Medieval Family Life

Medieval Family Life (MFL) is a collection of manuscripts from the fifteenth 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 outlining 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.

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.

This database brings together letters and documents from the four major 15th-century English family collections, along with a range of complementary resources. The families included represent different social groups, regions, and time periods: the Pastons, an ambitious gentry family originating in Norfolk, 1417-84; the Celys, London wool merchants, 1472-88; the Plumptons, a longstanding Yorkshire gentry family with service to the crown, 1460-1519; and the Stonors, an Oxfordshire gentry family whose members served as local office holders, 1326-1480. The database also includes papers from the Armburghs, a Warwickshire gentry family involved in an inheritance dispute, 1420s-50s. The letters, mostly written in English, are presented both in manuscript images (easily enlarged and manipulated for close study) and in printed editions (with the exception of the Armburgh papers, which are restricted to images from the manuscript roll). Some editions include introductory remarks and explanatory notes, whereas others pass over complexities in silence. The correspondence provides much information on social, economic, and political history, but librarians will need to provide users with secondary studies like Alison Hanham's The Celys and Their World (1985) so that they can better interpret and understand the issues involved. The depth of the collections allows users to follow themes like a family problem across a generation (as when Margery Paston secretly married her family's bailiff). Comparisons among the four collections can provide a more nuanced understanding; e.g., in the Cely papers men write about what women need, whereas the Paston wives send letters directly to their husbands and sons. Keyword searching requires a liberal use of truncation and alternative versions as spelling is rarely consistent ("howr mother schulld go on preschesyon on Corpys Kryste day in a cremsyn gown ...," Letter 91, Richard Cely). Note, however, the Popular Searches option, which has links to set searches for people and places important in the four family collections. Display of manuscripts and transcripts works very well, allowing side-by-side comparison with options for both landscape and portrait views. All manuscripts, printed editions, and transcripts are in PDFs for downloading and printing. The database provides auxiliary aids including an introductory essay by Joel Rosenthal, a well-known scholar of late medieval England; a glossary; family trees; chronology; interactive map; image gallery; and selected links to resources. A section devoted to teaching includes a tutorial briefly treating 18 diverse social history topics. This database is an important resource with manuscript images and searchable transcripts for all letters and documents associated with the major family collections from 15th-century England.

Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-level undergraduates through faculty/researchers.