HIST 241: The Renaissance -- Jones: Find Primary Sources

Medieval and Renaissance manuscripts are indexed here: https://pre1600ms.beinecke.library.yale.edu/

Digital Scriptorium is a growing consortium of American libraries and museums committed to free online access to their collections of pre-modern manuscripts. It is a digital collection of Medieval and Renaissance texts supported by the University of California Berkeley Library.

This project contains several collections of transcribed primary source documents relating to Ancient, Medieval and Renaissance History. Part of Yale Law School's Lillian Goldman Law Library, the Avalon Project has transcribed documents from Ancient history to the 21st Century.

Full text resources on the Renaissance from Fordham University's Internet Medieval Sourcebook. Includes Early Italian Humanism (Dante, Petrarch), Artists, Politics and Politicians, the Arts of Civilization

Digitized Medieval Manuscripts from Philadelphia-area institutions. Facet by date, subject (i.e.“Italian”) on the left menu.

Includes images as well as descriptions of manuscripts, glossaries, and exhibition notes. The Online Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts is a searchable database of some of the western illuminated manuscripts in the British Library. The Library holds one of the richest collections of medieval and renaissance manuscripts in the world, and aims to provide access to images and information about its manuscripts to students, scholars, and the general public.
The Catalogue includes descriptions and images of western manuscripts with pictorial and decorative embellishments, from fully painted miniatures to decorated initials.

Medieval and Early Modern Manuscripts Online

Click on the tile for "Medieval and Renaissance Manuscript Illumination" for digital collections.

Houghton Library's collection of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts represents a significant resource for the study of the literature, art, history, music, philosophy, and theology of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance in Western Europe. Limit your search by creators, place of origin, creation date, language, genre, or subjects

Use the menu on the left to facet, or limit your search, by date, country, and more.

The Renaissance certainly encompasses a distinctive culture, with indisputably new ideas. But many areas of life experienced more continuity with the Middle Ages than change. Medieval Europe bequeathed a legacy to the Renaissance and beyond that continues to influence our thought, art, institutions, and culture. Writings and book illustrations from the Middle Ages demonstrate the vitality of the period.

The renowned sixteenth-century engraved series the Nova Reperta (New Discoveries) depicts inventions in ways that can deepen our understanding of relationships between the local and the global, the individual and the community, and progress and destruction. Many so-called Western inventions represented in the prints, such as the compass, were developed in areas outside Europe long before the Renaissance. New breakthroughs in technology, such as printmaking, were not necessarily born in the minds of individual genius inventors but rather resulted from collaboration. The Nova Reperta challenges the viewer to consider the negative impact of some new discoveries, like gunpowder, and how invention was intimately tied to warfare, disease, and colonization.

Limit your search by "place created" to include books published in Italy during the Renaissance. The collection represented here includes fine examples of color and woodcut illustrations, astronomical diagrams, typographical innovation, fine bindings, and more. The books are artifacts of multiple points throughout history, from the earliest printing in the late 1400’s to the 20th century. While topics include history, astronomy, science, religion, and travel, the cultural perspective represented is unquestionably Western European.

Penned by an extensive network of Medici diplomats and informants, circa three million letters chronicle the political and cultural developments in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. The Medici Archive Project (MAP) was founded by Edward Goldberg and Hester Diamond in the early 1990s to foster the study of the Mediceo del Principato, the epistolary collection of the Medici Grand Dukes, dating from 1537 to 1743. The Medici were the most famous and influential family in Renaissance and early modern Italy. For two centuries they ruled Tuscany as sovereign grand dukes, and their activity is the focus of intense interest of historians, especially of scholars in the history of art, music, theater, literature, diplomacy, natural science, material culture, medicine, wine and gastronomy as well as gender studies and Jewish studies.

Provides access to digital collections from archives, museums, and special collections across Europe. Also includes a rotating gallery and digital exhibitions.