writemedieval

With the advent of a new year, it's time to revive the medieval worldbuilding blog.

Today's entry is a useful all-purpose resource. The Medieval Review is an online journal dedicated entirely to reviewing non-fiction books about the Middle Ages. It's conveniently electronic and available for free, making it easy for anyone with an internet connection to access it. It also accepts a very broad interpretation of Medieval Studies, so you can find reviews there for books covering history, literature studies, art history and philosophy, among other fields, in all the corners of Europe and much of the Near East.

This site is often the first place you'll read about exciting new books, before they begin to turn up in other scholars' footnotes and bibliographies.

When you're looking for images of medieval life, Karen Larsdatter's links at Medieval & Renaissance Material Culture are a great place to start. She has amassed a truly impressive collection of images from museums and medieval manuscripts. There are categories for everything from acrobats to zibellini (fur muffs), with particular concentration on tradespeople, clothing and household objects. Also, don't miss her blog, which has regular updates.

Another great online collection of information is Medieval English Towns, maintained by Stephen Alsford.  It's a textbook of English urban history and also a collection of translated documents.  Following the website's many links will lead you to gems tucked away in its back pages.  For instance, here's some great information on urban latrines, and another page on policing, two topics that I know can be hard to research.  Also, don't miss Alsford's detailed explanations of how town governments were run.

Here's another fantastic hub of information about medieval daily life.  Professor Martha Carlin at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee has a special interest in medieval homes and streets.  She tracks down all the medieval texts in her field that have been published on the internet and posts links on  her website.

The section with culinary texts is the highlight of the site.  If a medieval recipe or cookbook is on the internet, Professor Carlin has found it.  She also has excellent collection of household and conduct texts, as well as resources on medieval cookery, economic history, calendars, and dictionaries of medieval languages.

Here's another great resource that every medieval worldbuilder should know about.   De Re Militari is a society for professional historians of medieval military history.  Their website is a treasure trove of information about warfare in the Middle Ages.  It has an archive of scholarly books and articles that deal with a wide spread of centuries, kingdoms and military subjects.  There are also  book reviews and excerpts from primary sources.

If you're a newcomer to the field, the amount of information and the specificity of the articles may seem overwhelming at first.  I recommend introducing yourself to high medieval military history by looking at a book like John France's Western Warfare in the Age of the Crusades or Armies and Warfare in the Middle Ages by Michael Prestwich.

The internet is full of fantastic information about medieval history -- and it's even more full of not-so-fantastic notions.  Where should you turn if you're beginning your research on medieval life?  The following sites consistently provide quality information.

Netserf is a collection of links to all things medieval.  Some of the pages it lists are from academic sources, while others have been constructed by knowledgeable amateurs or commercial interests.   This page is particularly good for researching medieval arts and culture, which is probably a reflection of webmaster Andrea Harbin's interest in medieval drama.

The Internet Medieval Sourcebook contains excerpts from a wide variety of medieval documents translated into English.  Here you can find everything from accounts of medieval fairs and markets to a record of a cross-dressing male prostitute, to Aquinas' reasoning for the existence of God.  Saints' lives and legal documents are found in particular abundance.

The ORB, or Online Reference Book for Medieval Studies, also has a nice encyclopaedia of links to helpful texts on its own site and elsewhere on the internet.  The bibliographies in the What Every Medievalist Should Know section can also be helpful for certain topics, although some of them seem outdated.

The Labyrinth at Georgetown University also has a modest selection of links.  However, it seems not to have been updated for some years now.