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Welcome to Old English Literature: A Hypertext Coursepack. This site is designed to help you study several of the primary texts that have been included in many Old English Courses. A range of resources are available including primary texts with a running glossary and notes, reading lists, translations, contextual information and sources of the poem. There is also a facility to allow you to add comments or additional notes to each of the texts via an online discussion forum. Just select the text you are interested in on the right hand side.

The internet sacred text archive

Primary materials. Primarily, freely-available online texts, in the broadest sense of WRITTEN THINGS: * documents, manuscripts, printed books, music, and images; * transcriptions, facsimiles, editions, and translations; * hyperprojects that also come under MEDIEVAL & RENAISSANCE HYPERPROJECTS: digital humanities, electronic, hypertext projects; featuring encoded or marked-up text, relational or searchable databases, … * digital catalogues (especially of manuscripts).

"Ever since antiquity astronomy has consisted of both theory and observation, but these two components have often received different treatments in the original sources. In the medieval period we find many texts that present theories (even new theories) for the motions of the Sun, the Moon, and the planets; and other texts that describe instruments (some newly invented) for making observations. Moreover, medieval scholars carefully read various works that survived from antiquity, notably Ptolemy's Almagest, and these treatises served as a guide for the scientific study of astronomy. In particular, Ptolemy described methods of determining the planetary models (or parts of them) from sets of dated observations, and he gave numerous examples (including many based on observations he himself made) which take up a major portion of his magnus opus. In this respect, however, the vast majority of his successors did not follow him, for we find surprisingly few planetary observations in the medieval astronomical corpus. (A similar paucity of observations of the Sun, the Moon, and eclipses has also been noted.) Indeed, in most astronomical tables compiled in the Middle Ages observations play no role, and it can be demonstrated that the tabular entries are largely based on earlier astronomical theories."

"This text is part of the Internet Medieval Source Book. The Sourcebook is a collection of public domain and copy-permitted texts related to medieval and Byzantine history."

The Domesday Book is the result of a survey carried out in England and parts of Wales in 1086. The book is one of the first and therefore oldest public records in England and therefore serves as a great resource for geographers, genealogists and historians. The Open Domesday Book is the first free online copy of the Domesday Book. It also includes a great Google Maps interface that allows users to search for locations and quickly find references in the Domesday Book to the location and places nearby. If you search for a location you can view on a Google Map the places mentioned in the Book in that area. If you click through on any of the referenced locations you can view an image of the original text and a breakdown of the data recorded in the Domesday Book.

This book is intended as a manual of 'good housekeepimg', presented as advice given by an elderly householder for his young wife. The recipes form a substantial section of the text. The manuscript includes descriptions of the food presented for a range of different occasions. The advice is quite particular; for example, the need to discard and replace the water used to soak pulses before cooking! An online translation

"Caption your own Bayeux Tapestry" is just the thing to brighten up a dull day/century. It allows you to choose various figures, animals, buildings, and other objects along with text (with your choice of color) to create your own historic tale.

This site provides materials for Harvard University's Chaucer classes in the Core Program, the English Department, and the Division of Continuing Education. (Others of course are welcome to use it.) It provides a wide range of glossed Middle English texts and translations of analogues relevant to Chaucer's works, as well as selections from relevant works by earlier and later writers, critical articles from a variety of perspectives, graphics, and general information on life in the Middle Ages. At the moment the site concentrates on the Canterbury Tales, but the longer-term goal is to create a more general Chaucer page.

Dance of Death, also variously called Danse Macabre (French), Danza Macabra (Italian and Spanish), Dança da Morte (Portuguese), Totentanz (German), Dodendans (Dutch), is a late-medieval allegory on the universality of death: no matter one's station in life, the Dance of Death unites all. There is also a strong element of estates satire. The Danse Macabre consists of the dead or personified Death summoning representatives from all walks of life to dance along to the grave, typically with a pope, emperor, king, youngster, and labourer. They were produced to remind people of the fragility of their lives and how vain were the glories of earthly life.[1] Its origins are postulated from illustrated sermon texts; the earliest recorded visual scheme was a now lost mural in the cemetery of the Holy Innocents in Paris dating from 1424-25.

On this site, you will find several hundred pages of information describing the flow of history, from the evolutionary processes that formed our bodies, to the forces of globalization that exploded in the 1990s. It is detailed, engaging reading-the result of over 25 years of continuous refinement for actual classroom use. Reading about a period will fill your head with facts and names about your chosen topic like any good history textbook. But you won't remember the important lessons-the ones that history classes exist in order to teach us, so that we don't each have to learn them on our own. Good students studying traditional History texts learn much about the past, but even the best rarely take the lessons of the past with them when they leave class. As a history teacher at University High School in Urbana, Illinois since 1979, I have developed a method for teaching history, using a series of about 200 cross-referenced flowcharts and over 100 powerpoint multimedia lecture outlines to help students see history as a dynamic process of causes and effects, not just a meaningless list of names and dates. With this website you can help bring about a revolution in the History classroom, producing students that deeply understand the past and enjoy learning about it.

Animaps extends the My Maps feature of Google Maps by letting you create maps with markers that move, images and text that pop up on cue, and lines and shapes that change over time. When you send your Animap to friends it appears like a video - they can play, pause, slow and speed up the action!

"In the Navigatio sancti Brandani, the ocean voyage is imagined as a liminal phenomenon, suspended between earthly life in the terrestrial world and paradise, envisaged as an oceanic island, beyond it. Many famous medieval maps, such as the late thirteenth-century Hereford Map and its near-contemporary, the no longer extant Ebstorf world map, can be adduced to support the ocean's conceptually peripheral status in this period. Nevertheless, the genesis of the paper on which this article is based lay in a simple observation: that in a corpus of detailed world maps drawn in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries - the same period in which the Voyage of St Brendan and texts like it were circulating across Europe - the notion of the ocean sea as a   peripheral phenomenon is repeatedly and graphically counteracted."

links to text of English Common Law documents

"This legacy of an artist monk living in Northumbria in the early eighth century is a precious testament to the tenacity of Christian belief during one of the most turbulent periods of British history. Costly in time and materials, superb in design, the manuscript is among our greatest artistic and religious treasures. It was made and used at Lindisfarne Priory on Holy Island, a major religious community that housed the shrine of St Cuthbert, who died in 687."

Though Queen Melisende's Psalter is probably not the earliest manuscript preserved from the Crusader Kingdom, it represents Crusading illumination of the early period at its best. From details within the psalter we know its place of origin to be the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, and we can also date it fairly accurately between 1131 and 1143.

Final assault and capture. (July 15, 1099.) (Gesta.) At length, our leaders decided to beleaguer the city with siege machines, so that we might enter and worship the Saviour at the Holy Sepulchre. They constructed wooden towers and many other siege machines.