Resources

Some Medieval Studies Resources on the Web

The Early Books and Manuscripts Collection of Houghton Library includes material dating from approximately 3000 BCE to 1600 CE, and ranges from papyri to early and illuminated manuscripts to early printed books. While there is an emphasis on Western languages and cultures, the collection includes substantial numbers of Arabic, Indic, Persian, and Syriac manuscripts. Materials in the collections may be consulted in the Houghton Library Reading Room; in addition, bibliographic data for and images of a growing number of medieval and other materials are available at Houghton's Digital Medieval Manuscripts page.

Beyond Words was a landmark 2016 exhibition bringing together materials from 19 Boston-area collections in three locations. The website remains a tremendous resource for teaching and scholarship. Browse the online catalog here.

Inter Libros is a web site developed and managed by Dr. Michael Hemment, Research Librarian at Widener Library, meant to facilitate and serve as a virtual gateway for classical and medieval research at Harvard University and beyond, by evaluating the scholarly merit of selected print and digital resources, clarifying their contents and scope, highlighting their limitations and deficiencies, and maximizing their accessibility.

Resources for Medieval Art and Architecture is a Harvard Libraries guide to online research resources in medieval arts and architecture created by Jeffrey Hamburger, Kuno Francke Professor of German Art and Culture, Department of the History of Art and Architecture.

The Digital Atlas of Roman and Medieval Civilizations is a series of maps and geodatabases bearing on multiple aspects of Roman and medieval civilization, covering the Roman empire, medieval Europe, and the medieval Mediterranean world. 

The BVMM is a virtual library of medieval manuscripts in French libraries, containing reproductions of a large selection of medieval and early Renaissance manuscripts. An initiative of the Institut de recherche et d’histoire des texts in Paris (IRHT-CNRS), the BVMM currently contains more than 1000 complete manuscripts in color, 600 others in black and white, as well as portions of 4200 illuminated manuscripts and incunables.

Manuscripta Mediaevalia, a collaborative project of German manuscript libraries and repositories funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, provides access to descriptions and digital images of over 90,000 manuscripts in German collections.