Transcriptions

Transcripts tend to be useful for printing, for editing, and for gaining insight by the commentary or annotation that usually accompanies a simple reproduction. Unfortunately, the nature of a transcription is that often a transcriber will have two possible interpretations for a single hand-written word on a manuscript, and will have to choose one of the two. Sometimes a transcriber does not even see more than one possibility.

Therefore, keep in mind that transcriptions are colored by the view of the scholarly editor. It is good to use more than one edition of any piece of literature that you are working on--in fact, it is considered good scholarship to do so.

The Rossell Hope Robbins Library
This library hosts many texts divided into different projects which are accompanied by graphics and criticism, with introductions to the works. These projects include The Camelot Project (on Arthurian studies), The Robin Hood Project, The Medieval Alexander Project (about Alexander the Great during the Middle Ages), and TEAMS Middle English Texts (TEAMS is The Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages; there are a variety of texts here).

The Christian Classics Ethereal Library
This site provides a basic introduction to many Western religious texts, but the real unique thing about this site is that you can download texts in formats that are supported by iPods, palm pilots, and simple text-readers for easy transport on electronic devices. There is no annotation or commentary, but there is author information available on most texts.

Decameron Web
Boccaccio’s “Decameron” is a very long work in Italian, but has been translated and transcribed here for the benefit of student. It is accompanied by what the authors call “a growing hypermedia archive of materials dedicated to Boccaccio’s masterpiece”. There are articles on history, society, religion, the arts, the plague, and numerous other resources.

The Luminarium: Anthology of Middle English Literature (1350-1485)
This anthology has a variety of transcriptions and is organised by author. Accompanying the works of these authors are criticism tailored to the specific work or author, links to discussion forums, bookstores that sell these works, and other options--not all of these options accompany every work, but each work is provided amply for an introduction.

What are they about?

The types of manuscripts that have been scanned and uploaded to the internet are various. There are complete manuscripts of highly artistic complexity that have been annotated by scholars and experts, and stubs of parchment without transcription or translation that have been scanned in a low-resolution setting. I have attempted to filter the less professional projects and introduce here only manuscripts that would be helpful to the widest range of study.

A large number of online manuscripts deal with different versions of the Bible, or even of the one book of Psalms, as well as other devotional literature like personalised books of hours. Others are stories of adventure, or moral tales about role models like saints or kings (called "lives" or "vitae"), and essays or sermons on how people ought to live. These tell us a lot about what types of ideals were very strong at that time. A number of musical scores from medieval manuscripts have also been put online, mostly in huge databases rich with information.

The literary subject of most of these manuscripts is philosophical or religious rather than fictional adventures or biography, but it should be recognised that the representation of manuscripts online is not necessarily representative of the sector as a whole: there are many different types of manuscripts, but the best projects online have dealt mainly with religious works. There were stories of adventure (King Arthur, Welsh mythology, Greek poets like Ovid and Vergil) but on the whole they are not well presented online by quantity or quality.

There are, of course, exceptions. However, to group these together would not have given them fair representation since they are not of the same genre. Instead of incorporating them here, I treat them individually, with separate entries as I will for some of the more elaborate or unusual projects.

Please keep this in mind when you read the larger articles I have linked to from this entry! I would not want to present an image that would colour your idea of medieval literature as a whole.