Subject Guide to Medieval History

Back to Guides

If you need help, don't hesitate to ask at the reference desk, or contact Reference Librarians Linda Moore or Mark Maier.

Try these encyclopedias, dictionaries, and other reference guides to get started. Click on the link to see the call number.

Historical Research Guides:
The Historian's ToolboxRef D 16 .W62 2003
American Historical Association’s Guide to Historical Literature
See especially Volume 1, Section 20.Ref D 20 .A55 1995

Dictionaries:
Dictionary of the Middle Ages Ref D 114 .D5 1982
Dictionary of Military History. Ref U 24 .D4913 1994

Bibliographies:
Medieval Studies: A Bibliographic Guide  Ref CB 351 .C76 1983
The Crusades: Historiography and BibliographyRef D 157 .A84 1976

Specific Encyclopedia:
New Catholic EncyclopediaRef BX 841 .N44 2003

Moving to the next step: finding books

To find books in the Mossey Library, use the Mossey Library Catalog.

Use MeLCat to request books and audio-visual materials directly from other Michigan libraries over the web. Use OCLC World Cat to search the holdings of over 3000 libraries worldwide in a single search. You will have to use interlibrary loan to obtain copies of these books.

Continuing on: the best places to find articles

Basic level search: to find basic or general articles on medieval history topics already in the Mossey Library, use the Humanities Abstracts. If your topic deals the political, social or economic aspects of medieval history, see also the Social Sciences Citation Index. Many of the articles in these two abstracts are available in electronic format.

Intermediate level search: for more advanced topics, you can search over 12,000 journals in a single search by using Article First, which indexes the table of contents pages of over 300 core titles in History. Also try searching the Arts and Humanities Citation Index, which contains full text articles and allows for citation tracking.

Comprehensive search: for more extensive research, search International Medieval Bibliography. Beginning in 1967, it indexed over 4500 journals and has more than 300,000 entries in its database. As it is an international bibliography, many of the citations will refer to articles published in languages other than English.

Try Also: ATLAReligion. This is a great source for articles dealing with religious topics of the Middle Ages.

Another good database is: JSTOR. This database provides full-text coverage of more than 40 major history journals. The journals have been digitized from their first volume. Each year another volume of recent issues is added to the collection.

Scholarly Websites to Pursue

For a guide to locating, using and citing primary historical materials on the internet, see Using Primary Sources on the Web. In the Mossey Library Catalog and WorldCat, use the word “Sources” as one of your search phrases.

Try searching GoogleScholar for scholarly literature across many disciplines and identify resources available from Mossey Library.

The European History Highway: A Guide to Internet Resources. Ref D 16.117 .E97 2002

For another excellent guide selected by Michigan librarians, click here.

These two websites are portals to many other quality sites on medieval topics. The Labyrinth at Georgetown University and Netsurf.

For additional information, see the Hillsdale College History Department Homepage.

Citing Sources
The History Department requires that you cite your research using Turabian's A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Thesis, and Dissertations which is located at Ref LB 2369.T8.

Online examples of Turabian's can be found here.

An excellent guide to citing electronic sources in history can be found here.