Consulting Medieval Manuscripts Online
utm.edu
utm.edu
By the by (and I know that this is about to sound like an ad, but I have no connection, I'm just someone who likes printing out old books scans and sticking them to my walls), if you want large-scale color prints of this stuff, I've had good luck with Shortrun Posters -- they focus on churning out one size of poster super-cheap, so the prices are way lower than I've found elsewhere. If you stick to the default options, you can get 18" x 24" posters shipped for like $4 each.
My first though was exactly this: print some and put on the wall.
http://www.bookofjoe.com/2012/04/fromdavidrumseycomrand-mcna...
You can go to a time and place and see exactly what kind of events were happening at that point of time. I haven't opened it up to things yet, but am planning to pretty soon!
The closest projects I've seen are http://pleiades.stoa.org/home for Ancient GIS open-data and an iOS App with a timeline database, https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/timeline-eons-free/id4333521...
Edit: David Rumsey's classic site has many historical maps & charts, e.g. http://www.davidrumsey.com/blog/2012/3/28/timeline-maps
Found a UI demo & thesis project for DBpedia GIS: http://latemar.science.unitn.it/spacetime/usecase.html & http://latemar.science.unitn.it/spacetime/FabioValsecchi-the...
Of mice
The mouse is a puny animal; its name, mus, comes from the Greek, the Latin word deriving from it. Others say mures, mice, because they are produced ex humore, from the damp soil, of the earth; for humus means earth and from that comes mus, mouse. Their liver grows bigger at full moon, like the tides rise then fall with the waning of the moon.
For the rest: it's amazing to see how back then simply writing was way more of an art than it is now. It's no exception that the writer would use 2 or more colors even for simple text, for example just to highlight capitals. Don't think I have ever seen anyone doing that in the present. Also the maps from those days often look like sceneries from some fairytale with nicely drawn castles etc. Not like your average roadmap :P
http://www.wdl.org/en/search/?item_type=manuscript&additiona...
> For the rest: it's amazing to see how back then simply writing was way more of an art than it is now
It's a really interesting trade-off – books used to be rare luxury status symbols and then the number skyrocketed as machine printing became an industrial-scale process. I do sometimes wonder if we're going to see a slight reversal of that with people paying for art prints as a way to get something which you simply can't have on a tablet.
> In particular, all those in Yucatán were ordered destroyed by Bishop Diego de Landa in July of 1562. De Landa wrote: "We found a large number of books in these characters and, as they contained nothing in which were not to be seen as superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they (the Maya) regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction."
No wonder those people "regretted" it, it was newly all of their written culture being destroyed. Imagine if some aliens invaded Europe and burned all these books and all that was left was 3 books.
http://www.famsi.org/mayawriting/codices/marhenke.html or also: https://archive.org/details/Ancient-Books-All-Rare-Collectio...
They have a weekly data dump, as well as a three-year overhaul underway. Wonderful, wonderful community around it, with a deep commitment to open data. If you have any suggestions for the database's future you'd like to see, I'd be happy to say it forward or put you in touch with somebody (I interned there last semester).
And there are more on the way: NTT Data signed in March [1] an agreement with the Vatican Library to digitize 82,000 manuscripts.
[1] http://www.news.va/en/news/vatican-library-and-japanese-firm...