Finding medieval images

Bestiary/Liber de natura bestiarum, England after 1236
BL, Harley 3244, fol. 55v

Happy New Year everyone!

The secret, I believe, to engaging people easily with your research is to show them something visual. This instantly helps to link the audience to the past through something tangible. It can often be difficult however to find images to match your research, as the success of your search queries is entirely dependent on how an image has been keyworded. Has the image been keyworded to include the marginalia, or has it purely been keyworded regarding content, or a main image? If you have an image of Adam and Eve, has the pear tree behind them also been included in the search terms?

...and so on, and so forth.

As a result, my new year's gift to you all is a compilation of the websites I use to find images when needed. If you have any that I've missed, please do comment below and I'll update the post.

Firstly, I always start with Google. It has a fairly low success rate if I'm honest and frustratingly, when you do find an image it is often uncited making it academically useless.

After google, Pinterest! Pinterest is wonderful for marginalia as there is an army of fellow medievalist combing the web and they often include the citation in the caption. Thank you pinners <3

Tumblr
Useful but also frustrating as often images aren't keyworded logically, or are uncited. 

Gallica
Yes it's in French, but with google translate and a bit of common sense you can navigate the website. Very useful for drawings and maps.

British Library Illuminated Manuscripts
Prime example of the problems with keywords. Only just touches the surface of the images the BL contains.

Morgan Library and Museum
Searchable by keyword and watermark free.

Aberdeen bestiary
If I need an image of animal this is pretty much my first stop everytime.

Getty Images
Hit and miss. Images always watermarked but you can sometimes find your way to an original image through Getty.

http://digital.library.ucla.edu/immi/
Not comprehensive, but useful for simple search terms i.e. "leprosy"

http://guides.nyu.edu/c.php?g=276597&p=1844931
List of different manuscript databases. Not all links work, but there are many listed.

http://guides.library.cornell.edu/c.php?g=31841&p=201679
Another list of manuscript databases.

Scriptorium
Lots of manuscripts catalogued, can't search for images specifically (yet)

http://arthistoryresources.net/ARTHmedieval.html
A little hit and miss, but still quite a few useful links especially for artefacts.

http://www.bl.uk/reshelp/pdfs/Manu_pubs.pdf
Bibliography of books of images ordered by subject i.e. flowers, magic

Bodleian
Leg work needed as you have to open each link individualy and then scan through the accompanying captions. More available here.

A word on databases

As part of my doctoral work I have needed to create a database.

This did not go well. 

I suspect part of the problem is that I am not a terribly logically minded individual, and after attending a two-day course aimed at students from all backgrounds run by my university and a week of staring at a computer screen I had made little tangible progress.

So, like any good procrastinator, I decided to leave it and pick it up when I felt like I had more time. 

…fast forward 3 years…

What I thought I would do today was share was the gems of three years of avoiding not being able to write a database.  

  

1. Don’t use MS Word.

If I had used MS Excel my life would have been a lot easier. I didn’t completely abandon the project, I did gather the data for the database, but if I’d gathered it in Excel I would have saved myself a lot of time later when I actually had a database to work with.

2. A ) Go find someone who has worked with databases.

    B ) If they’re a historian, doubly go find them

This is the more important of my two lessons. I was slightly in denial about actually having to create a database and hoped that my Word doc. would see me through (feel free to chuckle derisively at this point). I had the good fortune to be put in contact however with a fellow researcher who had spent 4 years working with a database who very kindly took pity on me and knocked me one together.

3. Find a course aimed at historians, not a general one.

Not everyone database-challenged may have the luck I had however, and my helper/saviour/colleague recommended this course run by the IHR:

http://www.history.ac.uk/research-training/courses/databases-1

The course I attended was excellent, but I struggled to convert what I’d been taught into something I could use with my historical data. A simple google quickly brings up the IHR course, along with many others. 

They’re not hard to find, but if you don’t look for them – you don’t know they’re there!

Free handbook on designing historical databases:

http://port.sas.ac.uk/mod/book/view.php?id=75

How to, historical database tutorial:

http://port.sas.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=24&section=2

Notes

A big thank you to Sam Gibbs who put me right on databases:

http://www.icmacentre.ac.uk/person/mr-samuel-gibbs

Monthly Round-up

A November true to form, cold and windy. What did the internet bless us with this month?

A new geeky twitter account for you, Archbishop Walter de Grey. "Archbishop of York and former chancellor to King John. 800 years behind the times. Per manum"
https://twitter.com/AbpGray?lang=en

A guide to medieval sources from the Bodleian:
http://www.medievalhistories.com/guide-to-medieval-sources/

Some PhD writing tips (bit niche, but what can I say - I'm biased at the moment)
http://amberdavis.nl/tag/write-a-phd-almost-painlessly/

Book on medieval swear words (why wouldn't you be interested?)
http://www.medievalists.net/2013/11/08/by-gods-bones-medieval-swear-words/?utm_content=buffer48719&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

Medieval Christmas market, 11-13th December, King's Lynn:
www.kingslynnchristmas.co.uk

Letter written on birchbark:
http://news.discovery.com/history/archaeology/birchbark-message-reveals-story-of-medieval-traveler-151106
  

And finally, look how happy the skeleton on the far right looks?

De Lisle Psalter, England, BL MS Arundel MS 83 II, f. 127 r.

 

Language Tools

This post is more for the medievalist rather than the passing history buff but I thought it would be useful to compile useful sites for translating and using medieval documents.

I'll update this periodically if I find any more useful sites, or if any become out of date.

For those of you that expected more than a page of links, here is a nun picking penises from a tree:

- Read more about penis trees 

- and a more academic look 

Latin glossary:
http://ducange.enc.sorbonne.fr/

Latin glossary:
http://comp.uark.edu/~mreynold/recint1.htm

Medieval latin dictionary and conjugator:
http://archives.nd.edu/words.html

Verb conjugator, not very smart though as sometimes it will invent conjugations:
http://www.verbix.com/

How to translate latin verbs into English:
http://www.uvm.edu/~bsaylor/latin/cheatsheet.html

More for classical latin, but useful if you're trying to find alternate beginnings or endings for a word:
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?redirect=true&lang=Latin

Latin abbreviation dictionary (Online version of The Record Interpreter)

https://archive.org/details/recordinterprete00martiala

Latin abbreviation dictionary (online version of Cappelli)

http://www.hist.msu.ru/Departments/Medieval/Cappelli/

Latin place names

http://placenames.org.uk/browse/mads/epns-deep-96-b-subparish-000073

Whole list of useful online palaeographic resources:
http://www.rechtshistorie.nl/en/home/palaeography

Online palaeography course:
http://www.history.ac.uk/research-training/courses/online-palaeography

Another online palaeography course:
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/palaeography/

Middle English dictionary:

http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/

Numerous dictionaries including old English and French:

http://www.wikiwords.org/

Dictionary of French equivalents for Latin place names:

https://archive.org/details/dictionnairelat00unkngoog

Digitised MS images:
http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/welcome.htm