Music

Manuscripts containing musical scores have been preserved online mostly by their incorporation into database projects, though there exist many individual projects and efforts to draw on multimedia sources now available.

Medieval Music Database
La Trobe University Library hosts this site, which holds an extensive database of medieval musical texts, usually accompanied by transcriptions, translations, and valuable information about the manuscripts and their relationships to similar items. Along with individual manuscript images, the site also houses four complete works (three antiphons and one gradual). This site has an excellent search function. Unfortunately the Music Dept. of La Trobe University was closed down, so updates on the database have been sporadic.

Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music
Though this archive requires brief registration, the archive is easily searched once inside and holds an enormous collection of manuscript images in high-resolution. Along with the images in this database, manuscripts are also listed that are only part of a census of items and do not have much information related to them, so in your search, be sure to specify that you would like images of manuscripts.

Digital Scriptorium
This web site, which I’ve introduced before, has a good search function and a decent selection of music-related manuscripts, though not many whole works. High resolution photos are available. When using the search function you may find it useful to use more specific terms (antiphon, gradual, kyrie, gloria, rather than “song” or “music”).

Stichting Musick’s Monument: Medieval Manuscripts
In words from their own site, “The Stichting Musick’s Monument produces Historical Art Productions, partly in association with scholars from the Chair of Humanities of the University of Amsterdam (UvA).Pictures, music and text are integrated: You will hear music from the same period and the same area of origin as the visual materials; these are supplemented with explanatory text. From this combination evolves something like a Gesamtkunstwerk (a total work of art), a complete new way of digital art presentation.” A very interesting project!

The Psalter

Psalms are songs of praise, and 150 (or 151!) of them make up a single book in the Old Testament of the Bible, and one which was often recited by monks and nuns throughout the week. Like books of hours, books of psalms (psalters) could be personal objects but unlike books of hours, psalters were also used in church services or by individuals in a professional capacity.

“Glimpses of Medieval Life”: The Luttrell Psalter
This project by the British Library places selected images online in very high resolution with a good deal of background information. In particular, the Luttrell Psalter is illustrated with figures of every day medieval life; since we normally see aristocratic fashions (just as you would looking in expensive magazines today) this is very unusual and valuable to people who want to know what it was like to live in the Middle Ages.

Digital Scriptorium
This site is a good resource to find images of psalters, but since there are so many the link will take you to the search page. Type in “psalter” in the “Basic Search: Search all” box and see what you come up with!

Codices Electronici Sangallenses
The Library of Saint Galen is another excellent resource; use their search function to find psalters that have been put online. The images and descriptions are of good quality and this library has the advantage of having many completely digitalized manuscripts.

Parallel Latin/English Psalter
This psalter is one that is purely hypertext, but remains an excellent resource because Jerome’s Vulgate text of the Bible was the standard translation from Greek, Aramaic, and Hebrew during the Middle Ages. If you have trouble looking at a page of a manuscript, sometimes it is useful to look at a standard text to try and make sense of the script before you.