So you want to be a medievalist...

...that's awesome! Congrats, and welcome. 

I'm about to take exams, and I'd like to share with you some resources that I knew nothing about until I found out I'd be tested on them. In a perfect world I'd have time to explain them all to you. For now, here's a rough sketch of what they do. And please forgive the strange formatting errors. I've spent far too much time trying to html my way out of them already.

Until soon, stay savvy, friends!

Primary Sources: What do you want to find?*

                                   Old English                                                        Middle English

                                          |                                                                             |

Prose                Poetry               MS            Drama                            Verse             Prose                 ?

|                           |                          |                      |                                   |             |                           /

                                                             Record of Early English                                  Manual of Writing

|                           |                          |                   Drama                            /             |      in Middle Eng.           

             Online Corpus of Old                                            (Digital) Index of                      

             English Poetry;                                                      Middle English Verse                                                             

             Anglo-Saxon Poetic                                                                                           

|            Records                             |                                                                        |

English                                      Catalogue of MSs                                      Index of Printed

Historical                                   Containing Anglo-Saxon;                          Middle Eng Prose;

Documents;                               Early English MSs in                                 Index of Middle

Die Gesetze der                         Facsimile                                                    English Prose

Angelsachsen;

Rolls Series;

PASE database

              

            Patrologia Latina

            /

*Latin? --Repertorium Biblium Medii Aevi

            \

                  Acta Sanctorum

Secondary Sources: What kind of question do you have?*      

                        About sources                                                About influence or interpretation

                                |                                                                                       |

Fontes Anglo-Saxonici;                                                                                Anglo-Saxon England; Year's Work in English

Sources of Anglo-Saxon Literary Culture;                                                Studies; Studies in the Age of Chaucer; Variorum

Sources and Analogues of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales                         Edition (Chaucer); Arthurian Lit in the Middle Ages

*Old English Newsletter Online and Digital Medievalist are also great sources for sources

Tertiary Sources, etc.: For the very specific, or very general search

Bibliographies: 

International Medieval Bibliography; Bibliography of Publications on Old English through 1972; Bulletin Bibliografique (Societe Internationale Arthurienne)

Indices (indexes?), Surveys, Concordances, etc:

Motif Index of English Metrical Romances; Survey of English Place-Names; Index of Arthurian Names in Middle English; Biographical Register of University of Oxford to AD 1500; Medieval Libraries of Great Britain; Monumenta Germaniae Historica; Dictionary of National Biography; Dictionary of the Middle Ages

Linguistic Aides:
Cambridge History of the English Language, Grammar of Old English (Hogg), Handbook of Middle English Grammar;  A Middle English Syntax; Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English, Microfiche Concordance to Old English, Historical Outlines of English Sounds and Inflections; Bosworth-Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary; Dictionary of Old English (Toronto)