This week the ADS would like to highlight a recently published archive, The Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi (CVMA).
Founded in 1949, The CVMA is the international research initiative dedicated to recording medieval stained glass. Committees in Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain with Catalonia, Switzerland, United States of America, and associate committees in Portugal and Russia, come together under one project to publish catalogues that include illustrations, colour plates and commentaries of details that are often difficult to examine in situ.
CVMA inv. no. 022090
Digitised between 1999 and 2004, the CVMA Picture Archive hosts over 28,000 images of stained glass. Around half of these come from CVMA’s own archive currently held by Historic England having been scanned by HEDS Digigitisation services during a pilot programme in 1999. In addition to medieval stained glass, the database includes the Birkin Haward collection of Victorian stained glass in Norfolk and Suffolk, and ground-plans of nearly 200 churches courtesy of the Lambeth Palace Library Collection. This archive includes an advanced search interface, as well as an interactive map that displays the number and location of stained glass windows images within the database.
CVMA inv. no. 007574
The Downloads page features rare and out-of-print works, including detailed documentation for major windows at Gloucester, Lincoln, and Winchester Cathedrals. It also offers theses such as studies on 19th-century paint loss and influential work on Midlands glass painting.
Key conservation literature is also available, including English translations of foundational German texts and CVMA international guidelines. Additional documents cover CVMA history, archives of G. King & Son, and digital publications on Norfolk stained glass.
CVMA inv. no. 010148
The downloads section of the archive include:
- Conservation of Stained Glass
- The Medieval Stained Glass of Norfolk
- Roundels
- Bristol Colloquium Booklet
- Paint Loss in Nineteenth-Century Glass
- The Establishment of the CVMA in Great Britain
- York City Churches
- Stained Glass in the Midlands
News posts about CVMA and its deposition with the ADS can also be found on ARIADNE, and issue 152 of Vidimus.
