1. Technical Stuff / Online Palaeography Training

  • Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources: http://clt.brepolis.net/dmlbs/Default.aspx. Published for the British Academy by Oxford University Press between 1975 and 2013, this essential dictionary is now available online at Brepols Online Databases (2015).
  • Digipal: Digitial Resource and Database of Palaeography, Manuscript Studies and Diplomatic: http://www.digipal.eu.
  • Digital Rolls and Fragments: https://digitalrollsandfragments.com. Based at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (Yale University), a cluster of projects concerned with the study of medieval rolls, scrolls and manuscript fragments.
  • Earlier Latin Manuscripts: Tools for Studying the Scripts of the Oldest Latin Manuscripts: https://elmss.nuigalway.ie. A database of manuscripts written in Latin before the year 800 based on the work of E. A. Lowe and his assistants—that is, the catalogue published as Codices Latini Antiquiores, 12 pts (Oxford, 1934–71). The work for this database was conducted in the Department of Classics and the Moore Institute of the National University of Ireland Galway.
  • Éditions en ligne de l’École des chartes: http://elec.enc.sorbonne.fr/. Hosts many useful sites and resources, including an online text of the Le Glossarium infimae et mediae latinitatis de Du Cange, ed. L. Favre (1883–7), the comprehensive dictionary of medieval Latin which remains a crucial reference text even though the first edition was published in 1678.
  • HIMANIS: http://www.himanis.org/. An attempt to develop cost-effective ways of rendering images of handwritten texts amenable to electronic searches. So far, they have attempted to render the medieval registers within the Tresor des Chartes, the archive of the kings of France, readable in this way. Dating from 1302 to 1483, they contain around 68,000 charters and documents—grants and privileges given by the king of France and produced by their chancery. The search interface at the foot of the page is theideal starting point.
  • Lewis and Short Online: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.04.0059. The vast Perseus database, hosted at Tufts University, includes an online version of C. T. Lewis and C. Short (eds), A Latin Dictionary (Oxford, 1879). Note especially the Latin Word Study Tool, which can help you to determine the lemma and the grammatical status of unfamiliar words.
  • Lexicon Abbreviaturarum: http://www.hist.msu.ru/Departments/Medieval/Cappelli. An excellent online reworking of Capelli's essential dictionary of abbreviations. For an online reproduction of the 1928 German edition, see also http://www.ub.uni-koeln.de/cdm/ref/collection/mono20/id/8533.
  • Medieval Research Centre at the University of Leicester: http://paleo.anglo-norman.org/medfram.html. Includes training in both early-modern and medieval palaeography.
  • The National Archives: http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/. The In-depth Learning Guides at National Archives includes a number of useful tools for our purposes, including Latin Palaeography, an online tutorial intended to help students to learn how to read the handwriting found in documents written in Latin between 1086 and 1500, and two guides to kind of Latin used in documents between 1086 and 1733, one for Beginners and the other for the More Advanced. It is oriented, however, towards the needs of readers of diploma scripts rather than towards those of bookhands.
  • Old Books, New Science: https://oldbooksnewscience.com. A lab devoted to ‘digital scholarship, digital text editing, computational approaches to humanities research, and new media; medieval book history (manuscript and print); and medieval literary studies—especially work on form, affect, historical phenomenology, and theories of perception and cognition’.
  • Orbis Latinus Online: http://www.columbia.edu/acis/ets/Graesse/contents.html. The essential dictionary of Latin place-names.

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