Manuscripts

A) GENERAL INFORMATION

B) ONLINE MANUSCRIPTS CATALOGUES


  B.1) PORTALS
  B.2) GENERALIST DATABASES
  • Biblioteche medievali (RICABIM): [P] Repertory of Inventories and Catalogues of Medieval Libraries.
  • BUDE (Base Unique de Documentation Encyclopédique): cette base de données rassemble des informations concernant la transmission des œuvres antiques et médiévales par les manuscrits et les imprimés anciens pour une période qui couvre la fin du Moyen Âge et la Renaissance.
  • Consortium of European Research Libraries (CERL)
  • Medium: Manuscrits du Moyen Age et de la Renaissance conservés dans les bibliothèques de France (hors BNF), reproduits et recensés à l’IRHT; plus certains incunables, livres anciens, manuscrits de la BNF et d’autres bibliothèques dans le monde. Quand cela est possible, donne accès à la fiche Bibale (voir la section suivante) et à la reproduction numérique contenue dans BVVM (voir la section Digitized Manuscripts).
  B.3) THEMATIC DATABASES
  • Alchemical manuscripts: a database provided by Adam McLean.
  • Bibale: cette  base de données a pour objectif de reconstituer la trajectoire que chaque manuscrit a parcourue pour arriver dans la collection où il est conservé aujourd’hui (à travers bibliothèques médiévales et modernes, collections publiques et privées, ventes publiques et collections de libraires) et les différentes collections qui ont existé à travers les siècles et qui ont détenu des manuscrits médiévaux. La base décrit à la fois les manuscrits conservés aujourd’hui (pourvus d’ex-libris, d’armoiries ou d’autres signes d’appartenance) et les manuscrits attestés par les documents les plus divers (inventaires, catalogues, comptabilités, chroniques, correspondances, etc.).
  • Colophones librorum Manu scriptorum Occidentalium (CMO): project of a colophons database, by  L. Reynhout.
  • Dated Manuscripts catalogues: répertoire de catalogues de manuscrits datés, par le Comité International de Paléographie Latine.
  • E-Ktobe: database on Syriac manuscripts which aims to collect information on texts, physical elements, colophons and notes.
  • eTK:  scientifc and medical mansuscripts database based on Lynn Thorndike’s and Pearl Kibre’s A Catalogue of Incipits of Mediaeval Scientific Writings in Latin (Cambridge, 1963) and supplements.
  • eVK2: revised and expanded version of Linda Ehrsam Voigts’ and Patricia Deery Kurtz’s CD, Scientific and Medical Writings in Old and Middle English: An Electronic Reference (Ann Arbor, 2000).
  • Franciscan Authors, 13th- 18th century : alphabetical list of Franciscan authors, with biographical remarks and information on manuscripts, editions and studies. Created by Maarten van der Heijden and Bert Roest.
  • Handschriftencensus (Marburg) – manuscripts with Middle German texts.
  • Illuminated Manuscripts from the British Library
  • In Principio [P]: over 1,000,000 incipits covering Latin literature from the Pre-classical Age to the Renaissance.
  • Islamic Medical Manuscripts at the National Library of Medicine (USA).
  • Islamic Scientific Manuscripts Initiative: this project, a collaboration between the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, will constitute an online database of the works of some 1,700 authors who span the entire Islamic world, beginning in the 8th century and continuing until the 19th.
  • Iter Italicum [P]: online edition of Paul Oskar Kristeller’s list of previously uncatalogued or incompletely catalogued Renaissance humanistic manuscripts.
  • Jordanus, An International Catalog of Medieval Scientific Manuscripts, by the Institute for the History of Science in Munich, and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. Provides “information about mediaeval manuscripts written in Western Europe between 500 and 1500 A.D. which treat the mathematical sciences in the wider sense, i.e. arithmetic, algebra, geometry, trigonometry and mechanics.”
  • Katalogisierung der Orientalischen Handschriften in Deutschland
  • Libraria: site consacré à l’histoire des bibliothèques anciennes, du haut Moyen Âge aux collections de l’époque moderne.
  • ​(​​Logic) Medieval Logical Manuscripts
  • MADOC – Manuscripta Doctrinalia (sec. XIII-XV): descrizione di manoscritti filosofici e giuridici conservati in Toscana.
  • New Shelfmarks: International index of manuscripts & incunables recently acquired by public libraries, by the Association Paléographique Internationale.
  • Peraldus : Bibliographical references for individual manuscripts. Site created by Alain Nadeau; now inactive .
  • Post-classical Islamic Philosophy Database Initiative: this project, led by R. Wisnovsky (McGill) will create a searchable database index of the 400 most influential and original philosophical texts written in Arabic during the 1100-1900CE period.
  • Printed CataLogues and Unpublished Inventories of Extant Collections (LATIN manuscript BOOKS BEFORE 1600) by Paul Oskar Kristeller.
  • Quodlibase : Database of manuscripts containing quodlibetal questions. Site created and maintained by S. Piron.
  • West African Arabic Manuscript Project: at first a catalogue of Arabic manuscripts in southern Mauritania (Boutilimit); seven other West African collections have been subsequently added, including the manuscript libraries at the Institut Mauritanien de Recherche Scientifique, Northwestern University, and the Centre Ahmad Baba in Timbuctu. Currently (during 2008-09) print catalogues from West Africa published by al-Furqan Islamic Heritage Foundation are being added. They project to digitize the manuscripts.
  B.4) AUTHOR-CENTERED CATALOGUES
  B.5) LIBRARY CATALOGUES

      B.5.1) National 

      B.5.2) Individual Libraries

C) DIGITIZED MANUSCRIPTS

  C.1) PORTALS
  C.2) WEBSITES

D) MICROFILMS

E) TOOLS


  E.1) BIBLIOGRAPHIES ON MANUSCRIPTS

Online bibliography of secondary literature on manuscripts, modern papers and rare printed books

  • Peraldus: Bibliographical references for individual manuscripts. Site created and maintained by Alain Nadeau.

  E.2) PALEOGRAPHY
  • Abbreviationes™ Online – Medieval Abbreviations on the Web  [P]:   Pr O. Pluta’s software.
  • Cappelli: The Lexicon Abbreviaturarum (ed. 1901, in German) is downloadable here; the Dizionario Di Abbreviature Latini Ed Italiani (ed. 1912) is online here, and the second German edition (1928) is online here; in addition, a searchable version adapted as an app for smartphones ias available thanks to the university of Zurich.
  • De re rigatoria: Outils et documents pour l’analyse des schémas de réglure des manuscrits, par Denis Muzerelle (IRHT).
  • Enigma “helps scholars to decipher Latin words which are difficult to read in medieval manuscripts. (…) If you type the letters you can read and add wildcards, Enigma will list the possible Latin forms, drawing from its database of more than 400 000 forms. Nota bene: Enigma does NOT solve abbreviations. To do so, you can resort to A. Cappelli’s famous dictionary (…). If you cannot resolve an abbreviation, replace it by a wildcard in your Enigma query.”
  • Graphoskop: a software tool for the critical examination of historical handwriting. Developed as a plug-in for the open-source software ImageJ, it can be used for gathering quantitative data by taking specific measurements from digital facsimiles of handwritten material.
  • Medieval Unicode Font Initiative:  group of scholars and font designers who work on a common solution to the problem of encoding and displaying special characters in Medieval texts written in the Latin alphabet.
  • Cours de paléographie de la Société des amis des Archives de France : seulement les documents originaux utilisés pour les cours, avec quelques remarques.
  • Paläographisches Lesetraining für lateinische Schriften des 5.-20. Jahrhunderts, by Thomas Frenz (Univ. of Passau). Tutorial presenting 7 exercices on books writings from the Vth to theXVth centuries (section “Etwas von allem”).
  • Ecole des Chartes, Paris: bibliography for paleography studies
  • Medieval Latin Paleography:  resources listed by Rega Wood.

  E.3) CODICOLOGY
  E.4) EDITION SOFTWARES
  • Classical Text Editor [P] by S. Hagel: a very easy to use, WYSIWYG, word-processor for critical editions, commentaries and electronic publishing, with any number of apparatus – bidirectional text – sigla. For Windows.
  • EDMAC adds useful TeX macros specifically for critical editions. (One of the TEX “variants”  making use of EDMAC is Critical Edition).
  • Typesetter by Bernt Karasch. CET is fairly easy to use. But it becomes extremely slow with longer texts. In addition, this software is no longer developped and new developments in TeX and MikTeX are therefore not included).
  • Ednotes: provides macros for critical edition typesetting with LaTeX.
  • Juxta: “Juxta is an open-source cross-platform tool for comparing and collating multiple witnesses to a single textual work.” For MacOS, Windows, Unix.
  • LaTeX: typesetting system for the production of technical and scientific documents.
  • MikTeX: implementation of TeX and related programs for Windows; adds to TeX compiler many other components.
  • Transcript: this software combines a picture viewer and a text editor. In other words, the digital image of the manuscript appears in the upper window, you can transcribe the text in the lower window. For Windows.
  • TUSTEP [P] was the software used for e.g. the Opera omnia of Nicolas Cusanus and the latest volumes of the Albertus Magnus edition. There is also an International Tustep User Group. For Windows, Unix, Linux.
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