There is a separate page for Chaucer-related links

   Medieval Resources Online

It is perhaps wise to start with WEMSK (What Every Medievalist Should Know) a set of lists of bibliographical resources arranged by major topic, designed explicitly "for the beginning-to-semi-advanced graduate student to get you started, and to allow you to work up in a new field" which Professor James Marchand (University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign) is continuing to work on.

Essential for every aspect of medieval culture: NetSERF: The Internet Connection for Medieval Resources.

Medieval and Renaissance Web previously maintained by Thomas Izbicki is designed to provide access to scholarly resources in all aspects of the Western Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

If you want very full lists of what is available in Medieval Studies (all aspects, all areas, all regions) you should visit MELITON (Medieval Literary Studies Online) made by Dr. Roman Mazurkiewicz Krakow, Poland. The only inconvenience is that comments are in Polish. (Use MS Explorer)

For Old English resources, and sets of fonts for printing medieval characters / punctuation, see Peter Baker's OE site at the University of Virginia. People involved in creating electronic transcripts of medieval texts will need to know about the Medieval Unicode Font Initiative.

The Old English Newsletter provides useful information for scholars and students in all areas of Anglo-Saxon studies. The related OEN Bibliography offfers 16,500 items and 5,000 reviews that can be searched in various ways.

The Digital Medievalist is a new peer-reviewed on-line journal for technology and medieval studies.

The Corpus of Middle English Texts is part of the Middle English Compendium at the University of Michigan, that contains the Middle English Dictonary (itself available to subscribers only); it offers (or will soon offer) searchable and downloadable electronic editions of almost every major medieval text, using good editions.

The Labyrinth Library at Georgetown University offers wonderful resources for the Middle Ages, including a list of medieval e-texts available online.

The fine index of resources offered by Orb is essential. Within this, go at once to the Internet Medieval Sourcebook established by Paul Halsall, for a huge variety of important medieval texts in many languages. Equally (i.e. extremely) valuable are the topics contained in the ORB Encyclopedia, covering many aspect of the European Middle Ages. See also their collection of complete on-line textbooks for teaching.

Many important works published by TEAMS (Rochester/Kalamazoo) are also available online.

See EuroDocs' section on "Medieval & Renaissance Europe" for links to many good resources and lists of resources.

Exeter University Press (U.K.) publishes a very important series of medieval texts, many Old English, including the CD of the Exeter Book.

Collegues' Books at Michigan State University Press includes many important medieval titles including Al Shoaf's edition of Troilus and Criseyde.

Grover Furr has made available in a single site a large number of pdf (Adobe Acrobat) files of rarely available important texts from the Middle Ages, mostly huge and in Latin but with a few in French, including Le Roman de la Rose, and most of the Latin works of Boccaccio. If asked for a password, enter 5%*+FX#3 but expect the download to take a long time, even with the fastest links, except for the shortest texts.

Luminarium offers marvellous pages on the writers of the Middle Ages, as well as the Renaissance and the 17th Century. In addition, it contains vast lists of links to cultural aspects of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the 17th century, including sections on buildings, costume, art, society, history (although a lot of the slides listed in the art section are not in fact available), and a lot of music to listen to. It also offer bibliographies of related books and articles.

A useful resource for students is the Online Companion to Middle English Literature,  by the Heinrich-Heine-University, Duesseldorf, which offers short introductions, specimens of text with audio readings, images etc, for many well-known works.

Among more general resources, try exploring The Voice of the Shuttle, where you will find a wonderful set of Anglo-Saxon and Medieval resources among many others.

Equally important, the Medieval Studies section of the HUMBUL listings at Oxford.

Also the Medieval section of Jack Lynch's resource guide or the various medieval bibliographies and lists of links on Charles D. Wright's home page.

The Medieval Feminist Index lists over 5000 items.

The Mediaeval Logic and Philosophy pages by Paul Vincent Spade include a huge array of links to sites in those disciplines.

Gary Macy (University of San Diego) is compiling an online guide to 13th-century theologians.

For Philosophy especially, but also most other topics, there is the very well annotated 'Internetography' (index of sites and online resources) on Renaissance intellectual history at the University of Munich, which includes the Middle Ages.

A very full list of Medieval History-related links from the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, Department of History.

The Brigham Young University links to online Primary Documents of European History (by country) includes many medieval documents, often with facsimile and translation.

The Scholiast site by Peter Ravn Rasmussen, a history student at the University of Copenhagen, in Denmark, is largely, but not exclusively, a very valuable guide to resources in medieval history, including the Black Death.

For the history of medieval science, James McNelis's page will take you everywhere.

Edwin Duncan has a very full guide to email lists dealing with medieval topics. Medtextl is surely, along with Chaucer, the most important.

UPenn offers a vast listing of Books On-line that includes translations of medieval works.

The Periodical Historical Atlas gives access to maps of Europe throughout the Roman period and the Midle Ages.

Britannia.com offers articles on many medieval topics and a host of lists of bishops, abbots, kings, etc.

Within the very remarkable site containing Bulfinch's Mythology, you can find a broad list of international medieval resources relating to Charlemagne and Romance.

Stanford University Libraries offer a very useful Bibliography of English Translations from Medieval Sources (1968-1991) as part of their Medieval Pages. (Not on-line texts but printed books).

NM's Creative Impulse at Evansville provides a great set of medieval links (all areas) designed for students.

  Books and Manuscripts

A fascinating site, especially centered on Manuscripts, is the DScriptorium Home Page at Brigham Young University. Essential for every aspect of medieval culture (though limited in range): NetSERF: The Internet Connection for Medieval Resources. Nixnet offers a lot of links to Illuminated Manuscripts. Chris Witcombe lists many Medieval Art sites in his Art History Resources. The Web Gallery of Art also has some beautiful miniatures. The French IRHT is putting online thousands of beautiful pictures of pages and details from medieval manuscripts.

The Bodleian Library at Oxford has a fine set of pages for people wishing to consult its collections of western manuscripts. A set of pages is devoted to Western Manuscripts before 1500, they include some beautiful images of pages from illuminated manuscripts.  Complete images of a number of very important Oxford manuscripts (Celtic and medieval) from the Bodleian and other Oxford libraries are available online. They include Ms Digby 23, Part 2 of which contains the Song of Roland, CCC Ms. 201, a B Text of Piers Plowman, CCC Ms. 198, The Canterbury Tales. There is also a wonderful, fully illustrated Roman de la Rose MS. Douce 195,  and the 'Caedmon Manuscript' (Ms. Junius 11) containing the Old English Genesis and Exodus. The files are VERY large.

One of the most celebrated medieval literary manuscripts is that at Heidelberg known as the Codex Manesse with its 137 full-page portraits of poets.  Equally magnificent are the full digital images of a series of other illuminated manuscripts in the University of Heidelberg Library. The site is in German but the images are splendid. It includes a two-volume manuscript of Parzifal, (Vol.2) and Ulrich von Zatzikhoven's Lanzelet. A vast resource with links to digital images as well as lists and catalogues of German manuscripts is the site Manuscripta Mediaevalia. It is in German. Its page of links to digitalized manuscripts (with thumbnails) includes the Heidelberg Mss and others from Marburg, Berlin and Fulda.

One of the most successful online manuscripts is the beautiful calendar from the Tres Riches Heures Du Duc De Berry.

Leaves of Gold is a touring exhibition of manuscripts from Philadelphia collections, with a fully developed online site including many images, some too small. But a splendid resource.

The British Library allows you to enjoy Turning the Pages of a few manuscripts. Other pages cover some of their main Treasures.

A very fine exhibition of Manuscripts from Cambridge, Cambridge Illuminations, was held at the Fitzwilliam in 2005.

The Mediatheque at Troyes offers several fine online exhibitions, text in French of course. Especially good is the one on Bestiaries, but the general one on their most remarkable manuscripts is also very fine, as is that on incunabula as well as a remarkable, newly discovered Book of Hours (it is possible to view the whole maniscript through a link on the last page of the presentation.

View images from Columbia University's Rare Book & Manuscript Library.

Equally worthwhile is Aberdeen University Library's wonderful On-line Bestiary and also its Burnet Psalter (15th century)

Aberdeen has also put online the St Alban's Psalter, which is marvelous. The images can be viewed through an Index at the very foot of the Introduction page.

Cambridge Univeristy Library offers a tiny Digital Library with complete sets of images of a splendid Life of King Edward the Confessor and of the Book of Deer, said to be the oldest book from Scotland.

The French National Library offers a series of exhibitions including one on Bestiaries and one on Fouquet, available in English or French etc. See also pictures from a 14c Grandes Chroniques de France. And they offer a huge number of pages from their manuscripts, especially the medieval western manuscripts.

The University of Illinois offers a list of online books of hours.

John R. Yamamoto-Wilson has made available an online study of one Book of Hours.

The British Library, with Keio Univeristy (Japan), has put online complete images of the 2 complete Gutenberg Bibles and other related early printed material. The Library of Congress is now doing the same with its Gutenberg Bible.

At the bottom of Keio University's HUMI project's home page http://www.humi.keio.ac.jp/ there is a link to "Treasures of Keio Univeristy" leading to an index that includes "Medieval Manuscripts" which leads (id "guest") to a link to "Development of Western Scripts and Printing Types" that includes "Writings in Medieval Manuscripts" where you will find enough materials for an entire Paleography course (though the pictures of larger pages are not really quite detailed enough) -- lots of pictures of manuscripts from the 9th to the 16th centuries.

Here is another very useful set of online materials for a Graduate School course on Medieval Palaeography in which a number of images of charters offer an inbuilt word-by-word explanation / expansion following the cursor.

Probably the most professional material is Ductus, a commercial set of materials for a full course on paleography, devleoped at the University of Melbourne. They offer a sample Demo version online (click Course A for a couple of specimen images with inbuilt line-by-line trascriptions -- click the hot-spots button).

See the Medieval sections in sites among my General Art Resources.

Essential for every aspect of medieval culture: NetSERF: The Internet Connection for Medieval Resources.

For art history resources of every kind, Classical and Medieval among all the rest, there is a quite remarkable set of pages of art-history links maintained by Harcourt-Brace. Good for rainy days.

The Webmuseum gives you very rapid access to thousands of paintings from the Middle Ages until today.

The Battle of Hastings is very well covered in a visually ambitious site. There is a companion site devoted to the Bayeux Tapestry which is equally worth a visit.

A very important resource: Images of Medieval Art and Architecture, by Professor Alison Stones, of the University of Pittsburgh.

 Try this set of links to medieval museum collections.

You can also explore Medieval Art, or view another site with the Bayeux Tapestry,

The 17-year-old author of Nixnet, Nick Herman, offers a vast array of links to sites containing Medieval Art of all kinds.

For buildings and every aspect of art, especially Romanesque, mostly in Spain but also in France, Germany and Britain, you should view Arteguias.com but it is all in Spanish.

Buildings & Architecture

Essential for every aspect of medieval culture: NetSERF: The Internet Connection for Medieval Resources.

A very important resource: Images of Medieval Art and Architecture, by Professor Alison Stones, of the University of Pittsburgh. She offers extensive collections of images of buildings, covering Britain and France and general topics so far, but with much more to come.

Similarly vast, Jefferey Howe's Digital Archive of Architecture includes sections on (French)  Romanesque and Gothic architecture as well as all the rest.

ArtServe at the Australian National University offers thousands of images, inlcuding many of mostly medieval buildings in England and  France, including a lot of scultped details and stained glass.

My own page of links to English Cathedrals (and other churches) online may be of interest.

Within ORB there is a large study of Medieval English Towns with a lot of information on urban society.

One site devoted to English Gothic cathedrals is from Italy, while another set of links to sites about cathedrals is in a New York-based page.

There are many fine things in the Castles and Abbeys pages.

You can visit over 600 churches in Suffolk, thanks to Simon Knott's enthusiasm.

The photos of churches and other buildings with text from Pevsner made by Allan Soedring is also very fine.

All the carved elements in Exeter cathedral's structure can be seen in great detail at Exeter Cathedral Keystones & Carvings, a site made available by Avril K. Henry and Anna C. Hulbert

Medieval English churches contained many wall paintings; Anne Marshall's Open University site gives a broad survey of what survives.

You can enjoy Peter Collinson's tour of the City of Canterbury without moving.

If castles are what interests you, Castles On The Web will keep you happy for hours.

Visit the Basilica of St Francis in Assisi.

For buildings and every aspect of art, especially Romanesque art, and the Pilgrim Routes, mostly in Spain but also in France, Germany and Britain, you should view Arteguias.com but it is all in Spanish.

Cluny on the Internet.

The Ecclesiological Society also has a list of church-related sites that might prove useful.

Phil Draper has a lot of material on his Church Crawler site, and also offers a fine set of county links, stressing the value of the Cornwall site.

Essential for every aspect of medieval culture: NetSERF: The Internet Connection for Medieval Resources.

You may like to listen to the Gregorian Chant Home Page or listen to Medieval Music.

Drama

Essential for every aspect of medieval culture: NetSERF: The Internet Connection for Medieval Resources.

Three sites will give you everything you could hope for: Baragona's Medieval Drama pages and Sydney Higgins' Medieval drama links, and Links for Theatre History and Early Music at the University of Toronto's Centre for Research in Early English Drama / Records of Early English Drama (REED).

A modernized (performance) edition of The Castle of Perseverance.

A large number of Morality Plays are online at the University of Maine.

Organizations & Conferences

Every year in May scholars gather at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo for a major Congress of Medieval (and Renaissance) Studies organized by their Medieval Institute, which also publishes important series of texts etc.

Another very important International Medieval Conference is the IMC organized each year by the International Medieval Institute at the University of Leeds (U.K.). It covers all disciplines, with a strong emphasis on social history.

The New Chaucer Society organizes a biannual International Conference.

The Center for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto is a major center of activities, as is its close neighbor, The Pontifical Institute for Medieval Studies.

A very formal page for the Medieval Academy of America. Its page includes lists of University Departments and Programs where Medieval and Renaissance studies are actively pursued.

The Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (ACMRS) publishes Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies (MRTS), a prestigious series of editions, translations, and reference works, and sponsors another important resource, Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Brepols Publishers, Belgium).

Essential for every aspect of medieval culture: NetSERF: The Internet Connection for Medieval Resources.

   Paul Halsall's Internet Medieval Sourcebook
   The index page of the Medieval Institute at Western Michigan University
   The marvellous Corpus of Medieval English Prose and Verse at the University of Michigan
   Dan Mosser's great list of WWW Medieval Resources at Virginia Tech
   Michael Murphy offers a Companion to Medieval English Literature (themes, motifs and conventions) that students may find very helpful.
   Stanford University Library's Medieval Pages
   Grover Furr's Medieval History and Literature Page
   For medieval history: Medieval & Renaissance History (not updated since 1996)
   For texts: The Online Medieval and Classical Library (SunSITE) at Berkeley.
   Reviews of major medieval publications, with a few articles, can be read online in Envoi.

For serious research in virtually any area, you should go to the Louisana State University's Webliography; then click to Humanities, for example. Or go directly to their exhaustive Literature section. Equally serious are the contents of the electronic journal Exemplaria (A Journal of Theory in Medieval and Renaissance Studies).

The University of Illinois Library at Urbana-Champaign offers a useful Medieval Studies Program Library Resources page, where the short list of Internet links will be the most useful.

Specialized Links : British

More interesting to historians, perhaps, the home page of the British Academy - Royal Historical Society Joint Committee on Anglo-Saxon Charters, which includes an online (revised, augmented, and updated) version of P. H. Sawyer's Anglo-Saxon Charters: an Annotated List and Bibliography(1968) and Regesta Regum Anglorum. Searchable edition of the entire corpus of Anglo-Saxon royal diplomas - comprising Mercian charters of eighth and ninth centuries, West Saxon charters of the ninth century and all charters of the period 900-1066. Also available are facsimiles and much more.

There is a translation of St. Patrick's Confession at Catholic First. Since he's the first British writer whose work has survived...

A fascinating set of links to Beowulf Resources can be found at Georgetown University.

Some pictures of the Beowulf Manuscript and of Magna Carta (with a translation) can be found in the Digital Library section of the British Library's home page.

A magnificent edition of The Seafarer, with each word keyed to a glossary, and including 3 modern English translations with a lot else besides, by Corey Owen of the University of Saskatchewan.

For works by Anselm, see Jasper Hopkins' page.

The very helpful  Piers Plowman Home Page maintained by Lawrence Warner.

A hypertext edition of  Walter Hilton's Scale of Perfection, by Thomas Bestul.

The Godfriends (Umilta) Website, a very exceptional resource by Julia Bolton Holloway and others, offers access to ten websites on Julian of Norwich, her Showing of Love and its contexts.

Mapping Margery Kempe, located at the College of the Holy Cross, is another model of how a religious text can be contextualized through the Web.

Wessex Parallel Web Texts (WPWT) offers a growing list of online texts for teaching purposes, mostly lyrics, (see Contents page) concentrating on the Harley Lyrics, but also offering modern translations of Winner and Waster and The Owl and the Nightingale etc.

A study published in 1984 that has gone out of print is now available on-line: Commercium in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, by R. Allen Shoaf.

The National Library of Scotland has made available the entire text and a complete facsimile of the Auchinleck Manuscript, one of the most important collections of Middle English texts and one that Geoffrey Chaucer might even have known.

Gower's Confessio Amantis.

Chaucer's contemporary Thomas Usk wrote The Testament of Love but no manuscript survives. In 1532 a version of it was included by William Thynne in his edition of Chaucer's Works. Prof. R. Allen Shoaf has published a new edition of this text with TEAMS and has also set up a WWW site about the textual problems involved. The site includes a facsimile of Thynne's edition. In addition, Professor Shoaf has put online a modern-English translation of Usk's Testament of Love, with the request that any one logging into it please send him an empty email message with the subject USK to help him keep track of the use made of it.

Students may be interested in the many aspects of the Arthurian world evoked in the Camelot Project based at the University of Rochester.

The Malory Society offers what it can, given the little that is known of Sir Thomas Malory.

Related to this topic is the new online journal The Heroic Age,  dedicated to the study of the Northwestern Europe from the Late Roman Empire to the advent of the Norman Empire. Volume One | Volume Two |

In Parentheses  offers links to English versions of  various kinds of international source-materials, including a translation of Geoffrey of Monmouth's History and rather ancient (Jessie L. Weston) versions of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Pearl. Their Papers in Medieval Studies is another on-line scholarly journal with a number of excellent papers.

Some Piers Plowman scholars are preparing a major editing project described in their archive.

How much did a loaf of bread cost in 1300? To find out, visit the Medieval Price List. If you want to prepare your own medieval food, there is a Medieval/Renaissance Food Homepage.

Want to learn Old English on-line? There is Catherine Ball's excellent site for learning Old English. Another fine site on the subject is that by  Murray McGillivray.

In Parentheses offers a list of on-line resources related to various medieval and later topics, including Sanskrit and Peruvian! These include a very old-fashioned English version of the Nibelungenlied, and a more modern version of the Song of Roland.

France

The most important starting-point for work being done on the Middle Ages in French (and also other languages, even English) is Menestral (with an accent in fact but...)

Globe-Gate: The main source. A splendid list of links relating to French Medieval literature. Separate sections deal with such topics as medieval lyric poetry, medieval French drama. Globe-Gate's list of Occitan (Provencal) resources.

The Classiques section of Gallica, at the Bibliotheque Nationale, gives access to text files of many works, including some from the Middle Ages.

An Italian site that also gives links to Carmina Burana, the German Minnesanger, and Northern French trouveres. Includes music.

View the complete works of the troubadors Arnaut Daniel and Raimbaut de Vaqueiras in Provencal & English, and works of a growing number of other troubadors without English translation in a very fine site by Leonardo Malcovati. He also offers a search engine for these pages.

Guilhem Nou has a site on the Trobadors entirely in Langued'oc, it includes texts of poems by several.

A volume of rhyming English translations of poems by 8 trobadors by Barbara Smythe at In Parentheses.

Translations of a few poems by Guilhem de Peitieu (Guilhem IX) by Leonard Cotterell may surprise and give pleasure. Not so conventional!

Read modern English translations of some poems by Chretien, Marie de France and others.

The Charette Project at Princeton includes transcripts and images of almost all the manuscripts of Chretien's Lancelot.

Join (or at least learn more about) the International Marie de France Society.

Le Roman de la Rose (Romance of the Rose) project combines images (so far) of 3 complete manuscripts and a searchable transcription of a portion of text... just beginning.

Another site devoted to the Romance of the Rose (in French, on image-in-text) is part of the Pecia blog of medieval manuscript research.

No other medieval poet has the popular appeal of Francois Villon, who has his own fan club.

Italy

The wonderful, fully bilingual Dante Online with all the works and also links to all the other significant Dante sites, including Otfried Lieberknecht's Homepage for Dante Studies.

The Dartmouth Dante Project offers a searchable text of the Commedia and more than 70 commentaries.

Danteworlds offers a variety of reading-aids to the three books of the Commedia.

Petrarch's Canzoniere in Italian; and again, the Canzoniere with flowers. Extracts in English from his letters. 

Brown University's Decameron Web includes John Florio's1620  translation of the Decameron.

The ItalNet publication of the Opera del Vocabolario Italiano (OVI) textual database. The database contains 1410 vernacular texts (16.8 million words, 442,000 unique forms, 116 MB of text) dated prior to 1375, the year of Boccaccio's death. The verse and prose works include early masters of Italian literature like Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, as well as lesser-known and obscure texts by poets, merchants, and medieval chroniclers.

Some may find Therese Bonin's Bibliography of Thomas Aquinas in English very helpful; it includes hyperlinks wherever possible, including to the home pages of publishers of printed books.
 

Germany

View Mediaevum.de when you have a lot of time. Surely the main site for things medieval German, always assuming that you can read German!

Medieval links from the university of Munster.

A complete online English translation of the Nibelungenlied by Margaret Armour at In Parentheses.

Feminist studies have awakened widespread interest in the medieval German mystic Hildegard of Bingen, born some 900 years ago.

German medievalists are well-served by the Middle High German Conceptual DataBase at Bowling Green State University. Users need to create an account with username and password, but it's free!

One of the most celebrated medieval literary manuscripts is that at Heidelberg known as the Codex Manesse with its 137 full-page portraits of poets.  Equally magnificent are the full digital images of a series of other illuminated manuscripts in the University of Heidelberg Library. The site is in German but the images are splendid. It includes a two-volume manuscript of Parzifal, (Vol.2) and Ulrich von Zatzikhoven's Lanzelet. A vast resource with links to digital images as well as lists and catalogues of German manuscripts is the site Manuscripta Mediaevalia. It is in German. Its page of links to digitalized manuscripts (with thumbnails) includes the Heidelberg Mss and others from Marburg, Berlin and Fulda.

A vast resource with links to digital images as well as lists and catalogues of German manuscripts is the site Manuscripta Mediaevalia. It is in German. Its page of links to digitalized manuscripts (with thumbnails) includes the Heidelberg Mss and others from Marburg, Berlin and Fulda.

The University of Marburg offers major resources related to medieval manuscripts in Germany.

It is remarkable that the Cusanusstift, the old folks' home to which Nicholas of Cusa bequeathed all his property and books is still in existence, with most of the books still in the library there. A magnificent resource with translations of his major works is available on Jasper Hopkins' page (also Anselm and Hugh of Balma). There is an Institute of Cusanus research at Trier, another valuable resource is the page of the American Cusanus Society.

Spain

PhiloBiblon offers a searchable bibliography of ancient texts produced in the Iberian Peninsula, in Spanish, Catalan, Portugese.

For buildings and every aspect of art, especially Romanesque, you should view Arteguias.com but it is all in Spanish.

The University of Texas Cantar de Mio Cid website allows you to view the manuscript, a transcript and English / modern Spanish translation, listen to it using various kinds of audio files, and view a lot of related images.

Ramon Llull was a quite remarkable person. Wikipedia gives a brief, sensible overview. The main site is at the University of Barcelona, with  a full listing of his works available online. A slightly disconcerting but very large site dedicated to his arts of memory, especially, is also available.

Scandinavia

Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga, the webpage of an exhibition by the Smithsonian, examines the history of the western expansion of the Vikings.