Manuscripts and Facsimiles
Diachronic: Images
British Library Digitised Manuscripts [The full digitisation of a number of medieval English manuscripts is available. See also 'Collection guides – Medieval and early modern British literary manuscripts' (including 'early printed books') and 'Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts'.]
British Library Treasures [includes Shakespeare in quarto and Caxton's Chaucer editions, among others.]
British Library, Discovering Literature: Medieval ['bringing together over 50 unique medieval manuscripts and early print editions from the 5th to 15th centuries']
Medieval manuscripts in Oxford libraries [full images of e.g. Peterborough Chronicle, Havelock and Ormulum]
Cambridge Digital Library [Cædmon’s Hymn ('Moore Bede') is available]
Online Facsimiles for ASNC Part I, Paper 10
Online Images of MSS Containing Old English
Scriptorium – Medieval and Early Modern Manuscripts Online ['a digital archive of manuscript miscellanies and commonplace books from the period c. 1450-1720']
Manchester Digital Collections [Mary Hamilton Papers and Middle English Manuscripts; for the latter, see this blog too]
Parker Library on the Web - Manuscripts in the Parker Library at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge ['digitizes almost ALL of Matthew Parker's medieval manuscripts']
Penn in Hand: Selected Manuscripts ['medieval and Renaissance manuscripts comprise approximately 900 items, the earliest dating from 1000 A.D.']
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library – Beinecke Digital Collections
The Middle Ages – The National Library of Wales [the house of the Hengwrt Chaucer; the Ellesmere manuscript is digitised at Huntington Library]
Location Register of English Literary Manuscripts and Letters [revision of the print volumes covering the eighteenth to twentieth century]
eBook Treasures [a paid service in partnership with the British Library and John Rylands Library]
Diachronic: Catalogue
Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts 1450–1700 ['a complete catalogue of literary manuscripts by 237 British authors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries']
Manuscripts Online ['JISC-funded project to create a federated search service for manuscripts & early print 1000-1500']
Digital Scriptorium ['a growing consortium of American libraries and museums committed to free online access to their collections of pre-modern manuscripts']
Robert T. Peckham (University of Tennessee at Martin), Consulting Medieval Manuscripts Online ['a block of links leading to collections containing fully digitized medieval manuscripts (over 13,000)']
Giulio Menna and Marjolein de Vos ('Sexy Codicology'), DMMapp (Digitized Medieval Manuscripts app) [links to more than 500 libraries in the world: 'Each one of these contains digitized medieval manuscripts that can be browsed for free.']
EM1060: The Production and Use of English Manuscripts 1060-1220 ['provides the first full and accurate record of manuscripts, especially those containing literary materials, written principally in English from c. 1060 to 1220']
Database of English Manuscript Drama (DEManD) ['a free, dynamic, content-rich online descriptive catalogue and inter-institutional finding-aid for English play manuscripts and manuscript fragments from the Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline periods']
GEMMS (Gateway to Early Modern Manuscript Sermons) ['an open-access, group-sourced, comprehensive, fully searchable, online bibliographic database of early modern (1530-1715) sermon manuscripts from the British Isles and North America']
Bodleian Ballads Online ['a digital collection of English printed ballad-sheets from between the 16th and 20th centuries, linked to other resources for the study of the English ballad tradition']
Sarah Werner, 'Early printed books: Resources for learning and teaching' ['images showing details like title pages, woodcuts, signature marks, volvelles and flaps, and more'; see also Werner's 'a compendium of resources']
Old English
Martin Foys (University of Wisconsin-Madison), OEPF 2.0: Restorative Editions of Old English Poetry ['a collaborative, open-access resource linking together moments of digital manuscript images, transcriptions, editorial annotations and translations of Old English poetry, to better allow people to study and explore these works']
DigiPal – Digital Resource and Database of Paleography, Manuscript Studies and Diplomatic ['a new resource for the study of medieval handwriting, particularly that produced in England during the years 1000–1100']
The Exeter Book [a complete digital copy; see the press release here]
Digital Vercelli Book [the full digitisation of the manuscript]
Paris Psalter MS [ditto]
Electronic Corpus of Anonymous Homilies in Old English [manuscript transcription and XML coding; see the project announcement here]
Aaron J. Kleist, The Digital Ælfric – Eight Catholic Homilies ['examines a core set of eight homilies from the First Series of Catholic Homilies for the period from Easter to Pentecost ... tracing their development through Ælfric's lifetime and nearly 200 years of transmission thereafter']
Middle English
Late Medieval English Scribes ['an online catalogue of all scribal hands (identified or unidentified) which appear in the manuscripts of the English writings of five major Middle English authors: Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, John Trevisa, William Langland and Thomas Hoccleve']
The World of Chaucer – Medieval Books and Manuscripts [some images of Chaucer and his contemporaries]
Chaucer MSS [full downloadable transcriptions of the major manuscripts of The Canterbury Tales]
Graham D. Caie (University of Glasgow), Digitisation of the Romaunt of the Rose ['allow images of the manuscript to be compared directly with the printed edition by William Thynne dating from 1532']
Murray McGillivray (University of Calgary) et al., Cotton Nero Project ['a full transcription of the manuscript together with a description of the transcription scheme, an on-line bibliography of works about the manuscript or any of the poems contained in it, and a diplomatic edition of Cleanness']
David Burnley and Alison Wiggins, The Auchinleck Manuscript [a digital facsimile and full transcription]
Takako Kato and Nick Hayward, The Malory Project ['an electronic edition and commentary of Malory's Morte Darthur (1469-70), with digital facsimiles of the Winchester Manuscript (British Library, Add. MS 59678) and John Rylands Copy of Caxton's first edition']
Vernon Manuscript Project [download or purchase the facsimile edition]
University of Victoria, Lydgate MS: Fall of Princes
Joel W. Fredell (Southeastern Louisiana University), The Book of Margery Kempe [includes a complete facsimile of the manuscript and its transcription]
Early Modern English
Early English Books Online (EEBO) ['the definitive online collection of early printed works in English, and works printed in England, making digital copies of over 146,000 titles from before 1700 discoverable through an interface tailored for early modern scholars'; see also EEBO-TCP: 'highly accurate, fully-searchable, SGML/XML-encoded texts corresponding to books from the Early English Books Online (EEBO) Database']
bpi1700 (British Printed Images to 1700) ['a database of thousands of prints and book illustrations from early modern Britain in fully-searchable form']
Perdita manuscripts, 1500-1700 ['linking the new detailed catalogue descriptions with complete digital facsimiles of the original manuscripts']
Early Modern English Manuscripts from UCLA's Clark Library ['complete digital scans of over 300 early modern English bound manuscripts from the Clark Library. Dating primarily from the seventeenth- and eighteenth-centuries']
Folger Library, 'List of online resources for early Modern English paleography'
EMMO (Early Modern Manuscripts Online) ['provide scholars and the general public with convenient web access to transcriptions, images, and metadata for manuscripts from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries'; Cf. Digital facsimiles of playbooks held at the Folger Shakespeare Library: 'copies of 334 of the plays encompassed by A Digital Anthology of Early Modern English Drama (EMED)']
Wellcome Library – recipe books ['images of approximately 92 English manuscript recipe books from 1550 to 1740']
English Broadside Ballad Archive [ballad sheet facsimiles, facsimile transcriptions, text transcriptions, and recordings]
1611 King James Bible, Blackletter Edition [a digital reproduction of the original edition; see also Parallel KJV Bibles and Text-only version]
English Renaissance in Context (ERIC) ['a database of scanned texts from Penn's Furness Shakespeare Library']
Shakespeare's World ['The project invited people to transcribe manuscripts created by thousands of men and women in and around Shakespeare’s lifetime, 1564–1616.']
Bess of Hardwick's Letters ['234 letters to and from Bess available as transcripts (diplomatic, normalised, print-friendly or xml)']
Digital Donne: The Online Variorum ['DigitalDonne constitutes volume 1 of The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne (8 vols. in 11 parts, Indiana UP, 1995-), a collaborative edition drawing on the labors of over 30 scholars from the United States and abroad.']
Late Modern English
Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO) ['contains every significant English-language and foreign-language title printed in the United Kingdom between the years 1701 and 1800'; see also ECCO-TCP: 'highly accurate, fully-searchable, SGML/XML-encoded texts from among the 150,000 titles available in Gale’s Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) database']
British Literary Manuscripts Online, c1660-1900 ['presents facsimile images of literary manuscripts ... from the Restoration through the Victorian era']
London Lives 1690 to 1800 ['a fully searchable edition of 240,000 manuscripts from eight archives and fifteen datasets for eighteenth-century London']
Georgian Papers Programme ['a ten-year interdisciplinary project to digitise, conserve, catalogue, transcribe, interpret and disseminate 425,000 pages or 65,000 items in the Royal Archives and Royal Library relating to the Georgian period, 1714-1837']
Papers of Sir Joseph Banks [images of letters from the eighteenth century]