Fantastic Databases and Bibliographies of Medieval Iconography

An excellent database of medieval iconography with entries about Biblical imagery, animals, and more.
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Sistine Chapel of the Early Middle Ages' buried for a millennium by an earthquake reopens

 "This church is the Sistine Chapel of the early Middle Ages," Maria Andaloro, an art historian involved in the project, told Reuters."

It collected the very best of figurative culture of the Christian world between Rome and Byzantium."Being buried by the earthquake saved the church from being altered in later centuries, particularly during the Counter-Reformation, said Prof Andaloro.

Among the most significant frescoes is a depiction of the Virgin Mary with child - one of the oldest known Christian icons in the world.After the ninth century earthquake it was moved to another church in Rome but it has now been returned to Santa Maria Antiqua.

 “It is unique, not just among the hundreds of churches in Rome but also in the whole of Italy,” said Francesco Prosperetti, Rome’s superintendent of archaeology.“It represents a forgotten period in the history of the Forum because of the earthquake that buried it.

”The main frescoes, decorating the walls of the central nave and presbytery, were painted under Pope Martin I, who led the Church from 649 to 655 AD.Further frescoes were ordered to be painted by Pope John VII (705 to 707 AD), who had a great affection for the church – his father helped managed the imperial palaces and he had been raised on the Palatine Hill. 

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New Book from Oxford: Biblical Pseudepigrapha in Slavonic Traditions

A new book from Oxford University Press:

• The first collection of Slavonic pseudepigrapha translated into a western European language

• The commentaries provide a wide intercultural perspective based on the study of parallel material in ancient and medieval Jewish and Christian literature.

• The texts are accompanied by an extensive introduction providing a general methodological survey of the field

Free Online Tool for Studying Latin Manuscripts: Cappelli's Dictionary of Abbreviations

Here is a very useful link to a list of Latin manuscript abbreviations based on Cappelli's dictionary of abbreviations:
Click Here for Access

A great app for the study of medieval paleography

If you want to study medieval scripts, handwriting, and manuscripts or simply you want to get acquainted with some of the finest medieval codices here is an app to get you started.
Description:

The origins of this app lie in online exercises in palaeography developed for postgraduate students in the Institute for Medieval Studies at the University of Leeds in West Yorkshire, U.K. The aim is to provide practice in the transcription of a wide range of medieval hands, from the twelfth to the late fifteenth century. Please note that it is not a tutorial on the development of handwriting in medieval western Europe.Users can examine 26 selected manuscripts, zoom in on individual words, attempt transcription and receive immediate feedback. They can optionally compare their transcription with a full transcript. The user's transcripts can be saved and reopened. The saved transcripts are accessible via File Manager apps.

Click here to download and install it on your Android device

New Book on Medieval Heresies Forthcoming in 2015 From Cambridge University Press: Christianity, Judaism, Islam

Cambridge U. Press announces the publication of a new volume in its  Cambridge Medieval Textbooks series:
Medieval Heresies Christianity, Judaism, and Islam by Christine Caldwell Ames

Between Christian and Jew: Conversion and Inquisition

A book review by A. Novikoff for the 2012 volume by Tartakoff, Paola: Between Christian and Jew: Conversion and Inquisition in the Crown of Aragon, 1250-1391.

Conversion in the medieval and early modern periods, as scholars have increasingly been inclined to demonstrate, was neither an absolute rupture from the host community nor an irreversible marker of one's identity. In this slender book, Paola Tartakoff marshals precious documentary evidence in support of this perspective while making a productive contribution to the related fields of medieval Jewish- Christian relations, inquisition studies, and conversion. Drawing from a little-known set of inquisitorial records in the seemingly inexhaustible royal and cathedral archives of Barcelona, she undertakes an examination of Jewish converts to Christianity in the century and a half prior to the massacres and forced conversions of 1391, a date that has received great scrutiny in recent years by historians of violence and persecution. Indeed, it is in view of the attention given to the more heavily documented later examples of mass conversion that Tartakoff has decided to confine herself to the pre- massacre period when the situation for converts was more fluid and less overtly violent; in her words, "paradoxical."

Click here to read the review