Middle Ages

The Riddle Ages

English Literature, Literature | Latin, Middle Ages, Old English, riddles, translation

The project website, launched in autumn 2020, made available texts and translations of two riddle collections: the 95 Old English riddles of the Exeter Book and the 63 Latin riddles known as the Bern Riddles. In addition to providing new translations and texts (with notes about previous editions and manuscript information), the project team produced commentary posts about each riddle’s proposed solutions, literary features and historical context. In 2021, the project team made available a further four Latin riddle collections: the 12 anonymous Lorsch riddles, 20 riddles by Boniface, 40 riddles by Tatwine and 60 riddles by Eusebius. In total, the website currently hosts 290 texts/translations and 168 commentary posts. A further 100 riddles by Aldhelm are to follow. In addition to original texts/translations, we have made available guest translations of riddles into other languages, including: Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin and Serbian, Indonesian and Spanish.

Data type: text

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Late Medieval English Scribes

English Literature, Literature | England, handwriting, Middle Ages, poetry, prose

Late Medieval English Scribes is an online catalogue of all scribal hands (identified or unidentified) which appear in the manuscripts of the English writings of five major Middle English authors: Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, John Trevisa, William Langland and Thomas Hoccleve.

Data type: images, text

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Irish Song Project

History of Music, Music | Early Modern, eighteenth century, fifteenth century, Ireland, Middle Ages, nineteenth century, seventeenth century, sixteenth century, songs

This is e a digital catalogue of 230 songs from the medieval period to the early nineteenth century, categorised according to generic type, musical incipit and other features and thus permitting for the first time comparison of songs distant in time but linked across history by melody, form or audience. Facsimile images of manuscript and early printed editions are provided, as also modern musical annotation and commentaries on each song.

Data type: audio, images, text

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Corpus of Scottish Medieval Parish Churches

Architecture, History of Architecture | architecture, Christianity, church, Middle Ages, Scotland

This database provides narrative accounts of the salient historical information on the history and architecture of the individual buildings and sites, accompanied by a full apparatus of references and by images of those buildings and sites.

Data type: images, spatial, text

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Fife Place-Name Data

Heritage Studies, Languages | gaelic, Middle Ages, place names, Scotland

This was a pilot project to retroactively create an online database from the (purposefully laid-out) volumes of The Place-Names of Fife. It was successful, and allowed the researcher, Simon Taylor, and the systems developer, Brian Aitken, to work together on a prototype of what will become the full Scottish Place-Name database for the future (based on older models, which underlie the survey volumes).

Data type: spatial, text

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The Online Froissart

History | England, fourteenth century, France, Middle Ages

“Jean Froissart’s Chroniques cover the period from around 1326 to around 1400 and are the single most important contemporary prose narrative about the first part of the Hundred Years’ War. More than 150 manuscript volumes containing the Chronicles have survived in more than 30 different libraries across Europe and North America. Of the four Books of the Chronicles the first three exist in substantially different versions. […] The Online Froissart offers access to the core manuscript tradition of the first three Books of Froissart’s Chronicles, and to some manuscripts of Book IV. It delivers complete or partial transcriptions of all 114 surviving manuscripts containing Books I-III, partial transcriptions of three witnesses of Book IV, a new translation into modern English of a selection of chapters, providing readers with an accessible way of exploring chapters selected from the first three Books, several complete high-resolution reproductions of illuminated manuscript copies, including many pages containing miniatures, and a range of secondary materials (codicological descriptions, name/place index, historical and textual commentaries accompanying the transcriptions, scholarly essays, a glossary and some commentaries on the illustrations).”

Data type: images, text

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The Lands of the Normans in England

History, Social History | England, family history, France, Middle Ages

In 1204 King Philip Augustus of France conquered Normandy, thus breaking up the ‘Anglo-Norman realm’ created after the Norman conquest of England in 1066. The severing of connections between the two countries had profound implications for French and English identity and politics, but it has not received the detailed study that it merits. The Lands of the Normans project is based on the study of a sample of Anglo-Norman landowners, based on the single most important English source for the confiscations of 1204, the Rotulus de valore terrarum Normannorum. The project team traced the history of each of the lay families and estates that appear in this source through the surviving records, English and French, royal and private, before and after 1204. These records were entered into an online database, designed and created by the historical members of the project team in combination with the technical officers at the Humanities Research Institute. “The database contains details of over 2,000 individual documents collected from over 100 historical sources. Nearly 3,000 different people and places appear in the database, and there are over 13,500 links describing the relationships between these people and places. The Lands of the Normans database thus provides an introduction to a number of important Anglo-Norman families, including their appearances in royal and private records and access to automated reconstructions of the genealogies of each family and maps of landholding. We hope that this may encourage other historians to explore the potential benefits of Information Technology for their own research.

Data type: spatial, text

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England’s Immigrants

History, Social History | England, fifteenth century, fourteenth century, Middle Ages, sixteenth century

England’s Immigrants 1330-1550, a fully-searchable database containing over 64,000 names of people known to have migrated to England during the period of the Hundred Years’ War and the Black Death, the Wars of the Roses and the Reformation. The information within this database has been drawn from a variety of published and un-published records – taxation assessments, letters of denization and protection, and a variety of other licences and grants – and offers a valuable resource for anyone interested in the origins, destinations, occupations and identities of the people who chose to make England their home during this turbulent period.

Data type: temporal, text

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The Gersum Project

Languages | England, Middle Ages

The Gersum Project, funded by the AHRC, aims to understand Scandinavian influence on English vocabulary by examining the origins of more than 900 words in a corpus of Middle English poems from the North of England. Investigating the early history of these words allows us to address questions about how we can identify Old Norse loans, and how and by whom these words were used in the first few centuries after their adoption into English, especially in the crucial Middle English period.

Data type: text

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