Introduction to Latin Libraries on the Internet

Since you are going to be searching through Latin resources by way of medieval studies, the resources I’ve provided here are only cursory and most have translations to English attached to them.

A lot of references to older Latin literature are to ecclesiastical sources, sources relating to the Christian church. You might be looking for a sermon by one of the early teachers of Christian doctrine, known as the Church Fathers, or you might be trying to find a translation of something in the Vulgate Bible, or even just a single psalm from a manuscript psalter. If you are interested in books of hours or other liturgical literature, you might be looking for a standard Latin prayer translated into English. If you come across a term or an event you are confused about, the Catholic church has put a useful encyclopaedia online.

The Corpus Scriptorum Latinorum will have selected resources in their original languages as well as a variety of translations to accompany them. The Latin Library, on the other hand, is more likely to have whole works without translation. For purposes relating to this study, The Online Medieval and Classical Library is probably the bet on getting relevant information that is translated by scholars.

Museum Holdings

It is typical of online presentations that a library would place a more complete, annotated or transcribed edition of a manuscript online for the public perusal while a museum is concerned with a more holistic representation of manuscript, along with timelines or contextual notes. These museums, though sometimes working hand in hand with libraries to produce digitised versions of their holdings, are no exception.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY: The Cloisters
The Met houses an unique department called The Cloisters, which preserves medieval sculpture, stained glass windows, artefacts, and a plethora of other items. Within this department there are several exhibits on manuscripts; they hold the Book of Hours of Jean D’Evreux, the Belle Heures de Jean de Berry, and a leaf from a Beatus manuscript.

The Fitzwilliam Museum
This museum in Cambridge places selections from the Macclesfield psalter online in high resolution, accompanied by several articles about it that describe the history of the book, its value, and what makes it unique.

The Pierpont Morgan Museum & Library
This museum has put up a great many manuscripts for public viewing online with a feature that allows you to zoom in on the manuscript in question, but these manuscripts are only selections and not whole works. That in mind, enjoy the high resolution and incredible detail of these manuscripts.

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.

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.