Understanding Medieval Literary Manuscripts
Staff at Manuscripts and Special Collections have produced a number of other web resources exploring aspects of our medieval collections in greater depth.
If you want to know more about how medieval books and documents were produced, and to pick up some tips on understanding their contents, look at our Research Guidance resources entitled Medieval Books and Reading and Understanding Medieval Documents. The second resource includes hints on how to read old handwriting (palaeography), and includes interactive exercises to test your palaeographical skills.
The 'Further Reading' pages in both resources contain links to printed books and websites relevant to the study of medieval items in Nottingham and in other libraries and archives across the world:
Aspects of women's lives in medieval England are explored in Manuscripts and Special Collections' Learning Resource entitled Wives, Widows and Wimples. These web pages include full-size, zoomable images of pages from our medieval collections, especially from the Wollaton Library Collection, together with transcriptions and translations of selected texts into modern English.
These 'Medieval Literary Manuscripts' web pages are concerned only with literary and cultural documents, but the University of Nottingham also hold many thousands of medieval deeds and administrative papers. Advice on the principal series within these collections is contained in two Research Guidance units on our website: Deeds in Depth and Manorial records.