Collections On-line
Early English Books Online - this is a superb collection of scans of over 125,000 books printed in England, from 1475 to 1800. You require membership with an academic or other institution that has an account in order to log in. If you live in Australia, you can get membership to the National Library of Australia for free, and access it through that.
The search option is reasonable, and allows you to make adjustments for the peculiarities of historical spelling. You can download each page as a separate image file or the whole document as a pdf. For individual page images, you can adjust the resolution, and when looking to puzzle out smudged printing and archaic wording, I've appreciated being able to access the high res scans. This is geared to academic researchers rather than the general public, so citations, history and publishing data are excellent. One of my favourite sites.
Link last checked - 19th December 2018
The search option is reasonable, and allows you to make adjustments for the peculiarities of historical spelling. You can download each page as a separate image file or the whole document as a pdf. For individual page images, you can adjust the resolution, and when looking to puzzle out smudged printing and archaic wording, I've appreciated being able to access the high res scans. This is geared to academic researchers rather than the general public, so citations, history and publishing data are excellent. One of my favourite sites.
Link last checked - 19th December 2018
Project Gutenberg - one of the best known repositories for out-of-copyright books online. Anyone looking for pre-17th C. literature is going to find something for them here, but unfortunately, searches are limited to author and title, not date, which means you need to know what to look for. There are a large number of 19thC modern English translations of romances, legends, poetry, etc. If you don't have specific authors or texts in mind, and you have the patience, go through the list of authors (able to be accessed in alphabetical order) as they have their life dates listed with them.
Link last checked - 19th December 2018
Link last checked - 19th December 2018
Internet Sacred Texts Archive - you have to wade through an awful lot of fluff and neo-pagan texts, but if you are prepared to keep scrolling down, looking for the actual medieval and renaissance documents, they have a fair number of them with surprisingly good translations. It's worth a look, but I'd advise sticking to the actual period collections, and ignore the commentaries and "cultural collections".
Link last checked - 19th December 2018
Link last checked - 19th December 2018
The Celtic Literature Collective - the website is a bit slapdash, but I highly recommend it if you are looking for medieval British texts. It is attempting to house a "Celtic Encyclopaedia", and while it only hosts a limited selection, it is attempting to list all extant pre-1500 documents in celtic languages (Irish, Welsh, Scottish, Cornish, Breton and Manx), so at the very least, is a good starting place if those are your fields of interest, giving you some idea of what to search for. The documents that have been loaded to the website are in situ text, and can't be downloaded, unless you copy-and-paste into a document. I particularly appreciate that where it does have the text, it usually has both the original language as well as the modern English translations.
Link last checked - 19th December 2018
Link last checked - 19th December 2018
TEAMS Middle English Texts programs - from the University of Rochester, the Robbins Library Digital Projects of Can be frustrating to navigate, but gives access to lots of texts on the subjects. Generally texts can't be downloaded.
Link last checked- 19th December 2018
Link last checked- 19th December 2018
Internet Medieval Sourcebook - hosted by Fordham University, this suffers a bit from age (it was started in 1996); they themselves acknowledge the "link rot" issue the site has. Having said that, it is one of the better resources, providing modern English translations to a large number of period texts. Again, they can't be downloaded and the search option is of little use if you don't know exactly what you are looking for, but the tables of contents are easy to search through, and the level is pitched at undergraduate students, so it isn't overloaded with academic commentary to confuse. Well worth spending some time exploring.
Link last checked - 19th December 2018
Link last checked - 19th December 2018
The Online Medieval and Classical Literature Library - another electronic collection started in the 1990s, this is a clean, simple website to browse. Navigation is simple, texts are good, but like most of these old sites, can't be downloaded. Excellent if you are looking for the Icelandic sagas, or the medieval romances, and I personally quite like the translation styles.
Link last checked - 19th December 2018
Link last checked - 19th December 2018
The Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music (DIAMM) - an excellent source of primary documentation for medieval music. You will need to join to view the documents, but subscription is free. Images cannot be downloaded without specific permission, but they encourage individual transcription, recording and performance.
Link last checked - 19th December 2018
Link last checked - 19th December 2018