Below are websites, communities, and digital resources invaluable to researching the development of living history and reenactment impressions. In addition to hobby specific sites, many of these resources are aimed at medieval history or study of the middle ages as a whole or on an academic level.
UPDATED 09/01/2023
The Armour Archive Forums
The go-to location for discussion on armor, its construction, design, and production.
Modern Chivalry Forum
An online community for knights and chivalry for re-creation, entertainment, history, self growth, charity, and education.
My Armory
Quality conversation on a variety of topics relating not just to medieval arms and armor, but ancient history, the renaissance period, and early modern.
Gallica Online Manuscripts
A searchable digital database of items in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. It is in French, but has an English version of the site which is about 90%, so bare with it.
Hathi Trust Digital Library
HathiTrust Digital Library is a digital preservation repository and highly functional access platform. HathiTrust provides long-term preservation and access services to digitized content from a variety of sources, including Google, the Internet Archive, Microsoft, and in-house member institution initiatives.
BookFinder.com
Find used books, rare books, textbooks, new and out-of-print books. Compare book prices, including shipping, from over 100,000 booksellers worldwide.
Medieval Dance Online
Medieval Dance Online is a MA Public History final project exploring dance practice during the Middle Ages.
OPenn Digital Resources
OPenn contains complete sets of high-resolution archival images of cultural heritage material from the collections of its contributing institutions, along with machine-readable descriptive and technical metadata.
British Library Digitized Manuscripts
A searchable database of all the digitized manuscripts in the British Library, to include a wife variety of medieval manuscripts.
Castles of Britain
Dedicated specifically to the study and promotion of castles and manor houses in England.
Castles on the Web
“An extensive database of all things Castle related including a directory of castles from around the world, a photo gallery with thousands of castle photos, castle greeting cards, a castle forum where you can meet other castle enthusiasts, a castle glossary and more!”
The Labyrinth
The Labyrinth provides free, organized access to resources in medieval studies. The Labyrinth’s easy-to-use links provide connections to databases, services, texts, and images around the world.
The Medieval Index
The Medieval Index is a collection of useful websites for research into Medieval Europe.
The Morgan Library & Museum Online Manuscripts
Hundreds of high resolution medieval and renaissance manuscripts easily searched by time and place.
The Wallace Collection
An internationally outstanding collection which contains unsurpassed masterpieces of paintings, sculpture, furniture, arms and armour and porcelain. For our purposes, the digital imagery of their medieval arms and armor is unparalleled.
Larsdatter
A searchable and well laid out compilation of images, descriptions, and artifacts of medieval material culture items from clothes to tools to weapons.
“CantApp”, the Canterbury Tales Narrated
The Canterbury Tales, narrated in Middle English, with visual representation of the original manuscript pages and in line translations. Works on mobile, too.
An Analysis of 1300 Effigies Dated Between 1300 and 1450
Douglas W. Strong “Talbot” analysis of effigies and brasses by location, date, and type of armor component laid out in convenient and easy to understand graphs.
Armor in Art
a searchable database of medieval art featuring armour. Items in the database range in date from 1100 to 1450 and are located throughout Europe. Content is varied – frescos, altars, stained glass, reliefs, etc – anything that is not an effigy/brass or manuscript is included.
Digital Bodleian
“In an effort to make portions of our collections open to a wide variety of users from around the world for learning, teaching and research, the Bodleian Libraries have been digitizing library content for nearly twenty years. The result is over 650,000 freely available digital objects and almost another 1 million images awaiting release.” This includes countless medieval manuscripts.
Effigies and Brasses
A collection of images and links of medieval monumental tombs. Most of the monuments listed here are either effigies or brasses. The remainder are incised slabs, half-reliefs, and other miscellaneous representations. The current collection is focused on European monuments, from the 12th to 15th centuries. The majority lie in the 14th century.
Manuscript Miniatures
An image collection of miniatures depicting armoured figures from the medieval period. Miniatures are sourced from manuscripts created before 1450 in countries across Europe.
Middle English Compendium Online
The Middle English Compendium is a publication of the University of Michigan Library, the latest embodiment of the University’s long-standing involvement in the study of Middle English. The Compendium has been designed to offer easy access to and some interconnectivity between three major Middle English electronic resources: an electronic version of the Middle English Dictionary (MED); a Bibliography of Middle English primary texts, limited to those cited by the MED and based on the MED bibliographies; and a searchable full-text Corpus of Middle English prose and verse.
Online Medieval Source Bibliography
An annotated Bibliography of printed and online primary sources for the Middle Ages. The texts are archived with a tremendous level of detail to include descriptions, page counts, genres, authorship, audience level, and scholarly apparatus.
Portable Antiquities Scheme
Run by the British Museum and Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales to encourage the recording of archaeological objects found by members of the public in England and Wales. Finds recorded with the Scheme help advance knowledge of the history and archaeology of England and Wales.
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