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 

The beauty of maps: a BBC documentary

Click here to visit the documentary website Cartography (from Greek χάρτης khartēs, "map"; and γράφειν graphein, "write"), or mapmaking, has been an integral part of the human story for a long time, possibly up to 8,000 years.[1] From cave paintings to ancient maps of Babylon, Greece, and Asia, through the Age of Exploration, and on into the 21st century, people have created and used maps as the essential tools to help them define, explain, and navigate their way through the world. Mapping represented a significant step forward in the intellectual development of human beings and it serves as a record of the advancement of knowledge of the human race, which could be passed from members of one generation to those that follow in the development of culture. Maps began as two-dimensional drawings. Although that remains the nature of most maps, modern graphics have enabled projections beyond that.

Medieval culture: Women and Laughter in Medieval Literature

Women & Laughter in Medieval Comic Literature

By Lisa Perfetti

A likely question in the mind of some readers of this book is how anything can be known about the laughter of women who lived more than five centuries ago. Scholars interested in medieval women have long been frustrated by the difficulty of researching women’s lives given that the majority of texts we have about them are written by men. The difficulty of studying women’s laughter is compounded by the fact that what texts we do have are part of an elite written culture and can only hint at the kinds of oral interactions that would have taken place between the man and woman of the street.

Click here to read the preface of the book

Medieval Total War game

Medieval: Total War is a turn-based strategy and real-time tactics computer game developed by The Creative Assembly and published by Activision. Set in the Middle Ages, it is the second game in the Total War series, following on from the 2000 title Shogun: Total War. Originally announced in August 2001, the game was released in North America on 20 August 2002 and in Europe on 30 August.