Research Guides: Medieval and Early Modern Science and Medicine: Websites/ Databases

Websites

Zodiac Man, Germany, 15th century
British Library MS Arundel 251, f. 46

Acta Sanctorum.
Digitized volumes at the Internet Archive.
Antiqua Medicina
University of Virginia, Claude Moore Health Sciences Library: medicine from Homer to Vesalius.
Calendar and the Cloister
The Calendar and the Cloister is a scholarly resource devoted to a single medieval manuscript: Oxford, St John's College 17. This splendid volume was created in the first decade of the 12th century at Thorney Abbey, a Benedictine monastery in Cambridgeshire. St John's 17 is a compilation of texts, tables, maps and diagrams. It is organized around the central theme of time-reckoning and calendar construction — what in the Middle Ages was called computus.
De Humani Corporis Fabrica
Website by Northwestern University dedicated to the study of Vesalius as well as providing an online translation of De Humani Corporis Fabrica.
Enluminures: base de donnees
Gems of Italian Medical History
Showcases early medical history volumes by Leonardo da Vinci, Niccolo Leoniceno, Antonio Scarpa, Johannes de Ketham and many others.

From the Becker Medical Library
Harley Science Project
Images and descriptions of 150 medieval and modern scientific manuscripts from the British Library’s Harley collection. The Project also incorporates updated records of seventy-two medical manuscripts that were created in 2005–2007 for the Harley Medical Manuscripts Catalogue.
Historical Anatomies on the Web
A digital project is designed to give Internet users access to high quality images from important anatomical atlases in the National Library of Medicine's collection.
Medieval astronomy in Europe
UNESCO
Newberry Library
In addition to many other topics of medieval, renaissance and early modern study, the Newberry houses an extraordinary collection of maps and sources relating to the history and culture of travel.
Nicole Oresme
Website on the life of Nicole Oresme that includes a biography, chronology and bibliography.
OU History of Science Collections
Over 130 books are digitized entirely (or nearly so) on the Online Galleries website of the History of Science Collections of the University of Oklahoma Libraries.
Powerful Grace Lies in Herbs and Plants
A joint exhibit between Becker Medical Library and the Missouri Botanical Garden Library that showcases works on herbal medicine dating from the 15th to the 19th centuries.
Rome Reborn
Online Exhibit by the Library of Congress
Sources and reference works for historians of medieval science
From University of Cambridge, Department of History and Philosophy of Science.
What a Piece of Work is a Man: Reading the Body in Medieval Manuscripts
This is an online version of the exhibition displayed in the foyer of Pius XII Memorial Library at Saint Louis University, October 1–November 30, 2008

Databases

Athanasius Kircher, Iter Exstaticum (1660): 22

Becker Medical Library- Washington University in St. Louis
Bernard Becker Medical Library has a collection of rare medical texts devoted to scholarship and teaching. The Library now holds nine distinct Rare Book Collections totaling approximately 23,000 books and journals. The collections are open to the medical community, historians, and to the general public. The collections’ strengths include ophthalmology, neurology, anatomy, ENT, dentistry, obstetrics and gynecology.
Bernard Becker Collection in Ophthalmology & Optics
A digitized edition of the print annotated catalog of the Bernard Becker Collection in Ophthalmology at Becker Medical Library – a collection which contains over 600 rare book volumes dating from the 14th century to the 20th century.
Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana
Vatican Library manuscript catalog
British Library Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts
COMMBASE
An Electronic Database of Medieval Commentators
on Aristotle and Peter Lombard's Sentences
ECHO – Cultural Heritage Online
Open Access Infrastructure for a Future Web of Culture and Science. The network of the ECHO knowledge weavers consists of more than 120 scientific and cultural institutions worldwide, that contribute cultural heritage content as well as scholarly metadata.
History of Medicine Finding Aids Consortium
A discovery tool providing keyword search services across a union catalog of descriptions of primary source materials found in special collections and archives throughout the U.S.
History of Medicine: Online Syllabus Archive
Compiled by the National Library of Medicine

In Principio This link opens in a new window
In Principio is a index of approximately 1,000,000 incipits (first few words of text) of Medieval and Renaissance Latin manuscripts.
Index of Medieval Art This link opens in a new window
The Index records works of art produced without geographical limitations from early apostolic times up to A.D. 1550 (extended in the case of the Morgan and Princeton Library projects to include this manuscript holdings up to the middle of the sixteenth century). As is to be expected, there is a particular emphasis and focus on art of the western world. This has been corrected over the last few years with the addition of significant holdings from Coptic Egypt, Lebanon, Ethiopia, Syria, Armenia, and the Near East. Seventeen different media are represented in the archive, and these include manuscripts, metalwork, sculpture, painting, glass, and so forth.

Islamic Medical Manuscripts at the National Library of Medicine
Lawrence J.Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts
University of Pennsylvania

Library of Latin Texts This link opens in a new window
This is a full-text database of modern critical editions of Latin classical, patristic, and medieval Christian writers .

Parker Library on the Web
This interactive, web-based workspace is designed to support use and study of the manuscripts in the historic Parker Library at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

Patrologia Latina This link opens in a new window
A vast compilation of patristic and medieval Latin literature.

St Louis University Rare Books
The Getty Research Institute
Acquisition of the Manly Palmer Hall Collection in 1995 provided the Getty Research Institute with one of the world's leading collections of alchemy, esoterica, and hermetica.
Universal Short Title Catalogue
Collective database of all books published in Europe between the invention of printing and the end of the sixteenth century
Vatican Film Library
Selected information on the holdings and organization of the VFL library.
Wellcome Library
One of the world's major resources for the study of medical history.