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Research Guides

Medieval Iconography: Death, Sickness, Crime

Course guide for reading imagery related to death, sickness and crime.

University of Toronto Databases for Medieval Images

ArtStor  Includes architecture, painting, sculpture, photography, decorative arts, and design as well as other forms of visual culture.

EMBLEM PROJECT, Netherlands. 17th and 18th century. Uses Iconclass for cataloguing iconographic content.

JSTOR University of Toronto INSTITUTIONAL TEACHING COLLECTION.  Use your UTOR ID to access.The PIMS manuscript collection (earlier slide collection) was digitized and added.

Index of Medieval Art. Princeton University. Colum Hourihane wrote an article on the Princeton iconographical database (previously known as Index of Christian Art) and how image content was classified, see Colum P. Hourihane, "Classifying Subject Matter in Medieval Art: The Index of Christian Art at Princeton University," Visual Resources 33:3 (2014), pp. 255-262.

ProQuest - Embedded Images in Journals  Go to Advanced Search, select Document Type, Image or Photograph, then add key words to your search.

Other Online IMAGE & MSS Collections

* *Remember when you search manuscript collections for an image, you need to know the call number or the specific details about the mss you are seeking. This information is available in secondary literature. The 'image content' or 'subject' is not usually cataloged in the digital manuscript collections, unfortunately.

Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. Rome. More than 17,000 MSS digitized.

British Museum Library, London, UK.

Courtauld Institute. Image Database: Art and Architecture.

Enluminures. A French-language gateway to manuscript collections in Parisian libraries other than the Bibliothèque nationale de France. 

J. Paul Getty Museum. Explore the Getty collection by clicking on “Manuscripts,” then entering a keyword or doing an advanced search.

Monastic Manuscript Project: Lists digital mss collection across NA and Europe, with direct links.

Medieval Manuscripts - European Collections  This site has a long list of digital collections across Europe.

Morgan Library and Museum, New York. Click for Medical Texts

National Library of the Netherlands. View highlights or, for a deeper dive, search by keyword, author, miniaturist, place of origin, and more.

Vatican Library. An extensive digitization project is putting manuscript treasures of the Vatican online. As of this writing, the number of digitized manuscripts exceeds 13,000.

Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK. Medieval Collection is searchable.

Walters Art Museum. The Walters provides high-resolution images of many of its more than 900 illuminated manuscripts.

Wellcome Institute, London. (Medical History)

Yale Digital Commons. Does include their rare manuscript collections and you can filter by type of collection.