English Faculty Page
| Centre for Humanities Computing
Medieval Literature Pages
- Introduction
- General Information
- Bibliographic Services
- Full Text Databases
- Sources
- Web Sites
Introduction
These pages are intended for students and staff at Oxford University and
focus on the study of Medieval English Literature. Although visitors from
outside of the University are welcome they will find that some of the services
are only available to members of Oxford University. The pages are hosted
by the
English Faculty at Oxford.
The page is sectioned into General Information, Bibliographic Services,
Full Text Bases, and Medieval World Wide Web Links.
General Information
The following links provide general information about the Faculty, the
Library, and other services:
Bibliographic Services
These links take you to the main bibliographic services subscribed to by
Oxford. Those marked with a *
may need a password:
Generic
- OxLIP - Oxford's Libraries Information
Platform. The main starting point for all of the networked services, dividing
titles into subject categories or as a full alphabetical list. Notably includes
a networked version of English Poetry Full Text Database, Chaucer - The Book
of the Duchess, The General Prologue, The Wife of Bath's Prologue, Patrologia
Latina (N.B. The Cetedoc edition of the Corpus Christianorum is available
on OxLip, but also in the Centre for Humanities Computing and the Bodleian),
Illustrated Incunabula Short Title Catalogue, and the International Medieval
Bibliography. Other titles of interest will be the Oxford English Dictionary
On-Line, Grove Dictionary of Art, and the Routledge Encyclopaedia of Philosophy.
In short, look around!
- *Web
of Science. Don't be deceived! This includes the Arts and Humanities ISI
Citation Index.
- OCLC FirstSearch
- Includes the MLA Bibliography, WorldCat, Article1st, and Contents1st.
- Periodicals Contents Index (Full
Text)
- ZETOC - The British Library's Electronic
Table of Contents service. Indexes over 15 million articles and aconference
papers. Now includes an excellent *ALERTING
service which will e-mail you TOCs (Table of Contents) from journals. Periodical
Contents Index is currently not available.
Medieval
- International Medieval Bibliography. Available on CDROMs
via OxLIP. The International
Medieval Bibliography (IMB) covers recent published articles in all aspects
of medieval studies within the range c. 450 to 1500 A.D., over a geographical
area throughout Europe and extending to the Middle East and North Africa.
Citations cover articles, review articles, scholarly notes, etc., from several
thousand periodicals and miscellanies (Festschriften, Conference Proceedings,
Collected Essays), but NOT monographs or short reviews.
Library Catalogues
Full Text Journals and Other Sites
Full Text Databases
The following services provide on-line searching of Medieval English texts:
The following services provide downloadable electronic versions of medieval
texts:
- The Oxford Text Archive
- On-Line Resource Book for Medievalists
- The Labyrinth
(Old English)
- A Full List of OE and ME Corpora
- The General
Prologue - An Electronic Edition (Towson University)
Please note that many of the texts available on the Internet are not of high
quality and you should check their bibliographic history before using them!
Sources
For Old English scholars there is the on-line database of source material under
the Fontes Anglo-Saxonici
project.
However, there are also avariety of primary sources available, notably medieval
manuscripts, some online, some on CD-ROM. Below is the list of items available
at Oxford:
- Early Manuscripts at Oxford - the primary
source you should turn to. This contains full colour images of many of the
priceless manuscripts at Oxford (Bodelian and College). It contains many of
the major manuscripts of interest to Old and Middle English students.
- The Electronic Beowulf - available on CD-ROM at the Centre for Humanities
Computing (OUCS). Full colour facsimile of Cotton Vitellius A.xv, plus the
Thorkelin transcripts, and full transcriptions.
- The Canterbury Tales CD-ROMs - texts, critical variants, and black
and white images from the manuscripts and early printed edition. So far The
Wife of Bath's Prologue and The General Prologue are available
(via Oxlip as a networked CDROM
or from the Centre for Humanities Computing.
- The Utrecht Psalter - available on CD-ROM from
Oxlip.
- The Book of Kells - available on CD-ROM at the Centre for Humanities
Computing.
- Piers Plowman: Corpus Christi College, Oxford MS 201 - available
on CD-ROM from the Centre for Humanities Computing (the first in a planned
series of CDROMs of Langland).
- The Lindisfarne Gospels. Available on CD-ROM from the Centre for
Humanities Computing.
- The Exeter Book - on order. Should be available on CD-ROM at the
Centre for Humanities Computing early 2001.
- Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music
- manuscripts of later medieval music
Teaching Packages
Some packages are designed to help directly in instruction. Some of these area
available in the Faculty Computing Room. Examples include:
- The Dream of the Rood
- Ductus - a palaeography course on Western Medieval Manuscripts by
Bernard Muir, contains images of scripts and illustrations. Available on CD-ROM
from the Centre for Humanities Computing.
- Multimedia Old English. Available on CD-ROM from the Centre for Humanities
Computing.
Other Web Sites
In addition to the above there are numerous web sites devoted to medieval
literature and history. The following list is a synopsis of some of the
major ones, but you could also try using one of the Internet Search Engines:
Medieval Studies Gateways
Internet Search Engines
Teachers of Old English in
Britain and Ireland (hosted at Oxford; extensive set of links for Old
English)