Research in a time of pandemic: Medieval Primary Resources Online

With research libraries across the world now closed for an indefinite period and many of us hunkering down into self-isolation, I thought it might be useful to gather together some of the more useful free and publicly accessible websites I’ve found for getting my research done online. For primary texts, these will not always be the most recent scholarly editions, but they are still useful in a pinch.

archive.org – This is usually my first port of call for books and textual editions in the public domain (i.e. published before 1923). It’s particularly good for those indispensable nineteenth-century editions such as the Rolls Series. I find the interface easier to use than that of Google Books, and it allows you to download the text in a variety of formats.

Occasionally, I have also come across useful books still in copyright which can be virtually ‘borrowed’ via the site – the waitlists for these have currently been waived for the site’s National Emergency Library.

For finding brief sections or reference information for books currently under copyright, Google Books or Google Scholar may prove useful.

Corpus Corporum: Maintained by Universität Zürich, this website pools together texts from a number of public-domain text series (most notably, the Patrologia Latina) and adds some fairly sophisticated search functions.

Patrologia Latina / Graeca (patristica.net): Provides links to PDFs of every Patrologia Latina and Graeca volume (mostly hosted online by either archive.org or Google Books).

Corpus Thomisticum: A range of Aquinas resources, including the Opera Omnia (Latin text). An English translation of the Summa Theologiae (Benziger Bros. edition, 1947) can be found here.

The Medieval Canon Law Virtual Library:  Brings together publicly accessible electronic resources for the study of medieval canon law, from Carolingians through the decretalists.

The Latin Library: Predominantly classical and Late Antique texts by well-known writers, but it includes some medieval texts as well.

Logeion: Includes various Greek and Latin dictionaries, including Lewis & Short and the Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources (DMLBS).

Finding Digitised Manuscripts: Many libraries, particularly national ones, now have extensive digital collections of their manuscripts freely accessible online. See, for example, the British Library, or Gallica (the digital collections of the BnF in Paris). This website on Early Medieval Monasticism has collected links to digital manuscript collections from archives and libraries around the world.

Academic Library Subscriptions: Those with access to the online resources of academic libraries are likely to benefit from a number of useful digital subscriptions, such as (to name a few I currently use regularly) Oxford Scholarship Online (which includes the Oxford Medieval Texts series); Latin Series A and B from Brepols (with texts from Corpus Christianorum and other leading series of primary text editions, albeit in an interface more appropriate for text searches than reading large portions of text); and the Loeb Classical Library, as well as countless digital journal articles and ebooks.

Using Canon Law

I found approaching canon law for the first time for historical research more than a little tricky, so I thought I would distill some of the most helpful ‘starter’ information I found on the way for anyone else embarking on it. (For more detail on what I was actually looking for, see my earlier post.)

Canon and Roman Law, Oh My!

In a (not so) recent post, I was complaining about remarking on the difficulties I’ve encountered deciphering the early modern printed editions of the canon law texts I’m working with. Today I thought I’d focus on what canon law is and why I’m hoping these texts will be worth the effort.

I’ll start by giving some general background on canon law and then dive into a more detailed discussion of an example from my own research.

Plenty of Trees, No Forest (6th Week, TT)

I began Trinity Term with a confident grasp of my dissertation topic. I made my way through the chronicles and vies in a systematic fashion, added faithfully to my annotated bibliography, and conceived the whole project as just a matter of putting the hours in and getting it done.

Then it all started going a bit wobbly. . .

Geoffrey Gaimar’s Estoire des Engleis

Estoire des Engleis (“History of the English”) is the oldest surviving work of historiography in the French vernacular, composed sometime after 1135 under the patronage of Constance FitzGilbert, the wife of a minor Lincolnshire nobleman. It describes the history of England starting from Cedric of Wessex’s landing on its shores in 495 and continuing all the way through the death of the Anglo-Norman king William II in 1100. Although Gaimar was a learned cleric, he composed his history in French verse, rather than in Latin prose, presumably for the better entertainment and edification of his aristocratic audience.

A Medieval Student

In his work the Didascalicon  (c. 1125), one of the classic theological texts of the twelfth-century renaissance, Hugh of St. Victor lays out an integrated view of human knowledge, insisting upon the need for a scientific pursuit of the traditional arts in order to relieve life’s physical weaknesses and to restore humans’ union with the divine Wisdom. Unusually, as well discussing the traditional pedagogic categories of the trivium and quadrivium, he includes sections on the practical and mechanical arts (such as commerce and agriculture).

In his discussion of the process of study, Hugh also gives us an intriguing peek at his own school days:

Digital Bodleian

Digital Bodleian

Treasures of the Bodleian

Online digitized facsimiles of some of the best of the Bodleian collections, including quite a few medieval manuscripts.

Tip: The Digital Bodleian manuscript viewer interface isn’t the most user friendly if you’re trying to look through the manuscript as a whole instead of just one image, but if you look in the right-hand panel under the metadata, there are icons to view the manuscript in Universal Viewer or Mirador, both of which are quite good.

 

Forays into Manuscripts (5th Week, HT)

This week I requested my first manuscripts from Special Collections – which doesn’t sound all that impressive until you take into account that this involves a Bodleian librarian cheerfully handing over 800-year-old books into my grubby carefully scrubbed hands.

Chivalry & Learning

Our books have informed us that the pre-eminence in chivalry and learning once belonged to Greece. Then chivalry passed to Rome, together with that highest learning which now has come to France. God grant that it may be cherished here, that the honour which has taken refuge with us may never depart from France. God had awarded it as another’s share, but of Greeks and Romans no more is heard; their fame is passed, and their glowing ash is dead.

Chrétien de Troyes, c. 1170

Essaying Essays (6th Week, MT)

It’s interesting that the etymology of the word essay goes back to the Latin word exigere, which means “to weigh, or put to the test”. While in Oxford the word does typically just refer to “a short piece of writing on a particular subject”, that older definition is actually feeling pretty accurate at the moment.

The Historian as Artist?

The first duty of a historian is to produce works of art. By this I do not primarily mean works that are finely written, but works that are emotionally and intellectually satisfying, that combine a clear unity of conception with a vivacity of detail, and portray people whose actions are intelligible within the framework of their circumstances and character. It is thus that one might describe as the aims of a Balzac or a Tolstoy: I say therefore that a historian should aim at satisfying the same emotional and intellectual needs as a novelist or poet. How he is to do this within the limits of the available data is the great question.

R.W. Southern, ‘Aspects of the European Tradition of History Writing’

Take a foreign language, write it in an unfamiliar script, abbreviating every third word, and you have the compound puzzle that is the medieval Latin manuscript.

Preface to English translation of A. Cappelli’s The Elements of
Abbreviation in Medieval Latin Paleography (1982) 

A very helpful resource which I had vaguely been aware of for a while but which I have only recently starting using more regularly is the Regesta Imperii OPAC Literature Database for the Middle Ages (RI-OPAC), available in English as well as German.

The database lists over 2.5 million academic books and articles on medieval topics, searchable by author, title, and thematic tags. Since it is limited to medieval research, even a search for a single word (e.g. ‘counsel’, ‘gestures’, ‘kingship’) tends to be much more fruitful than searching the entirety of a research library catalogue. While not exhaustive, the database is regularly updated and is therefore an excellent tool for investigating what research has already been done on any particular topic.

I recently came across these excellent guides to palaeography from the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (St John’s University). As well as access to a number of helpful resources, they have virtual courses in Latin, Syriac, and Arabic scripts, as well as guides for manuscript transcription.

https://www.hmmlschool.org/

Gallica is the digital library of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BnF) and is one of the best freely accessible digital archives online, crammed full of brilliant historical sources. It’s fairly easy to navigate, and you can register to save documents and books to your digital workspace.

I’ve personally been using it a lot lately to access all the 19th-century editions of my medieval primary sources from the comfort of my bed, instead of having to trot all the way out to the Bodleian Upper Reading Room!

Word Tools: Thanks to the wonders of the internet, there are now various Latin word tools that will tell you not only what any Latin word means, but also that it happens to be a genitive singular future passive participle, or whatever the ‘case’ may be.

Whitaker’s Words – My personal favourite, partly because it does take into account some medieval spelling and vocabulary changes)

Perseus Latin Word Study Tool

Health Advisory: While brilliant for making your way through a tricky translation, I would recommend using online word tools sparingly when it comes to actual Latin study – it’s easy to get dependent and forget to actually learn the vocabulary and grammar yourself, which comes back to haunt you later . . .

Dictionaries: Most Latin-English dictionaries only reflect classical usage and vocabulary. The best dictionary for medieval Latin is the recently completed Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources (DMLBS) published by Oxford University Press, which is also available as a subscription service online and through the Latin/Greek online dictionary search Logeion.