Great Britain's National Survey of Medieval Stained Glass

The Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi (CVMA) is the international research project dedicated to recording medieval stained glass. In Great Britain, the CVMA is a British Academy Research Project, hosted by the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of York. A Project Committee oversees the programme of activities, including our publications, which are undertaken by volunteer authors. This website has details of our Books and how to order them, and hosts our digital publications and conservation materials.

Our Picture Archive

Here you will also find free access to our digital Picture Archive, containing more than 28,000 images, most of them in colour. The majority of these come from the CVMA’s own archive of approximately 30,000 images housed at the National Monuments Record (now managed by Historic England) in Swindon, and were scanned by HEDS Digitization Services during a pilot project in 1999 (3,500 images) and a major project in 2001–2004 (9,000 images) supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Board (now the Arts and Humanities Research Council). In addition to images of medieval stained glass, the database holds a digital version of the Birkin Haward collection of Victorian stained glass in Norfolk. The CVMA (GB) continues to add images to its archive, including those created in the context of its print projects (e.g., the glass at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool), as well as others from collections of national significance.

The steering committee for the 2001–2004 digitization project was Dr Tim Ayers, Marilyn Deegan, Mick Eadie, Michael Evans, Shige Iwai, Geoff Laycock, Phill Purdy, Prof. Harold Short, and Simon Tanner. The Picture Archive also gives access to the ground-plans for nearly 200 churches, supplied courtesy of the Lambeth Palace Church Plans On-Line (images now accessed through the online Lambeth Palace Library Collections) project.

Licensing

The image server uses the Kakadu JPEG2000 library under license.