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Material Culture

 

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In this section, you will find databases and projects focusing on early medieval material culture. If you are looking for resources on late medieval material culture, try our Late Medieval History page.

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• The British Museum's collection catalogue is a good place to start looking for information on early medieval artefacts. Worth a mention is also the Ashmolean museum, which catalogue gives you the possibility to view and browse their records by time period and type in one simple interative graph. In general, museums' collection catalogues are a great place to start.

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• Kornbluth Photography is an images archive of objects, coins, art and more from the Carolingian period.

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• Checklist of Coin Hoards from the British Isles, c. 450-1180 is a comprehensive list of coin hoards from the Early English, Norman and early Angevin periods. It is hosted by the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and features a thorough bibliography. 

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• Corpus of Early Medieval Coin Finds (EMC) & Sylloge of Coins of the British Isles (SCIB) is a database of roughly 60,000 searchable coins with images and detailed descriptions. It is a combination of two separate complementary projects of the Fitzwilliam Museum and the British Academy.

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• Celtic Inscribed Stones Project's Database is a collaborative and interdisciplinary study of Medieval Celtic inscriptions from Celtic-speaking regions of the early middle ages, (Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Brittany, the Isle of Man, and parts of western England, in the period approximately AD 400-1100). Included are all stone monuments inscribed with text, whether in the Celtic vernacular or Latin, in the Roman alphabet or ogham (but excluding runic inscriptions). The website is from 2001.

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Art History

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If you are interested in early medieval manuscripts, please check our section dedicated to them on this page.

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• Medieval Monastic Project offers a specialised list of manuscripts relevant to the study of early monasticism. Click here to see online catalogues from institutions and libraries across Europe.

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• The Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture identifies, records and publishes in a consistent format, English sculpture dating from the 7th to the 11th centuries.

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• The Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture in Britain and Ireland is an electronic archive comprising of photographs and records of all the surviving Romanesque sculpture and sites in the British Isles dating from the 11th to 12th century. A chevron guide and a glossary relating to Romanesque church architecture are also available on their website.

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• Index of Medieval Art (institutional access required) is the largest database of medieval art in existence with full-text records for over 23,000 works of art dating from early apostolic times to A.D. 1400. 

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• Glass Ornaments in Late Antiquity and Early Islam (ca. 500–1000), an online exhibition by  the MET and  Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History developed in 2016.

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• The Vetrate Italiane is  database of Italian stained glass from the 6th to the 16th century.

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• Pattern, Color, Light: Architectural Ornament in the Near East (500–1000) is the website for another MET Exhibition, which took place July 20, 2015 - January 10, 2016

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• Casselman Archive of Islamic and Mudejar Architecture in Spain offers colour and B&W photographs of medieval Spain taken by the late Eugene Casselman (1912-1996). Photos

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Do you have any questions about Early Medieval Art or Material History?

Would you like help from people with expertise in the field?

Then join our Early Medieval Studies Research Forum by clicking on the button below!

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