ORB: Links to External Sites

ORB Online Encyclopedia
External Sites of Interest to ORB Users

ed., Carolyn P. Schriber

This list contains new sites that are closely related to the purposes and goals of ORB. We list them here temporarily, to encourage our readers to visit them and give us feedback. Our hope is that many of them will become permanent additions to the resources of ORB. (Be sure to check specific sections in the ORB Encyclopedia for other links.)

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Quick connect to other major medieval studies sites: Labyrinth | Internet Medieval Sourcebook Netserf | Argos | World Wide Web Virtual Library/Medieval

Medieval and Renaissance Studies Periodicals
This section of the Andy Holt Virtual Library, sponsored by UTMartin, contains nearly 120 links to journals, bulletins, and newsletters whose focus is the history and culture of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. All the sites provide tables of contents for current and some back issues, article abstracts, or full text, so that patrons may glean bibliographic information, determine the way a topic has been treated, or read an article in a journal which might not otherwise be available locally.

Uniting the Kingdoms?
Created by the UK Public Record Office, this well-crafted and entertaining site explores how the English, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh thought of themselves between 1066 and 1603 and how they ended up with only one (Scottish) King among them. The exhibition is divided into five principal sections, examining Scotland, England, France, Wales, and Ireland in turn. Each begins with a very brief overview and then offers a mixture of text and images of primary documents (via pop-up windows) to explore a number of topics related to the larger theme. Selected links and recommended readings are also included. Additional sections include a list of monarchs and a collection of maps.

Exeter Cathedral Keystones and Carvings: A Catalogue Raisonnÿ of the Medieval Interior Sculptures and their Polychromy, by Avril K. Henry and Anna C. Hulbert.
This free website offers a comprehensive visual and verbal explanatory catalogue of all the figurative medieval bosses, corbels and labelstops (with a few other interior carvings) which are an integral part of the medieval interior construction of the Cathedral.

The 1937 edition of Sources of English Constitutional History: A Selection of Documents from A.D. 600 to the Present, edited and translated by Carl Stephenson and Frederick George Marcham.

The Hill Monastic Manuscript Library has just put a portion of its catalogue online. The catalogue follows the EAMMS standards for electronic manuscript cataloguing, using the Access database developed for Digital Scriptorium. The data comes from the HMML inventory cards, which are brief descriptions of the manuscript and its contents. This online catalogue currently contains approximately 30,000 of the 90,000 inventory records in HMML's collection. Most of HMML's Austrian collection is now available.

The Electronic Grosseteste, ed. James R. Ginther. The site now contains all of Grosseteste's Philosophical Works (printed in the Baur Edition), his Letters, and the first 50 of his Dicta (transcribed by Joseph Goering). There are also research resources which would be of use to those who work in medieval theology, philosophy, history of science and church history, including a searchable bibliographical database. Users may also download zipped copies of the public domain texts. Registration is required, but that information remains private. All public texts are searchable.

The Goettingen State and University Library announces the final version of its digitized Gutenberg Bible. The 1282 pages of the Bible at Goettingen, one of four complete, illuminated copies on vellum, have been scanned with a high-end professional digital camera back, Picture Gate 8000. Careful attention was paid to create faithful reproductions of the 88 wonderful illuminated, partly gilded pages.
In addition to the complete Gutenberg Bible, the digital version includes: the manuscript of the Goettingen Model Book, a contemporary manuscript which provided the patterns for the decoration of the Goettingen Bible; and the famous Helmasperger's Notarial Instrument (6th November 1455), dealing with Gutenberg's invention, known as the "Werk der Buecher" (work of books) and Gutenberg's business relations with Johannes Fust.
"Gutenberg digital" is bilingual (German and English). The presentation is programmed in HTML and can be viewed with standard (4th generation) Web Browsers.

Medieval Manuscript Manual
The Department of Medieval Studies at Central European University, Budapest, has created a manual dealing with production, structure, illumination, patronage, and usage of manuscripts. Many useful and informative illustrations.

The Repertorium Fontium Medii Aevi, founded in 1953 and published by the Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo, is a detailed overview of medieval Latin Literature providing bibliographic data on thousands of titles, organized by genre. The Institute's lemmario offers a searchable index to those titles by key word. The coverage of the Repertorium is great enough that the ability to search quickly for given titles or simply to browse is something that serious students of the Middle Ages cannot afford to ignore.

Cyberpsalter
This home page for psalter studies was launched in 1997 to gather and link resources for the study of medieval psalter manuscripts. Psalter studies encompass the contents, codicology, functions, and audiences of these widely-used medieval books. Inherently multi-disciplinary, psalter studies are ideally collaborative. The Pierpont Morgan Library has recently granted Cyberpsalter permission to reproduce all of the full-page illustrations of the manuscript M.43, the Huntingfield Psalter, as well as its calendar pages and selected initials--a total of 60 pages--in black-and-white.

Bibliographic Information Base in Patristics (BIBP)
The web site allows the use of the bibliographical services of the BIBP. Some 29, 000 records, from about 350 journals, can be searched. The database can be searched only in French. By way of French, however, all the records can be searched. A new edition of various indexes is planned for the summer of 1999. This BIBP service is free for the time being.

Images of Suffolk Churches, by Dave Postles.
To date, there are about 20 images of Dennington church, but without commentary so far. The 20 images include parclose screens, painted dado, pyx cover, box pews and benches. He intends to put up images of about five other churches and also vernacular architecture.

The Centre d'Etudes des textes Medievaux of the University of Rennes
Contents include on-line French medieval texts: Chretien de Troyes' Erec et Enide; some mysteries from the Ste Genevieve Ms, and the Sainte Venice edited by G. Runnals; the volucrary of Jean de Cuba's Jardin de Sante; information about French medieval studies: links with French medieval texts.

Medieval Art in Pisa
A long list of links to works of art, churches and historical data about the extraordinary artistic heritage of the town of Pisa. In Italian.

French Medieval Literature
This is the most promising and important crossroads and starting point for French medieval literature on the net. No fancy programming, just leads to a variety of editions, commentary, recaption history, etc. The selection (over 200 texts) is adequate to feed an entire university program (certainly more than you will find on a standard cover-the-century MA or PhD reading list).

The Digital Scriptorium
This is a pilot project organized by the Columbia's Rare Book & Manuscript Library and UC Berkeley's Bancroft Library, with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, aimed at the creation of a visual union catalog of medieval manuscripts. The test database includes, as of February 4, 1999, descriptions of 2169 medieval codices or documents (cut-off date ca. 1550, but with some materials as late as the 19th century) from the Union Theological Seminary, six libraries at Columbia and Barnard College, and three at Berkeley, with a total of 5865 images from those manuscripts. The oldest MSS catalogued date from the 9th century.