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English Medieval Literature

This guide was created for the course EN385: English Medieval Literature offered by the Department of English, Southern Connecticut State University.

Texts and Manuscripts

Books by Chaucer in Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg offers over 42,000 books that have been digitized and they can be downloaded or read online for free. Contains The Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde and other poems of Chaucer.

Brut Chronicle
Brut is a medieval legenday and historical chronicle of England named for its first hero, Brutus, a descendant of Aeneas and the epic founder of Britain.

Chaucer's Works in the Hathi Trust Digital Library
HathiTrust is a partnership of academic & research institutions, offering a collection of many titles digitized from libraries around the world.

Digital Scriptorium
The Digital Scriptorium is a growing image database of medieval and renaissance manuscripts that unites scattered resources from many institutions into an international tool for teaching and scholarly research.

Early Manuscripts at Oxford University
This site which is managed by the Oxford Digital Library contains more than 80 digital facsimilies of origingal manuscripts from various colleges in Oxford.

Internet Medieval Sourcebook
The Internet History Sourcebooks Project from Fordham University is a collection of public domain and copy-permitted historical texts presented for educational use.

Middle English Compendium
This project from the University of Michigan was funded partly by the National Endowment of the Humanities and offers three major electronic resources: Middle English Dictionary, a bibliography of Middle English works that are cited in the Middle English Dictionary, and a Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse, an extensive collection of Middle English prose and texts.

The Online Medieval and Classical Library
Contains some of the most important classical and literary works of classical and medieval civilization

TEAMS Middle English Text Series
The goal of the TEAMS Middle English text series is to make available to teachers and students texts which occupy an important place in the literary and cultural canon but which have not been readily available in student editions.

Websites for Medieval English Literature

Anglo-Norman Dictionary
A digitized, revised version of the Anglo-Norman Dictionary with full search facilities, and linked to an extensive database of related texts.

Camelot Project
The Camelot Project is a database of Arthurian texts, images, bibliographies, and basic information. The project, begun in 1995, is sponsored by the University of Rochester.

Chaucer Bibliography Online
"This bibliography reproduces in searchable form the annotated Chaucer Bibliography published annually in Studies in the Age of Chaucer (1979-present), with corrections and additions."

Database of Middle English Romance
The Database of Middle English Romance makes available in digitized form more than eighty verse romances (metrical and alliterative), composed between c.1225 and c.1500, often in multiple manuscript versions and, later, in early modern prints.

Digital Index of Medieval English Verse
"A standard port-of-call when studying late-medieval English poetry". Prof. Andrew Richmond.

Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Index
Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Index covers journal articles, book reviews, and essays in books about women, sexuality, and gender during the Middle Ages.

Harvard's Geoffrey Chaucer Website
This site from Harvard University provides a wide range of glossed Middle English texts and translations of analogues relevant to Chaucer's works, as well as selections from relevant works by earlier and later writers, critical articles from a variety of perspectives, graphics, and general information on life in the Middle Ages. The focus is on Canterbury Tales but the goal is to eventually make this a general Chaucer page.

A Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English
This is a revised, digital edition of the Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English freely accessible to all.

Medieval Digital Resources
This is an excellent database of peer-reviewed digital materials for the study of the middle ages. includes images, bibliographies, reference works, pedagogical tools, translations, editions, music, websites and more.  

Medievalists.net
This site contains information on the Middle Ages including books, articles, book reviews, fiction, videos, films, interviews, podcasts, conferences, and medieval studies programs in Great Britain, Canada, and the United States.

The New Chaucer Society
The purpose of the New Chaucer Society is to provide a forum for teachers and scholars of Geoffrey Chaucer and his age. It includes a variety of new and digital resources related to the study of Chaucer.

ORB - Online Reference Book for Medieval Studies
This is an online reference encyclopedia for medieval studies.

Open Access Companion to the Canterbury Tales
The Open Access Companion to the Canterbury Tales (OACCT) is a volume of introductory chapters for first-time, university-level readers of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. The chapters have been created and edited by professional scholars of Chaucer, and all material is released open access and free of charge for classroom, scholarly, and personal use.

Voice of the Shuttle: Anglo-Saxon and Medieval Literature
The VoS is a very comprehensive site for Literature. The Medieval Literature page links to Labyrinth, a resource page for medieval studies from Georgetown University; Luminarium, a comprehensive anthology and guide to English Literature; NetSERF, which has many excellent medieval sources, Middle English lyrics; Middle English Drama; Stanford University Library Medieval Page, and links to Old English Pages among others.