Geo-referenced source-editions of early medieval Europe

This is a collection of hyperlinks to digitized editions of source-documents and literature concerning early medieval Europe that can be found on the internet today. Sources listed here are all available to the public, free of charge. Currently there are 4964 entries in this collection.
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All external links in the result list open a new tab or window depending on your browser settings. When appropriate, sources are geo-referenced. Currently there are 3555 sources connected to geographic places. Click on the following links to see how this is implemented.

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Load the search form, using the magnifier-button , and make choices of your interest, or use the quick search box and type words from the title. Words are separated with space or comma. If you type less than three characters, titles beginning with the search-string will be selected.

The status of the articles and books differ, some of them belong to the public domain, but there are also copyrighted material. It is my ambition to list all freely available primary sources on the internet concerning Merovingian and Carolingian Europe. In order to keep this list updated and complete, I will need your help. Don't hesitate to contact me by e-mail regarding tips of primary sources and literature that are missing, or hyperlinks that are broken. You will find my e-mail-adress below. You can also use the comment functionality and post a book tip online or write a short review.

About the search settings

• Categories: There are three groups of categories; sources, literature and graphics. You can search in individual categories or groups of categories.
• Title: If you enter less than 4 letters, all titles beginning with your search string will be selected. If you type more than 3 letters all titles containing your search string will be selected.
• Author: Authors are registered with their family name first. Same rules as title.
• Website: Sources and literature located at certain websites. Note the difference between "Google Book Search" and "Goggle Book Search USA", which is explained below.
• Source language: The main language of the source or literature.
• Source format: Sources are categorized in three formats. Image means text is presented as an image with a format such as JPG, GIF, PNG, multipage TIFF or images wrapped in a PDF-document. The images of Gallica, BNF belongs to this category. Image and OCR-text (Optical Character Recognition) means both image and a machine-recognized text. The images and text from Google Book Search and Persée belongs to this category. Formatted text involves human interpretation and human typing, such formats are PDF, HTML or Word processing format like MS Word (DOC) or Open Office (ODT). The texts in the new interface of dMGH belongs here, see below.

About Google Book Search

There are several editions of early medieval charters and other sources in the Google Book Search with full view status, that is, they are no longer protected by copyright and are considered to belong to the public domain. They can be read online as images or OCR text, or you can download the books to your computer in PDF-format (images of pages wrapped in a PDF-document). Books published after around 1870 require that your computer is located in the US (the computer having a US ip-number) in order to see the full text. In this listing, I use two labels for the books in Google, "Google Books" and "Google Books USA". The latter requiring a proxy-server for us living outside the USA. If you don't live in the US, you can use a free proxy-server to hide your true IP-number and pretend your computer is located there. Read more about Google Books and how to access all the full-view books from outside USA using a proxy server in the german WikiSource, at the Archivalia blog, or at the Medieval English Genealogy website. The hyperlinks to books in the Google Book Search presented here are believed to be persistent. A growing number of public domain books from Google, blocked for users outside the US, are made available on the Internet Archive website.

About The digital Monumenta Germaniae Historica

The dMGH is the single most important collection of medieval primary sources on the internet. Almost all volumes are there to be viewed as scanned images and formatted text. I think there are some embargo for recently published volumes. I try to geo-reference singel sources and link to them, even if located inside a volume. The dMGH website make this easy with a system of linking to individual pages, or to individual document numbers in the Diplomata-series, using the commonly used abbreviations. Two examples will clarify how this is done.

1. www.mgh.de/dmgh/resolving/SS_rer._Merov._2_S._396 = Gesta Dagoberti I. in: SS rer. Merov. 2. page 396 ("S." means "Seite", German for page).
2. www.mgh.de/dmgh/diplomata/resolving/D_Kar._1_165 = D Kar. 1, no. 165: Donation by Charlemagne to monastery Prüm (Rheinland-Pfalz) issued on the 9^th of June 790 in Mainz (Mayence).

Read more about this at www.mgh.de/dmgh (in German only), including a list of the exact abbreviations to use.

About literature

The listing in categories concerning literature is less complete than the listing of available sources. There are a lot of literature about early medieval Europe available for free on the internet. Beside the digital libraries Google Book Search and Gallica in general, the following scientific journals are available for free on the internet. All articles concerning Merovingian and Carolingian Europe are being added to this database and geo-referenced when appropriate.

• Bibliothèque de l'École des chartes (1839-2000)
• Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters
• Francia - Forschungen zur westeuropäischen Geschichte (1973-2006)
• Le Moyen âge (1888-)
• Neues Archiv der Gesellschaft für ältere deutsche Geschichtskunde (1876-1935)
• Revue Numismatique
• Zeitschrift für bayerische Landesgeschichte.

To mention in the area of early medieval prosopography are the two online publications Medieval Lands. A prosopography of medieval European noble and royal families, by Charles Cawley, and Prosopographie des personnages mentionnès dans les textes pour l'époque de Pépin le Bref et de son frère Carloman (741-768), by Didier Isel (2007). The individual articles/sections of these publications are geo-referenced on this website and can be retrieved by clicking on the city of interest. To mention is also the Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (BBKL).