“In the beginning”...bringing the scrolls of Genesis and the Ten Commandments online

A little over a year ago, we helped put online five manuscripts of the Dead Sea Scrolls—ancient documents that include the oldest known biblical manuscripts in existence. Written more than 2,000 years ago on pieces of parchment and papyrus, they were preserved by the hot, dry desert climate and the darkness of the caves in which they were hidden. The Scrolls are possibly the most important archaeological discovery of the 20th century.

Today, we’re helping put more of these ancient treasures online. The Israel Antiquities Authority is launching the Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library, an online collection of some 5,000 images of scroll fragments, at a quality never seen before. The texts include one of the earliest known copies of the Book of Deuteronomy, which includes the Ten Commandments; part of Chapter 1 of the Book of Genesis, which describes the creation of the world; and hundreds more 2,000-year-old texts, shedding light on the time when Jesus lived and preached, and on the history of Judaism.

Click here to read this article from Google

The Geese Book – medieval manuscript now available online

One of the most interesting manuscripts of the late Middle Ages is now available online – The Geese Book, a lavishly and whimsically illuminated, two-volume liturgical book, can now be accessed through a project from the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.

The Geese Book was produced in Nuremberg, Germany between 1503 and 1510, and gives the complete liturgy compiled for the parish of St. Lorenz, which was used until the Reformation was introduced in the city in 1525.

The volumes are renowned for their high quality decorative illumination including fanciful pictures, provocative and satirical imagery of animals, dragons, and wild people. The work takes its name from an enigmatic illustration showing a choir of geese singing from a large chant manuscript with a wolf as their choirmaster. A fox, who has joined the choir, extends his paw menacingly in the direction of one of the geese.

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

Newberry library project makes historical documents and images accessible for the classroom

I squinted at the calligraphic handwriting. (I don't read much Latin or Middle French, and in this script, it's challenging just to make out the letters.) And I marveled at the content: God stands next to Adam in the Garden of Eden in all the regalia of a 15th-century monarch. The serpent assumes the head and torso of a woman when it tempts Eve to eat the apple. Queen Tomyris wears a placid expression as, with one hand, she points a bloody knife toward King Cyrus' decapitated corpse and, with the other, she holds his severed head over a vat filled with the blood of his soldiers. Medieval theologians are astonishing.

 Then, I stepped back and asked, how might this manuscript help a teacher bring medieval Europe to life for his or her students? What does a manuscript provide that a textbook does not? What would be gained and what would be lost if we had this page digitally reproduced, that is, professionally photographed and displayed on a website? The texture, the smell would be gone. But those colors and the startling scenes would still be stunning on screen. Does the Internet's much-touted ability to overcome spatial barriers effectively dissolve the walls of a rare-books reading room?

Click here to read this article from the Chicago Tribune

Click here to visit the Digital Collections from the Classroom website

Warwickshire Manorial Records going online

Fines for playing tennis, selling shoes before o’clock in the afternoon, or being an ale house haunter, are just some of the penalties in force in Warwickshire 600 years ago. Documents detailing such historical gems can be found in the Warwickshire Manorial Records which will soon be available to the public.

 Warwickshire County Council launched the Manorial Documents Register at an event at Warwickshire County Record Office earlier this week. The register contains information about the location of court rolls, surveys, maps and documents about land boundaries from medieval times and can be accessed by anyone at www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/mdr.

Charges issued by 17th century court leets include:

• A pain (fine) on tanners and shoemakers that they offer not wares to sell before one of the clock in the afternoon 
• The churchwardens to search for ale house haunters and others that come not to church on Sunday on pain (fine) of 10s 

 Mark Ryder, Head of Localities and Community Safety said, “These records contain a rich and fascinating history about life in Warwickshire in the late middle ages. The database will signpost people to the relevant sources and will help to bring medieval history to everyone’s fingertips.

 “In Warwickshire we are lucky to have three remaining court leets located in Alcester, Henley in Arden and Warwick who continue these ancient traditions, two leets will be at the event next Monday.”

The project was run by the County Council’s Archives team with funding from The National Archives. In addition to the launch it is possible to book a place for a Manorial Records talk on Monday 29 October 10am-12pm at the Record Office.

More details are available on 01926 738959 or via recordoffice@warwickshire.gov.uk. Further information about the project and the launch is available from Sam Collenette, Archives and Historic Environment Manager, Warwickshire County Council on 01926 738950.

Source: Warwickshire County Council

People of Medieval Scotland online database officially launched

A new interactive online database, which will make thousands of the oldest documents in Scotland’s history available to the public, has been officially launched today during an event at the University of Glasgow.

The People of Medieval Scotland (PoMS) project has catalogued over 21,000 individuals mentioned in 8,600 documents. The documents, written between 1093 and 1314, tell the story of Scotland’s transformation from a land of patchwork regions to an established kingdom with fixed borders and modern systems of government.

The records are now online and fully accessible to the public through the online database, allowing academic experts and enthusiastic amateurs alike to learn more about the period. The database will also include free software which has been specially developed for use in schools. Special interactive labs will offer history students creative ways to explore the wealth of information stored within the database.

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

St Andrews Cathedral in Scotland recreated online

People can now explore St Andrews Cathedral, Scotland’s largest medieval church, as it looked in the Middle Ages, through a new online portal created by the University of St Andrews.

 Visitors will be able to create their own avatars and navigate their way around the online reconstruction, which shows the Cathedral as it was 700 years ago. They can explore the cloisters, the internal choir section, the chapter house, and the nave. There will be historic characters so visitors will be able to chat with Robert the Bruce, an Augustinian Friar and perhaps “The Old Grey Lady” a ghost reported to haunt the building. The experience is intended to give users a new perspective on Scottish history, accessible across the generations.

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

Creating An Online Portal Into The Medieval World

Perhaps it is fitting that students and scholars interested in the medieval world have to grapple with fiefdoms in order to find information dating to the period – though that doesn’t make it any less frustrating. But the days of searching through scattered online resources will soon be history. 

Researchers are in the process of pulling together a website bringing together scores of electronic resources on medieval subjects, including literature, history, theology, architecture, art history and philosophy. Creation of a centralized search engine for medieval materials would be a big step forward. At present, for example, those interested in studying the medieval era may have to visit dozens of different sites to search for documents related to their research topics, from King Arthur to church history to the Hundred Years’ War. And that’s assuming they know how to find those sites in the first place.

 The new site, which is part of a larger project called the Medieval Electronic Scholarly Alliance (MESA), will allow users to search all of these sites at once – streamlining the research process and hopefully bringing to light resources a scholar may have otherwise missed. The site is scheduled to launch by the end of the year, and will initially cover Europe and the Mediterranean world from roughly 450 A.D. to 1450 A.D.

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

New website – Getty Research Portal – offers better access to art history resources

The Getty Research Institute launched a new website last week, the Getty Research Portal, which promises to provide universal access to digitized texts in the field of art and architectural history.

 The Getty Research Portal is a free online search gateway that aggregates descriptive metadata of digitized art history texts, with links to fully digitized copies that are free to download. Art historians, curators, students, or anyone who is culturally curious can unearth these valuable sources of research without traveling from place to place to browse the stacks of the world’s art libraries.

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

See also Getty launches full text website for art history research

Interactive map of the Roman Empire now online

Imagine you’re in Rome, it’s 205 CE, and you’ve got to figure out the quickest way to transport wheat to Virunum, in what’s now Austria. Your transportation choices are limited: ox cart, mule, ship or by foot, and your budget is tight. What do you do?

Enter ORBIS: The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World. With it, you can survey the options that would have been available to an ancient Roman in that very predicament with the ease of getting directions via GPS.


Type in your starting point, destination, the goods you need to move, and the time of year. Voila! You can quickly see the most cost-effective way to transport the grain.

By generating new information about the ancient Roman transport network, ORBIS demonstrates how, more than anything else, the expansion of the empire was a function of cost.

Click here to read this article from History of the Ancient World

Thousands of Irish Medieval Documents now available online

Trinity College Dublin historians have reconstructed invaluable medieval documents destroyed during the bombardment of the Four Courts in 1922. The Four Courts was the home of the Public Record Office, which was catastrophically destroyed when it was bombed in the conflict between pro-Treaty and anti-Treaty forces at the start of the Irish Civil War. It was previously thought that the entire medieval archive had been destroyed, but forty years’ work by a team of researchers at Trinity has led to the reconstruction of more than 20,000 hugely important government documents produced by the medieval chancery of Ireland. From today, the Irish chancery letters are available again in a new publicly accessible and free internet resource known as CIRCLE: A Calendar of Irish Chancery Letters, c.1244–1509.

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

The Walters Art Museum Receives $265,000 NEH Grant to Digitize Over 100 Flemish Manuscripts

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has granted the Walters Art Museum $265,000 for a three-year project to digitize, catalog and distribute 113 illuminated medieval manuscripts from Flanders, present-day northeastern France and Belgium. This project, Imaging the Hours: Creating a Digital Resource of Flemish Manuscripts, will digitize 45,000 pages of text with over 3,000 pages of illumination from the 13th through 16th centuries. A highlight will be the digitization of a collection of 80 Books of Hours—prayer books of personal devotion—which were the “bestsellers” of the Middle Ages, often sumptuously illuminated in gold and painted by masters of the time.

“Just as the Walters provides access without admission fee to our permanent collection, we are also making it available as part of our public mission. The museum is grateful to the NEH for its continued generous financial support allowing us to provide a free worldwide online resource of preservation-quality, digital manuscript surrogates to anyone with an Internet connection,” said Walters Director Gary Vikan.

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

Social Media as a Teaching Tool

Twitter's popular hashtag, #thatawkwardmomentwhen gains another contribution when Criseyde tweets, "I just realized that my uncle is setting me up with the King's son... "

Of course, Criseyde, the ill-fated lover who makes a cover appearance in Chaucer's poem, Troilus and Criseyde, doesn't have her own Twitter account. She and others from Chaucer's Medieval writings must rely on the students in an upper-level class at Shenandoah University to say what they would if they could in a social media experiment being tried out by instructor Bryon Grigsby.

Grigsby, who is also the vice president of academic affairs at the Virginia institution, is one of multiple instructors in campuses who have dived into the deep end to test out the use of social media as a teaching tool to support student learning without knowing the outcome.

At Georgetown University, Professor Betsy Sigman is using Google+ in her courses at the McDonough School of Business. There she's trying out the social networking platform to help students keep up with current events on data, the topic of the course she's teaching.

Click here to read this article from Campus Technology

Bodleian Libraries Cairo Genizah collection now available online

The Bodleian Libraries have digitized and made available for the first time their exceptional collection of the Cairo Genizah fragments. The website launch is marked by a bequest of five Genizah fragments from the library of the late Eli Weinberg.

The Cairo Genizah is an accumulation of almost 280,000 medieval Jewish manuscript fragments, mostly written in Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic. They were discovered in the late nineteenth century in an annex of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat, presently Old Cairo, Egypt. Documents accumulated there from the ninth to the fourteenth centuries, and remained there until their value for scholarship was discovered in the 19th century.

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

The Ghent Altarpiece in 100 Billion Pixels

It is now possible to zoom into the intricate, breathtaking details of one of the most important works of art from the medieval world, thanks to a newly completed website focused on the Ghent Altarpiece.

A stunning and highly complex painting composed of separate oak panels, The Mystic Lamb of 1432 by Hubert and Jan van Eyck, known as the Ghent Altarpiece, recently underwent much-needed emergency conservation within the Villa Chapel in St. Bavo Cathedral in Ghent. As part of this work, the altarpiece was removed from its glass enclosure and temporarily dismantled—a rare event which also made it possible to undertake a comprehensive examination and documentation, supported by the Getty Foundation in Los Angeles.

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

Hidden dimension of Stonehenge revealed

A project directed by academics at the University of Sheffield has made the archaeology of the world-famous Stonehenge site more accessible than ever before.

Google Under-the-Earth: Seeing Beneath Stonehenge is the first application of its kind to transport users around a virtual prehistoric landscape, exploring the magnificent and internationally important monument, Stonehenge.

The application used data gathered from the University of Sheffield´s Stonehenge Riverside Project in conjunction with colleagues from the universities of Manchester, Bristol, Southampton and London. The application was developed by Bournemouth University archaeologists, adding layers of archaeological information to Google Earth to create Google Under-the-Earth.

The unique visual experience lets users interact with the past like never before. Highlights include taking a visit to the Neolithic village of Durrington Walls and a trip inside a prehistoric house. Users also have the opportunity to see reconstructions of Bluestonehenge at the end of the Stonehenge Avenue and the great timber monument called the Southern Circle, as they would have looked more than 4,000 years ago.

Click here to read this article from History of the Ancient World

Medieval records of the Church Courts of York now online

Fascinating records from the Church Courts of York are now available on-line at the Borthwick Institute for Archives at the University of York, allowing historians new insights into a huge variety of topics over many centuries.

From arguments about church taxes on liquorice, roses and pigeon dung, to families disputing wills and inheritance, the records paint a vivid picture of the social, economic, political, religious and emotional world of people living in a period from the 14th to 19th centuries.

Digitisation of the York Cause Papers, which record the proceedings of the ecclesiastical courts of York from 1300 to 1858, has been funded through a grant from JISC, the UK’s technology consortium for higher and further education. The development means the papers are set to become one of the most widely-used historical records in the UK.

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

Discover Medieval Chester project gets funding

The ‘Discover Medieval Chester’ project, which intends to promote the rich history of medieval Chester as a multi-cultural, multi-lingual frontier city, has has received an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Knowledge Transfer Fellowship to the value of £172 000.

The project is led by Dr Catherine Clarke of Swansea University, in a partnership with the Grosvenor Museum, (Chester’s history museum) and other heritage bodies, and builds upon Dr Clarke’s previous AHRC funded collaborative research project titled, ‘Mapping Medieval Chester.’

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

New App features Bodleian Treasures

The Bodleian Libraries have launched a mobile app featuring a selection of the rarest, most important and most evocative objects from the Bodleian collections: from ancient papyri through medieval oriental manuscripts to twentieth-century printed books and ephemera. The app supports the Autumn 2011 exhibition, Treasures of the Bodleian – on show until 23 December. Created in conjunction with Toura, a leading solution for cloud-based mobile app development, the Treasures of the Bodleian app can be downloaded for free.

Users can explore in high resolution through themes including the classical heritage; maps and boundaries; the sacred word; the animal and plant kingdoms; literature and music; the sciences of observation and calculation; and moments in history.

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

British Library launches new Medieval and Renaissance images app

In conjunction with their exhibition Royal Manuscripts: The Genius of Illumination, the British Library has created a Royal Manuscripts app for Apple iPad and iPhone users, which features over 500 images from 58 manuscripts in their collection.

The app is available for download at a cost of just £1.49 for the iPhone and £2.99 for the iPad, until November 2011.

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

Library completes digitization of medieval manuscripts

The secrets of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library on the sixth floor of Van Pelt Library have now been revealed on the internet. A two-year grant funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities has allowed Penn to finish digitizing medieval and Renaissance manuscripts produced before 1601. A second grant was secured in March to digitize manuscripts from 1601 to 1800.

“Penn in Hand: Selected Manuscripts,” an online collection, currently offers over 1,400 online facsimiles of manuscripts. The collection also includes over 100 facsimiles of the Lawrence J. Schoenberg Collection, a collection of late medieval and early modern manuscripts donated in April by 1953 College graduate and Wharton MBA recipient Lawrence Schoenberg.

Van Pelt is one of the first American libraries to have a large public digitized collection that is free of charge, said Nancy Shawcross, curator of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library.


Click here to read this article from the Daily Pennsylvanian