eReviews: Medieval Family Life from Adam Matthew Digital
Sep 1, 2010Medieval Family Life: The Paston, Celys, Stonor, Plumpton and Armburgh Papers
Adam Matthew Digital;
http://www.amdigital.co.uk/collections
Content
Medieval Family Life (MFL) is a collection of manuscripts dating from approximately 1400 to the 20th century. The collection, created from source material from the British Library, Chetham's Library, the National Archives, and the West Yorkshire Archives, consists of the Paston Family Papers, the Celys Family Papers, the Plumpton Correspondence, the Stonor Correspondence, and the Armburgh Family Papers (represented by the "Armburgh Roll," a single parchment roll written on both sides in ink); these include the only surviving family letter collections from the medieval period in England.
The manuscripts reveal the details of medieval life in the areas of business and trade, politics, community, family affairs, and relationships. Transcripts of the correspondence are fully searchable, and contextual secondary source material accompanies the manuscripts, along with original images linked directly to the transcriptions. Also included are a chronology, a glossary, family trees, a slide show of medieval images from the British Library, an interactive map, and links to related freely accessible research sources.
Usability
The opening screen consists of a welcome statement outlinig the content of the collections. At the top there's a toolbar (containing buttons for the Introduction, Documents, Further Resources, and Help and Teaching), illustrations from the collection, and a Get Started section with links to View the primary sources, Read the introductory essay, Explore the interactive map, Discover more about the families, and Go to the help pages.
The Introduction details the nature and scope of the product and includes the essay "The Family Letter Collections of Fifteenth Century England" by Professor Joel T. Rosenthal, SUNY at Stony Brook. Documents lets you view the various manuscript images and printed editions; Further Resources is a screen full of buttons leading to the Visual Sources Gallery, Family Trees, Chronology, Map, Glossary, and External Links to The Anglo-Norman On-Line Hub; the Catalogue of Digitized Medieval Manuscripts; The Court Rolls of Ramsey; Hepmangrove and Bury, 1268-1600; Digital Scriptorium; Early Manuscripts at Oxford University; Free Library of Philadelphia's digital collection of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts; the Gazetteer of Markets and Fairs in England and Wales to 1516; The Labyrinth: Resources for Medieval Studies; The Middle English Compendium; The Online Medieval and Classical Library (OMACL); and Teams Middle English Texts.
Tucked at the very top right of the screen is a Search button. The Search box lets you do a Basic, Advanced, or Popular Search (for people and places of importance among the families in the collection). I tried a basic search for "sarsenet" and got 11 results, eight from the Paston letters, and three from the Stonor papers. I examined the first hit, in a letter from John Paston to his mother, and quickly discovered the many variant spellings of "sarcenet" (my first spelling was wrong, but it located hits). The Viewer employed here is excellent and easy to use-you can read the original manuscript on screen left, maneuvering and zooming with ease, while also viewing the transcript, featuring search words highlighted in yellow, on screen right.
Next I went into the Documents section and clicked to view the (more than 1000) Paston manuscripts. The first manuscript in the list was the will of Sir John Fastolf, dated November 3, 1459. The holograph version is completely legible-creases, slight stains, and all-but the transcript at right makes it easy to read through the document. Pulling up other documents that piqued my interest, I also noted that it was very easy to download them and export them into EndNote and RefWorks.
Then I browsed through the Visual Sources Gallery, full of images depicting a wide variety of medieval activities, including "a woman defending her castle," "an amorous encounter" of a man about to embrace a woman at her spinning wheel, a group of men "bird snaring," and much, much more. The image detail is superb, and the colors brilliant.
Family Trees includes pop-up biographies for individuals listed; the Chronology identifies births, deaths, and significant events among family members; the interactive map lets you view key places relating to the papers and "explore the main towns and important battles and castles in late medieval England." The Glossary translates medieval words and phrases into modern language, and the External Links have been selected by the Editorial Board to provide stable scholarly information from free sites.
The Help and Teaching section is particularly effective, using screenshots and balloons to explain the system, all done in a manner that will be accessible equally to digital natives and technophobes.
Pricing
The price for MFL is $15,000 (a one-time-only purchase price with no annual maintenance and no cost-per-user fees). Given the importance of the material and its value to researchers, this is not out of line.
Bottom Line
MFL contains a treasure trove of significant primary source material that will inform the scholarship of all medieval researchers. Content: ten. The online system lets users approach the material in an appropriate variety of ways, allowing them to see broad brushstrokes of the period as well as very granular detail. Design: ten. For a fairly esoteric area of research, MFL is remarkably easy to use and accessible. Technology: ten. That makes it pretty conclusive: it's a ten, through and through. Highly recommended to any library-academic, public, or special-serving medieval period scholarship. For free trials, go to www.amdigital.co.uk/trials/.
