Written and peer-reviewed by major scholars, this growing series of primary source commentary articles is designed to bridge the gap between primary and secondary content. Each article takes an item from the platform’s extensive collection of images and considers the object as historical artefacts in their own right, providing a contextual and historical analysis of these fantastic interactive resources.
Micaela Kowalski
This engraving was created by German printer Theodor de Bry in 1592 as an illustration within a printed travel account of Brazil. What does it tell us about views at the time?
Read now
Lauren Rozenberg
Exploring the French metrical poem known as The Black Prince commemorates the life and military feats of Edward III of England’s (1312–1377) eldest son: the titular Black Prince, Edward of Woodstock (1330–1376).
Read now
Catriona Murray
What was the role an meaning of this silver commemorative spoon (in Dutch, Herinneringslepel)?
Read now
Susan Broomhall
The Dirck Hartogh plate is our only contemporary evidence of the voyage of Hartogh and his crew; the Eendracht’s log books have not survived. What else can it tell us?
Read now
Kemille S. Moore
The chromolithographed advertisement for Edwards’ Harlene for the Hair is a delightful example of the passion for color advertising that swept through Europe in the 1880s and 1890s.
Read now
Holly Fletcher
Prints such as this were part of a tradition of reporting “monstrous births” which gained momentum across the sixteenth century. What purpose did they serve and meanings were attached to them?
Read now
Giacomo Comiati
This looks at a twelve-page-long fragment of a printed edition—dating to the beginning of the print era—of Petrarch’s Triumphs, complete with a commentary written by the Italian humanist Bernardo di Pietro Lapini da Montalcino, known as Bernardo Ilicino.
Read now
Lydia Zeldenrust
Investigate a copy of The Canterbury Tales printed by Richard Pynson in London around 1491–92. The exact date is unknown, but it is among the first books printed by Pynson, whose earliest dated book is from 1492.
Read now
Rosamund Oates
The Liber Chronicarum, popularly known as the Nuremberg Chronicle, was printed in Nuremberg in 1493 by Anton Koberger, find out more about it.
Read now
Judith Collard
Matthew Paris gave this manuscript to St Albans Abbey as is recorded in this volume. The Itinerary was part of a larger work consisting of the Historia Anglorum and the final part of the Chronica Majora, find out more about it.
Read now
Susan Broomhall
What does this portrait show us about how early modern officials of the Dutch East India Company (or VOC) wanted to depict their life at the VOC’s Asian headquarters in Batavi?
Read now
Christopher S. Mackay
Discover this early edition of the Malleus Maleficarum, the most famous work on witch-hunting of the early modern period.
Read now
Woven as a single piece of fabric with four identical faces (inside and out, front and back) showing the better preserved (interior) faces, this fine unku (tabard/tunic) was never worn by a human being, so who was it for?
Read now
Victoria Flood
Explore a late fourteenth-century manuscript of the Cheshire monk Ranulf Higden’s universal chronicle, the Polychronicon (completed between 1324 and 1360), produced (it is thought) at Ramsey Abbey in Huntingdonshire
Read now
Chris Dennis
Find out more about this collection of sermons by Saint Bernard, Abbot of the great Cistercian monastery of Clairvaux (1115–1153), considered a masterpiece of monastic theology.
Read now
Justin Kroesen
Throughout the Middle Ages, the altar’s special status was visualized through a number of elements that were attached to it or erected on or over it.
Read now
Thorlac Turville-Petre and Sarah Wood
Part of an early fifteenth-century parchment miscellany, delve into this version of Piers Plowman, originally the final part of a larger book named “the Clopton manuscript” after its first identifiable owner, the Worcestershire landowner Sir William Clopton.
Read now
Printed in 1480 in Westminster, find out more about William Caxton’s edition of the Prose Brut, an anonymous medieval collection of historical materials in Middle English.
Read now
