The English Emblem Book Project of the Penn State University Libraries in Pennsylvania, USA, has digitized older form of texts, the emblem books, for the 16th to the 19th centuries.
"An emblem book is a collection of images with adjoining text. In an emblem there is a dialog or tension between image and word. Emblems are frequently allegorical in theme. Emblem books are a form of text not altogether familiar to us today. An emblem book represents a particular kind of reading. Unlike today, the eye is not intended to move rapidly from page to page. The emblem is meant to arrest the sense, to lead into the text, to the richness of its associations. An emblem is something like a riddle, a "hieroglyph" in the Renaissance vocabulary -- what many readers considered to be a form of natural language."
"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 3696 entries in this collection. "
