I WAS DELIGHTED to be asked to write a chapter for this volume about the history of the website Medievalists.net, an online resource for those interested in the Middle Ages. While the many other digital resources described within these pages come from the academic domain, our project is very different. While I cannot really talk about Medievalists.net in a scholarly fashion. I can tell you why it began and how it evolved—a very personal story, with good times as well as bad.

Prehistory

The internet was still quite new at the turn of the twenty-first century, and was not yet an indispensable part of our day-to-day lives. For those in the field of Medieval Studies, it was even less important, with only a relatively few websites catering to this audience. The most important of these were the Internet Medieval Sourcebook, ORB, and NetSERF, each offering medievalists much-needed resources. The Internet Medieval Sourcebook gave us a variety of translated medieval texts, most of which came from translations so old that they were in the public domain. ORB (The Online Reference Book for Medieval Studies) aimed to provide teaching materials and resources such as articles and bibliographies. NetSERF offered links to all kinds of medieval-related content on the internet, both academic and popular.

As a graduate student in the later 1990s, I was very much aware of these sites, and saw they had a lot of potential. I even wondered if there was a way I could get involved with them. My own career path, however, was moving away from becoming an historian and turning toward library studies. Then, at the 2001 International Congress in Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, I took part in a conversation that would change my life. During the business meeting of De Re Militari: The Society for Medieval Military History, discussion turned to the society’s need for its own website.