Science and Medicine Databases

The following searchable databases are now available via the website of the Medieval Academy of America: http://www.medievalacademy.org/

eTK - a digital resource based on Lynn Thorndike and Pearl Kibre, A Catalogue of Incipits of Mediaeval Scientific Writings in Latin (Cambridge, MA: Mediaeval Academy, 1963) and supplements.

eVK2 - an expanded and revised version of Linda Ehrsam Voigts and Patricia Deery Kurtz, Scientific and Medical Writings in Old and Middle English: An Electronic Reference. CD (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000).

See the link "Science and Medicine Databases at UMKC" listed as "new" on the homepage (as well as on the "Links" page). The homepage also contains a slide show of images from Brunschwig's De arte distillandi. The citation under the slide show images is a hot link to the Linda Hall Library of Science and Technology, and the images themselves are links to larger versions.

Electronic Thorndike-Kibre (eTK) and Electronic Voigts-Kurtz (eVK2)

An expanded and updated digital version of Lynn Thorndike and Pearl Kibre, A Catalogue of Incipits of Mediaeval Scientific Writings in Latin (TK), rev. ed. 1963 with two supplements, has been produced with the permission of the copyright holder, Medieval Academy of America. While TK consolidates all manuscript information for a text into a single entry, eTK divides entries from the book into 33,000 records, each for a manuscript witness to a text.

Scientific and Medical Writings in Old and Middle English, by Linda Voigts and Patricia Kurtz, 2nd ed. (eVK2), an updated and expanded version of the CD published by the University of Michigan Press (2000), provides more than 10,000 records for the earliest technical and learned writings in English.

The digital records in both eTK and eVK2 are organized in multiple searchable fields and allow searching of incipit words and word strings and searching by manuscript, library, author, title, subject, translator, date, and bibliography.

Both electronic references allow scholars to retrieve new information and to make connections previously unthinkable in the study of medieval science and medicine. Both tools are now freely available via a link from the website of the Medieval Academy of America: http://www.medievalacademy.org/