digital MGH: complete MGH series available on line

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Nathaniel Taylor

digital MGH: complete MGH series available on line

Legg inn av Nathaniel Taylor » 06 mar 2006 05:16:43

This will be of interest to many people looking at primary sources for
continental Europe, particularly Germany, France, and Italy, for the
period down through the twelfth century:

I was vaguely aware of a project in the works to make full-text
electronic editions of all volumes of the enormous _Monumenta Germaniae
Historica_ series, from 1826 to the present, but have just noticed that
as a "preliminary measure" the MGH has placed full page-image digital
version of ALL volumes (down to the year 2000) on their website, freely
accessible:

http://www.dmgh.de/

The MGH volumes are fundamental critical editions of major sources for
continental European history down through the twelfth century, and in
some cases beyond. This series includes ALL the major and most of the
minor chronicles of Merovingian & Carolingian Europe (from Gregory of
Tours forward), in their traditional critical editions; ALL the official
charters of the German kings and emperors from Charlemagne through
Frederick Barbarossa (& his daughter-in-law Empress Constance), plus
Henry the Lion of Saxony / Brunswick, Matilda of Tuscany, and a few
other odd quasi-kings; the _Libri memoriales_ of Remiremont, Reichenau,
etc. (with the full photographic facsimiles of the complete
mansucripts); all the major Carolingian capitularies; all the major
Germanic law codes (except the Anglo-Saxon ones); the various geneaogies
of the counts of Flanders and many of the regional imitators of such
texts; Einhard's biography of Charlemagne; etc., etc.

What's available now is a page-by-page server of each individual volume.
The series and volume titles (and tables of contents, and indexes) are
generally in Latin, so you have to know what to look for, but if you are
familiar with the overall arrangement of the series, or are working from
a citation in a footnote, you can quickly find what you need.

The site front page says that the MGH is building full-text-searchable
e-versions of all these works over the next several years. This may
not be available as a public access item, though. But to have all the
volumes available as page images as an 'interim measure', now, is pretty
darned amazing, though.

A small minority of these volumes have been available for download on
Gallica, as whole files. The dMGH site doesn't seem to allow you to
download the entire volume as a pdf file, which is the one drawback, if
you want to have a local copy of a volume you're using heavily. But the
site works quite quickly so I'll live without it. And perhaps it's
crawlable to capture a complete volume's page images--I haven't tried.

As an example, I'm pasting the direct URL for one of the facsimile pages
of the 'liber memorialis' of Reichenau:

http://mdz1.bib-bvb.de/~db/bsb00000552/ ... 00552&seit
e=371

And here the beginning of the so-called testament of Charlemagne, the
paraphrase embedded in his biography by Einhard (from the SSRG
single-volume edition, 1911):

http://mdz1.bib-bvb.de/~db/bsb00000728/ ... 00728&seit
e=66

Nat Taylor

a genealogist's sketchbook:
http://home.earthlink.net/~nathanieltaylor/leaves/

my children's 17th-century American immigrant ancestors:
http://home.earthlink.net/~nathanieltay ... rantsa.htm

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