Database of Medieval Research

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.

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.

Latin & Palaeography Tools

Two invaluable online resources that have been lifesavers for me as I’ve started to work with unedited manuscripts:

A. Cappelli’s Dizionario de Abbreviature – The indispensable and definitive guide to Latin abbreviations, this online version of the Italian edition is much more comprehensive than the later English edition.

Some academic libraries (including the Bodleian) also have subscriptions to Abbreviationes Online, which allows you to search a growing database for any medieval Latin abbreviation.

Enigma – In what I can only imagine was the result of an inspired friendship between a medievalist and a computer programmer, this brilliant tool allows you to enter as much of the word as you can make out, together with a host of wildcard options, and then provides you with a list of every possible option, courtesy of Whitaker’s Words. Particularly cleverly, it allows each minim (the identical vertical strokes found in ‘i’, ‘u’, ‘m’, and ‘n’) to be entered as a ‘!’, so for example,  ‘!!!!!!!ere’ spits out only three possible options (innuere, munere, numere) which you can then narrow down based on context.

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.)

Gallica Digital Library

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!

Latin Resources

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.

National Archives Website

National Archives Resources for Medieval Latin & Paleography

Two levels of Latin tutorials (not as helpful for the grammar, but really good for medieval Latin vocabulary from common types of medieval documents), some paleography tutorials, and a couple other goodies.

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.