More cool medieval links...

So, here are some more excellent databases and resources for the medievalist.

Hill Museum and Manuscript Library. http://www.hmml.org/

Ah, the Hill Museum. World-famous for its collection of monastic and other religious documents, with special strengths in German and Eastern Christian material--but not as many people know about their collection of digital images. This is very much a work in progress, due to the size of the museum's holdings, and not everything is, or can be, digitalized. But definitely worth a look, and their browsing features make life easier.

Early English Books Online. http://eebo.chadwyck.com/home

Great resource for the early printed word in England. Great search features and a fine collection. In their own exalted prose: "this incomparable collection now contains about 100,000 of over 125,000 titles listed in Pollard & Redgrave's Short-Title Catalogue (1475-1640) and Wing's Short-Title Catalogue (1641-1700) and their revised editions, as well as the Thomason Tracts (1640-1661) collection and the Early English Books Tract Supplement." NOTE: this database is a restricted-access project, available only through participating libraries (of which Rochester is apparently one).

The Soldier in Later Medieval England. http://www.medievalsoldier.org/

This site is meant to be a database of all the English soldiers who served in the Hundred Years' War, for the period between 1369 and 1453 (so, don't try to find the musters for Edward of Woodstock's forces at Najera in 1367). It is the brainchild of Anne Curry and Adrian Bell, and is of immense help to those of us who have long been plagued by lack of precise data on these orders of battle. The purpose of the database is " to challenge assumptions about the emergence of professional soldiery between 1369 and 1453."

English Medieval Legal Documents Wiki. http://emld.usc.edu/tiki-index.php?page=HomePage

A very promising website, with tons of links and good information on the torturous paths of medieval English legal history. Useful links and bibliographic information on scholarship as well. There is the odd link or two which don't work, but all in all this is a blessed good site.

Calendar of the Patent Rolls. http://sdrc.lib.uiowa.edu/patentrolls/

University of Iowa has digitalized--yes--the Patent Rolls, Henry III through Henry VI. The search feature is quite good, and fairly nuanced. In order to prevent folks from downloading entire PDF volumes, the pages show up as individual PDFs--excellent for searching, not so good for quick reading or browsing.


Digital Scriptorium. http://www.scriptorium.columbia.edu/

Formerly out of Berkeley, and now based from Columbia; boasts "5300 manuscripts" and "24,300 images." Some (many?) from the Huntington Library. It has a fairly good search engine, but no browsing option per se, which I consider a drawback, but that's just me.

Germans and Saracens...

I'm looking for good studies on the depiction of Saracens in medieval German literature...I'm tracking down a number of studies regarding Willehalm, in particular. My own study involves German chronicles of the Third Crusade, which have not yet been analyzed in this fashion. At the moment, I am really hoping to avoid the complicated debates over the interior relationships of these chronicles, but that may not be necessary. Having just been to the crusades conference at Fordham, I am running on a surfeit of ideas regarding Western Christendom and its portrayal of the "other." Personally, I dislike that kind of terminology, since I feel that it creates both an overly simplistic, non-contextualized normative paradigm, and a psycho-socially deterministic, pejorative discourse in a field which demands the opposite [As I've pointed out to various of my English department colleagues, I can talk this way when I wish...] However...in this instance, I believe that the later "hardening of ideological lines", so to speak, between Christian and Muslim in the later Middle Ages, had, in the German case, something to do with the German experience in the Third Crusade definitely, and the Fifth Crusade perhaps. We'll see.