Edited Multimedia

Several web sites take advantage of the internet’s capacity to entertain two or three ways of presenting a single piece of information. These sites make use of text, pictures, sound, and video presentations to help bring medieval manuscripts to a wider audience.

The Medieval Bestiary Project
This project compiles a number of medieval bestiaries and presents the definitions of the animals in comparison to each other, along with the common medieval allegory that often accompanied such descriptions, and a picture of the relevant animal, insect, or stone. This compendium provides a very general look at medieval bestiaries.

Turning the Pages
This is a project by the British Library that combines images of manuscripts with texts/transcripts, and a program that makes it look as if you are actually turning the pages of a manuscript. An excellent idea for people who have trouble seeing the manuscript for what it is when trying to research them online.

Musick’s Monument
So far this is the only project I’ve found that actually uses music along with manuscript images to explain what medieval musical manuscripts contain. There are also Quicktime videos available and--another innovation--iPod wallpapers downloads.

Rossell Hope Robbins Library Projects
It would be a pity to try and use only one of these projects, since they are all helpful. Along with images from many different time periods, this web site shows how medieval manuscripts have perpetuated myths that are popular even now.

University Libraries

Universities hold many of the manuscripts and manuscript digitalisation projects currently on the internet. I’ll only introduce a few here, since there are so many, but hopefully from these sites you will be able to search for others. You can also search for university official web sites, navigate to the library section, and look for special projects or collections. Often you will find more useful information this way than you will by using Google, Yahoo, or even another university resource page.

Again, I only present a few of these sites to you in these articles, but I will try and not duplicate too many of them--if a site appears more than once, you know it must be good!

University of Southampton
The Wessex Parallel WebTexts are hosted on their site, developed by one of their faculty and partly funded by them. This is the excellent digitalization project of the Harley Lyrics.

University of Michigan
This site hosts the Middle English Compendium, which contains not only a huge section of Middle English Prose and Verse but also a very valuable Middle English Dictionary that would be of help when you begin to read manuscripts.

University of Virginia
More Middle English texts can be found here in the University of Virginia’s Middle English Collection--most of these texts are published in this American mirror on behalf of the Oxford University Text Archive; another academic connection!

Georgetown University
This university houses the widely-acclaimed Labyrinth, a search engine with many links and resources relating to medieval studies. Many of the manuscripts you see linked from this website can be found using this search engine.

University of Rochester
The Rossell Hope Robbins Library is hosted and maintained by the University of Rochester--this is where we find the Camelot Project, the Robin Hood Project, the Medieval Alexander Project, and the TEAMS Middle English Texts.

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.