Category: historical manuscripts

The Vatican Library is putting 4,000 (yes, four thousand!) manuscripts online. This is only a fraction of the 80,000 documents that the Vatican Library has collected since its inception in 1451. What an incredible resource for calligraphers!

The interface is good, providing views of each page with a great zoom range. This image comes from the manuscript book labeled “Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.A.3” in the collection “Archivio del Capitolo di San Pietro“. Codices in this collection come from the library of the Chapter of St. Peter Basilica.

I’ve spent hours already browsing through this wonderful resource.

See more information about the DigitaVaticana project in this article.

A recent post at CR Blog showcases The Macclesfield Alphabet Book, a 16-century pattern book, the precursor to our modern black-vinyl-and-plastic portfolio books.

According to the Rare Book Review, The British Library is trying to acquire this recently discovered manuscript. The purchase price is £600,000, partially because these pattern books are so very rare.

Got a spare fifteen grand lying around? That’s the estimated price for this 15th-century decorated breviary at Christie’s. Written in gothic bookhand, with 366 vellum leaves and covers of 17th-century leather over wooden boards, it’s a treasure. There are only four large decorated initials, but still. It’s beautiful.

WOW.

Just. WOW.

I read this article (subscription required) in yesterday’s online edition of the New York Times. It’s about the project of Stiftsbibliothek to put their treasure trove of medieval manuscripts online. The article states:

The collection includes material as varied as curses against book thieves, early love ballads, hearty drinking songs and a hand-drawn ground plan for a medieval monastery, drafted around A.D. 820, the only such document of its kind.

This morning I went over to the Codices Electronici Sangallenses (CESG) of St. Gall and looked around. They’ve done a spectacular job for those of us who really want to get a good look at the writing in these books. Each page of each manuscript has been scanned and is available for viewing at 4 sizes, from 416ox x 624px up to a whopping 3,328px x 4,992px. Click on the thumbnail at the top of this post for a 700×600 piece of the largest image size — and an idea of just how close a look these scans provide.

There are 144 manuscript books online now; St. Gall holds 355 manuscripts that were produced before 1000 AD, and their goal is to have all of those scanned, indexed and online by the end of 2009.

I’ve blogged before about the British Library’s Turning the Pages technology which allows browsers to use a virtual magnifying glass to get up close and personal with some truly magnificent historical manuscripts such as the Lindisfarne Gospels. Other manuscripts don’t have the magnifying glass option: the Luttrell Psalter and the Sforza Hours, to name a couple. (Hint: you have to click and hold to get the pages to turn.) They’ve now got Turning the Pages 2.0, but the technology requires plug-ins I haven’t downloaded yet, so I’ve only looked at these using their low-tech alternative. The largest available images are not more than 1,100px on any side, which is quite small in comparison to the scans on the St. Gall site.

Tomorrow the Codex Sinaiticus website will go live, presenting the entire 4th-century Greek manuscript online. From the looks of the screenshot, it could be valuable for the study of the Byzantine Roman uncial letter forms of that time. A magnifying glass, similar to the Turning the Pages technology used for manuscripts on the British Library site, allows for close inspection. A typeset transcription is provided on the side, with a translation (I hope in English as well as German) beneath that.

The web site will be introduced on Thursday, substantially updated in November, and fully developed by July 2009.

via Slashdot (who got the manuscript date wrong by about 800 years, but who’s counting?)