Finding online medieval manuscripts has long been a patchy, slow and fragmented affair, with each set of scans isolated and typically accessible only at the third or fourth remove (if you’re lucky). Luckily for us all, this situation so annoyed a UCLA assistant English professor called Matthew Fisher that he decided to do something about it.
A couple of years ago, Fisher started building up a web-resource listing every fully digitized pre-1500 manuscript he could find: and last December (2008), his group launched its Catalogue of (currently 1101-strong!) Digitized Medieval Manuscripts.
Of course, it’s not perfect: for instance, though you can search the database in a number of ways, “by date” (or even “by probable century“) – which I would have thought would be the first way most researchers would like to narrow their search down – is sadly not one of them (yet). Also, Cipher Mysteries’ favourite pre-1500 online manuscript (Beinecke Ms 408, as if you couldn’t guess) isn’t yet listed, but my guess is that 1100 is no more than 50% of the current achievable total.
But all the same, in many ways these are just ridiculously carping pot-shots at a truly epic project which has managed to transform a large set of bits into a substantial (and unified) resource. Right now, I’ve just used it to claw my way through St Gallen’s large set of mss: but I’ve still got many hundreds of others more to go. Hmmm… it might end up one of those nightmare scenarios where new entries get added at the rate you work through existing entries. Still, that would be a nice problem to have, relatively speaking. 🙂
For more background on the whole project, here’s a nice little article on Science Daily (thanks to John McMahon on HAstro-L).
A valuable list. Oddly enough, the fantastic collection of German MSS in Heidelberg is
only very partially included, and through a ‘foreign’ link. I can recommend this one:
http://www.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/helios/digi/codpalgerm.html
Your 50% seems therefore to be on the high side (which is both good and bad 😉 )
Hi Rene,
A useful link, thanks! I should perhaps mention that the UCLA people have a “Suggest a Site” page, which I’ve just put this into, along with Beinecke MS 408 (of course). Feel free to suggest any others you happen to find. 🙂
Cheers, ….Nick Pelling….
So here’s a nice piece of trivia:
According to the so-called Ruysschaert catalogue, where he identifies
which were the books bought by Voynich in the Villa Mondragone, one volume
was MS 23 of The library of William King Richardson, Boston, Mass,
which is now known as Houghton MS Richardson 23, in Harvard.
This can be seen digitally here:
http://pds.lib.harvard.edu/pds/view/6478734
(The library is represented in the catalogue site, but the MS isn’t).
I haven’t seen any clear evidence that this MS was indeed sold by Voynich
and/or comes from the Collegio Romano but there is a hint, in that it includes
arms from the Dukes of Este and Ferrara (IIRC), which Voynich liked to
brag about.
Cheers, Rene
Hi Rene,
A nice little find, thanks for passing that on! 🙂
Cheers, ….Nick Pelling….