathering point for Byzantine studies.

Links to crusade sources, chronology, and other materials are on the site of the Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East.

Dates in the Middle Ages can be difficult to calculate because of the wide variety of calendars that medieval writers used.  Among the sites giving aid are Calculation of the Ecclesiastical Calendar and Zeitrechnung des Deutschen Mittelalters .

The Domus Gratiani Homepage for Gratian Studies offers links to resources on medieval law.

Feminae:  Medieval Women and Gender Index covers journal articles, book reviews, and essays in books about women, sexuality, and gender during the Middle Ages. This index was begun in 1996 as a tool to help researchers find current articles and essays quickly and easily. It is counterintuitive in that books written by a single author are not indexed in Feminae; for these, you must check major library catalogs.

On hagiography, there is a bibliography of English translations of hagiographical works written prior to the year 1000.  See also Thomas Head's “Hagiography,” in the On-Line Resource Book in Medieval Studies (ORB).

The Index of Christian Art, founded at Princeton in 1917, is now available on the World Wide Web.  Since 1991, when computers were introduced to the Index, all new works of art documented by the archive have been electronically classified.  All of these records together with some material from the manual files is on an Internet application.  This is the largest database of medieval art in existence, with full-text records for over 23,000 works of art dating from early apostolic times to A.D. 1400. Unfortunately, it requires a fairly pricey subscription or access to a subscribing library.

On medicine, see  Medicina Antiqua ,  now maintained at the Wellcome Trust for the History of Medicine at University College London. It is intended to be a scholarly introduction to classical medicine and a resource linking to other web pages related to medical history, especially classical medicine.

Medieval Maps are indexed (most have links to on-line images) in the Index of Cartographic Images Illustrating Maps of the Early Medieval Period, 400-1300 AD.

.Medieval Europe is only one section of the WWW Virtual Library History Index, but it was a strong section, with many links (it does not appear to have been recently updated, however).

Medieval Music has several great sites, including the Gregorian Chant Home Page, Lexicon Musicum Latinum, and CANTUS: A Database for Latin Ecclesiastical Chant.

Medieval military history's relevant literature is reviewed on the De Re Militari site.

Medieval Palaeography is a site designed as an introductory module (10 hours) for an M.A. course in English local history. Although its focus is very specific, it includes some general bibliography and enough web examples to illustrate problems posed by medieval scripts.

Monasticism, for the Latin West, has Benedictine material organized around the Rule of Benedict.

Normandy was once covered by a fine bibliography posted in connection with the Charles Homer Haskins Society for Anglo-Saxon, Viking, Anglo-Norman, and Angevin History, but this is in the process of being replaced by a bibliographical and source section which remains under construction.

NetSERF, the self-proclaimed "internet connection for medieval resources," includes a lot of unbuilt territory but also many interesting features. It offers more than 1500 links to other sites.

ORB (the Online Reference Book for Medieval Studies) is an academic site, written and maintained by medieval scholars for the benefit of their fellow instructors and serious students. All articles have been judged by at least two peer reviewers. Authors are held to high standards of accuracy, currency, and relevance to the field of medieval studies. However, this well planned site remains mostly unbuilt.

Reviews for books written after 1993 can be found in the archives of The Medieval Review, the largest medieval electronic reviewing website

Many other excellent sites could be listed, but those listed above can lead you to the most important. Be aware that WEB includes a great deal of uninformed fantasy concerning things medieval. If you attempt to use general search engines to investigate medieval topics, you will soon discover the truth of the maxim that "Hours spent on the WEB can save minutes spent in the library." But if you locate materials by beginning with scholarly gateway sites, then the WEB can be a great asset and can enable you to extend your research well beyond the resources available at Texas Tech.