Medieval Manuscripts at Wilson Special Collections Library: Digital Resources

Ad fontes is a learning program of the University of Zurich for all those who work with historical materials. It is aimed not only at students of history and other historical disciplines, but also at interested amateurs and experts. Tutorials in the paleography of German, Latin, Romance languages, and Scandinavian languages are all available through the platform. There are also exercises/tutorials involving numismatics, heraldry, maps, evaluating primary sources, and more.

Bartholomew's World introduces medieval Scholasticism and at the same time strengthens skills in Latin and world history.

This resource has been designed for students and scholars of early modern English letters, history, theology, and philosophy--for anyone whose research will embrace original English manuscript sources in this period. Drawing on the rich manuscript holdings of some of the older Cambridge colleges, it presents an extensive archive of manuscript images unparalleled in printed guides and introductions. Joined to this you will find a range of pedagogical materials--transcription conventions, tips on dating, a bibliography and list of links--suitable for beginners, but convenient also for continuing reference.

Paleography is the history and study of handwriting. Old scripts can be very beautiful, but sometimes difficult to read. This site presents over 100 carefully selected French manuscripts written between 1300 and 1700, with tools for deciphering them and learning about their social, cultural, and institutional settings.

This online tutorial will help you learn to read the handwriting found in documents written in Latin between 1086 and 1500. The tutorial is for people who already know medieval Latin.

The Italian Paleography website presents 102 Italian documents and manuscripts written between 1300 and 1700, with tools for deciphering them and learning about their social, cultural, and institutional settings.

MDR is an extensive, curated database of peer-reviewed digital materials for the study of the Middle Ages. Some of the resources that found in this database have also been linked individually in this LibGuide. This database is consistently updated by the Medieval Academy of America and is a fantastic resource.

Abbreviationes™ is a highly useful reference, research, and teaching tool for medieval Latin paleography and resolving difficult abbreviations.

Enigma is a tool to help scholars decipher Latin words which are difficult to read in medieval manuscripts. It is sometimes impossible to decipher all the letters in a word, for various reasons (difficult palaeography, unclear writing, damage to the document, etc.)

Fragmentarium enables libraries, collectors, researchers and students to publish images of medieval manuscript fragments, allowing them to catalogue, describe, transcribe, assemble and re-use them.

From The Page is a software that enables crowdsourced transcription of manuscripts.

VisColl (Collation Visualization) is a system for modeling and visualizing the physical collation of medieval manuscript codices. The VisColl development team is centered at the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies (SIMS) at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries and is made possible through the support of SIMS.

Voyant Tools is a web-based text reading and analysis environment, designed to make it easy for you to work with your own text or collection of texts in a variety of formats, including plain text, HTML, XML, PDF, RTF, and MS Word.

The Text Encoding Initiative Consortium is an international organization whose mission is to develop and maintain guidelines for the digital encoding of literary and linguistic texts in XML.