Digitizing the Middle Ages

Abstract

The digitization of the Middle Ages has been going on for well over a decade. In the past ten years or so, numerous projects have been started with an eye to recording and preserving medieval artifacts – manuscripts and other material objects – in the potentially more readily accessible and more easily manipulable digital form. Students and teachers of the literature, history and culture of the Middle Ages stand to benefit from these projects in exciting ways. But how easy is it to find, say, high-quality images of medieval manuscripts, and what can one do with them? This article provides an initial taxonomy and overview of how to locate what is currently available and ongoing in the ‘field’ of medieval digitization, and focuses primarily on resources for teaching and study in the areas of literature and manuscript studies – although the resources listed here can obviously be consulted for the full range of sub-disciplines of Medieval Studies. It concludes with a suggestion for an inexpensive and very practical digitization technique that takes advantage of readily available manuscript materials – especially for those who find themselves thousands of miles from the nearest repository of medieval manuscripts.