Not quite all human life is here, but there is a lot of stuff out there which can save a medievalist a great deal of effort, and it sometimes seems as if not very much of it is as well known as it ought to be. The things I frequently use or find worthwhile therefore appear below. I hope you get something out of them too, and if you know of more, I'd be very glad to add them.
It all starts with books
Firstly you need to know what's out there, and for that, your local academic library is probably the place to start, as they may have subscriptions to things like:
- ISI Web of Knowledge, which contains the Arts & Humanities Citation Index but requires an Athens password; or:
- The International Medieval Bibliography, which needs an institutional subscription for online access, though your library may have it in print.
You can of course get somewhere by just prowling through library catalogues, which you can at least do for free, such as:
- the British Library;
- the Cambridge University Library Newton catalogue;
- the Consortium of London Research Libraries Catalogue;
- or the whole bundle and several others in one point-and-click interface in the COPAC Union Catalogue, on the rare occasions when all its constituent parts are functioning and its servers are alive...
On the whole, however, subject searches in this sort of apparatus are dangerously incomplete, and you really need to know what you're looking for already. There's no real substitute for just being up to date with recent periodical literature and reviews, though that also is no substitute for being in contact with people who actually publish the stuff.
If you do know what you're after, though, or have a starting point, the single best place to start is:
- the OPAC of Regesta Imperii. It doesn't yet have everything, nor ever will given volume of production, but they're well on the way, and even if it may be debatable how they sourced it all, it is a good resource.
- There is also a valuable guide to periodical literature at the University of Erlangen called Magazine Stacks.
There are also of course a number of online bibliographies out there, although they cater to specialist areas rather more than the IMB or similar creations.
Britain
Catalonia
- Adam Kosto and Paul Freedman's Bibliography for the History of Medieval Catalonia, which I hope some day they'll carry on expanding.
Online Texts
The increasing cost of publication on paper and the impossibility of managing to hold everything on shelves is driving teaching and libraries both to exploit online presentation of material. There are some really good corpora out there, though mainly in particular areas. A few brave sites struggle for comprehensiveness, and chief among them must be recognised:
- Paul Halsall's Internet Medieval Sourcebook at Fordham University, which is restricted slightly by copyright and considerably by available space but still succeeds in being somewhere that you can usefully direct your students;
- it's part of the rather larger, vaguer, but also useful Online Reference Book for Medieval Studies, in which lurks much quite useful material if only you can get it out of its search engine.
- Also, Brigham Young University's Harold B. Lee Library has, in a mostly helpful way, collected a vast range of links, some to the highest-quality stuff and others less so, at its History of Medieval & Renaissance Europe: Primary Documents page.
Once you stop trying to find everything at once it's astonishing what's out there:
- The most obvious and wonderful thing is the recent transition of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, to which a few lucky people may have had library access, to gratuitous and expansive free online format, which puts a vast majority of our vital texts online.
- Of that which the MGH does not contain, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France has a bewildering variety online as PDF files, almost without indexing but including for example Adhémar of Chabannes's Historiae and Du Cange's Lexicon as part of their Gallica site. It used also to include the whole of the Recueil des Historiens des Croisades, and some day maybe the missing ones will be back.
- A further quality cluster of source texts lurks at the rather snazzy Biblotheca augustana.
- And further material, albeit without apparatus or credits, is located at the Ad Fontes Academy Latin Library.
- The Heidelberger Hypertextserver has a variety of things too though their concentration is mostly theological;
- Hispanists may find joy in the Library of Iberian Resources Online;
- Celticists will find pretty much everything in the Corpus of ELectronic Texts (do you get it?);
- the British Library has a few interesting texts, like a full facsimile of the Lindisfarne Gospels and an edition of their Magna Carta, up as part of their Turning the Pages site;
and there are a number of different ways to get at periodical literature online, such as:
- the collection of useful journals online at Persée: portail de revues scientifiques en sciences humaines et sociales;
- the rather more, er, `popular' set put online at LookSmart's FindArticles, which at least includes History Today as well as parts of Past and Present, and used to include The English Historical Review;
- a very useful portal for those of us concerned with Catalonia is Revistes Catalanes amb Accé obert;
- a fair chunk of the rest of Spain is also taken in by the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas recently putting most of its journals online, at least in their most recent issues
- and for those with the appropriate subscriptions, of course there's the JSTOR Journal Archive.
"But it's all in Latin!"
Help is at hand. Apart from the fact that as I say above, Du Cange is online if you know where to look, there are a number of useful translator sites out there. For my purposes the ones I have found most useful of all are:
- William Whitaker's Words, a really useful translator which will attempt to parse Latin words in any declension or conjugation and will bravely attempt to transform medieval forms; it will also make things up which may be the answer, so requires care, but for a quick suggestion it's invaluable, and the downloadable program is even better;
- and the (sadly) incomparable Orbis Latinus of Johannes De Graesse, in which you have a better chance of finding that unparseable place-name than anywhere else.
"I think the answer lies in the soil"
No historian of any stamp can afford to ignore archaeology, except maybe people working on canon law... Everyone else should be leaping up and down at the prospect of more evidence, and evidence that lets you get at a completely different part of the medieval world than text-based study does. However, my knowledge of such sites is a bit more limited.
- In Britain, of course, supposedly everything is going to be databased online eventually by the Portable Antiquites Service, unless as latest rumours run its funding is cut due to the rather difficult and fallible nature of its self-presentation of course;
- and in the world of numismatics at least, there's the exemplary Early Medieval Corpus 350-1180 at the Fitzwilliam Museum, which is mainly the work of Sean Miller and maintained almost entirely by Martin Allen, but in which I may have had, er, a small hand.
- The sort of site I'd like to see more of, but haven't yet had time to look for, is things like this one about the excavation of the church of Santa Margarida de Martorell, but I grant you that may be a bit specialised for most readers...
Submissions of more such sites very welcome!
Other other evidences
I'm no art historian, but I know what I like--or something. On the rare occasions that we have them the early medievalist can profit from visual sources, and of these the most famous (forgive the English bias... ) is
For everything else, the big work of getting this stuff online seems to be happening in blogs:
- Lars Datter's Medieval Material Culture has a very useful set of links-pages that give you online resources for almost everything medieval people might have made, eaten, worn or used;
- and the high culture end of things is taken care of, increasingly, by Kirsten Ataoguz's Early Medieval Art.
- Basic introduction to the Anglo-Saxon material is to be found in Kemble: Anglo-Saxon Charters WWW;
- and the entire corpus is online as the New Regesta Regum Anglorum, again the work of Sean Miller.
- Outside Britain, the Sorbonne has a variety of French cartularies online for them as like that sort of thing;
- the Ménestrel Bureau have a similar but larger and still-growing resource up as part of their site;
- In Cambridge at least there is the Medieval Reading Group's Marginalia, although their focus is primarily literary;
- and others I knew of have passed from the scene, and I'd like to know of new ones.
- These days the blogosphere (I can use this word unironically, that's how far things have gone) seems to be where it's at, from free discussion and encouragement to presentation of genuine research for peer pre-review and even just publication. I'm glad to be a part of this great endeavour, and following that link will take you to a list of the others I myself follow. And if you have any comments that the carefully-buried e-mail address in the left sidebar there won't accommodate, I'd be glad to hear from you there.
And lastly charters
Given that I am a charter historian, it seems only right that somewhere on this page there should lurk some of the endeavours various people have made to get them onto the web. If most of what I know to link to is Anglo-Saxonist, that will be partly because I find it easier to hunt things in English, partly because I know some of the people involved and mostly because the fact that it only took one man to put the whole Anglo-Saxon charter corpus online gives them the edge over places with some actual volume of material...
and at the moment I know of no more, though if you do I'd like to.
Online communities
Established scholars probably don't participate in such things, although tales of old flame-wars on soc.history.medieval might suggest otherwise to you, but for those in the more insecure parts of the profession, by which I mean postgraduates, there appears to be some interest in knowing that we're not alone. Just, it often seems, not enough to sustain much actual effort, though there is a thriving Medievalists' community on Livejournal if you do such things (I do not).