Gospels

Bibles in the Middle Ages were usually written in Latin, although translation into common (vernacular) languages was becoming popular as people became more literate.

The Lindisfarne Gospels
The British Library’s “Turning the Pages” display on the Lindisfarne Gospels has shown the immense progress technology has afforded manuscript studies. There has been an incredible amount of research done on these gospels; here is a website that provides some self-tutorials about them. These 8th century gospels are in Latin, but over the Latin script there is what is called a gloss--an explanation or translating assistance in a common language, in this case Old English.

‘The Corpus Irish Gospels’
These gospels are from Corpus Christi College at Oxford University. The scans of this 12th century manuscript are in high resolution and is very simply decorated. The department of Early Manuscripts at Oxford University has many medieval manuscripts that are worth looking at, some of them scientific texts.

Codices Electronici Sangallenses
The Library of St. Gallen has a number of bibles in their collection, which can be found by their search engine--unfortunately, I can’t link directly to them here because of the frames on the website. They are easily found, though, as most of them are labelled “Bible” followed by the texts in the volume.

Latin Vulgate Bible Online
This website exists to help you read the Bible (Jerome’s Vulgate) in Latin; it has search capabilities, two English translations, and tools for saving phrases and verses for later use. It would be a good idea to bookmark this website if you don’t intend to learn Latin seriously but are still interested in being able to recognise specific passages within a manuscript.

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.