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Medievalist rejoice!

The Middle English Compendium, the electronic version of the Middle English Dictionary, HyperBibliography of Middle English and the Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse is now available.

The Middle English Dictionary's  15,000 pages which covers the period from 1100-1500 is now searchable in ways that a print dictionary  (Rivera Reference PE679 .M52 is not:  by head word or part of a form section, combinations of words, phrases and other features, co-occurrence of words, and combination of searches using boolean. 

The HyperBibliography of Middle English includes all the Middle English materials which are cited in the Middle English Dictionary. While not an exhaustive list, it offers the most comprehensive single list of middle english materials at present.  You can also browse by: Authors, MED Stencils, Lists of Manuscripts and Prints, and Documents.

The Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse  is a collection of approximately 140 Middle English texts, last updated in February 2006. 
Here is an example of a poem from An Old English miscellany containing a bestiary, Kentish sermons, Proverbs of Alfred, religious poems of the thirteenth century, by Richard Morris, ed. 1833-1894., Theobaldus episcopus Maurice de Sully bp. of Paris, d 1196. London: Pub. for the Early English text society, by N. Trübner & co., 1872.

Dove   Natura columbe et significacio. ÐE culuer haueð costes gode, alle wes ogen to hauen in mode, seuene costes in hire kinde, alle it ogen to ben us minde,      788 ge ne haueð in hire non galle, simple and softe be we alle; ge ne liueð nogt bi lagt; Ile robbinge do we of bac.*      792 ðe wirm ge leteð and liueð bi ðe sed, of cristes lore we haue ned; wið oðre briddes ge doð as moder, so og ur ilk to don wið oðer;      796 woning and groning is lic hire song, bimene we us, we hauen don wrong. In water ge is wis of heuekes come, and we in boke wið deules nome;      800 In hole of ston ge makeð hire nest, In cristes milce ure hope is best.

 

Also included are links to Digitized Manuscripts Containing Middle English and Online Catalogues of Manuscripts.

See the help guide for more online tutorial:  http://ets.umdl.umich.edu/m/mec/help.html.

Reference Department, Rivera Library