State Library of Victoria Medieval Manuscripts Online

The Ascension of Christ, historiated initial ‘C’, Italy, 15C

(State Library of Victoria, RARES 096 IL I)

The State Library of Victoria in Melbourne holds 27 medieval and renaissance manuscripts. Last year the SLV finished digitising nearly all of its manuscripts along with five manuscripts held by the Art Gallery of Ballarat.

The digitisation scheme stemmed from an Australian Research Council (ARC) funded project, which involved a number of activities, including the digitisation of the manuscripts in the State Library of Victoria and select manuscripts from the Ballarat Fine Art Gallery, together with the development of on-line links with other manuscript collections in Australia and New Zealand and the contribution of research findings to manuscripts in these collections as appropriate. The project is spearheaded by Professor Margaret Manion, whose team is creating detailed entries on each manuscript which are being uploaded into the catalogue records. A full list of participating individuals and institutions is provided in each of the detailed entries.

The project followed on from the SLV's highly successful 2008 exhibition 'The Medieval Imagination', which brought together manuscripts from collections in Australia, New Zealand and Cambridge, UK, and saw over 100,000 people pass through its doors. Some of the notable SLV manuscripts displayed and now digitised include: an early thirteenth-century copy of Ptolemy's Almagest with astronomical diagrams and translated from the Arabic by Gerard of Cremona; a mid-eleventh-century manuscript of Boethius's De musica (the oldest known book in Australia); a fifteenth-century illustrated copy in English vernacular prose of Guillaume de Deguileville's The pilgrymage of the Lyfe of Manhoode and The pilgrymage of the Sowle; and a lavish fifteenth-century manuscript comprising three works (including the Scriptores historiae Augustae) commissioned for Lorenzo de Medici and still in its original binding.

As a way of promoting these manuscripts, I have listed them below with links to the digitised versions (title hyperlinks), catalogue records, many of which include provenance information, and the detailed descriptions completed to date. References cited in the records refer to:

Margaret Manion and Vera F. Vines, Medieval and Renaissance Illuminated Manuscripts in Australian Collections (Melbourne: Thames and Hudson, 1984)

K. V. Sinclair, Descriptive Catalogue of Medieval and Renaissance Western Manuscripts in Australia (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1969)

Bronwyn Stocks and Nigel Morgan (eds.), The Medieval Imagination: Illuminated Manuscripts from Cambridge, Australia and New Zealand (South Yarra, Vic: MacMillan Art Pub., 2008)

And now the manuscripts!

State Library of Victoria
1. Boethius; Anon. [sometimes called Pseudo-Hucbaldus], De musica; Musica enchiriadis [and] De organo, Northern Italy, eleventh century
Catalogue record
Description

2. Petrus Comestor; Stephen Langton, Historia scholastica; Expositio litteralis in historiam scholasticam [and] Exposito moralis in historiam scholasticam, 1200
Catalogue record

3. Epistles of St. Paul with the Glossa ordinaria by Anselm of Laon, Central Italy (Gaeta), ca. 1200
Catalogue record
Description

4. Ptolemy, Almagest, translated from the Arabic by Gerard of Cremona, Northern Italy (the Veneto?), ca. 1200–1225
Catalogue record
Description

5. Psalter-Hours, Use of Liège, Latin and French, Southern Netherlands (Liège), ca. 1270–1279
Catalogue record

6. Vulgate Bible (Leviticus) with the Glossa ordinaria of Walafrid Strabo, France (Paris), perhaps first quarter of the thirteenth century
Catalogue record
Description

7. Antiphonal (fragment), Central or Northern Italy, late thirteenth or early fourteenth century
Catalogue record
Description

8. Statutes and treatises on medieval English law, Latin and Law French, ca. 1300
Catalogue record
Description

9. Antiphonal-Hymnal, Dominican use, with excerpt of De musica of Jerome of Moravia, France (Paris), 1335–1345
Catalogue record

10. John of Gaddesden, Rosa Anglica, England, fourteenth century
Catalogue record

11. Flavius Josephus, De bello judaico libri VII: Latin translation attributed to Rufinus of Aquileia, Spain (Catalonia), 1400
Catalogue record

12. Forty-nine illuminated and historiated initials from Italian manuscripts (cuttings), Italy, fourteenth and fifteenth century
Catalogue record
Description

13. Giles of Rome, Archbishop of Bourges, De regimine principum, France, 1429
Catalogue record

14. Guillaume de Deguileville, The pilgrimage of the lyfe of the manhode; and, The pilgrimage of the sowle, England (Lincolnshire), ca. 1430
Catalogue record 
Description

15. Book of Hours (fragmentary), France (Besancon), ca. 1430–1440
Catalogue record

16. Eutropius; Paul the Deacon, Scriptores historiae Augustae and Breviarium ab urbe condita; translations and additions by Paul the Deacon; Historia Romana by Paul the Deacon, Italy (Florence), ca. 1479
Catalogue record

17. Book of Hours, Use of York, Flanders (Bruges), ca. 1470–ca. 1490
Catalogue record
Description

18. Book of Hours, Use of Paris, France (Paris), ca. 1490
Catalogue record
Description

19. Book of Hours, Use of Rome, Southern Netherlands, ca. 1490
Catalogue record

20. St. Jerome, Commentaries on Isaiah, Netherlands (Roermond, Limburg), 1497
Catalogue record

21. 16. St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, Augustini opera, fifteenth century
Catalogue record
Description

22. Liber Obsequialis, Use of Constance, and Breviary (fragment), Latin and German, Southern(?) Germany, (1) fifteenth and (2) early twelfth century
Catalogue record
Description

23. Pontifical, for the Bishop of Mirepoix, France, ca. 1500–ca. 1520
Catalogue record

24. Liber antiphonarius Romanus, 1566
Catalogue record


Art Gallery of Ballarat
1. Eadmer (d. 1124?); Bede, Life of St Wilfrid and extracts from Bede's Historia ecclesiastica, Northern England, 1150
Catalogue record

2. Pontifical, with excerpts from the Summa theologia of St Thomas Aquinas and the Regula ad inveniendum principium lunae (added 1451), Italy (Veneto or Emilia-Romagna), ca. 1350–1380
Catalogue record

3. Calendar and medical diagrams, Northeast England (Durham?), ca. 1400–1420
Catalogue record

4. Book of Hours, Use of Rome, Italy (Florence), 1450
Catalogue record

5. Prayer Book, Southern Netherlands, ca. 1544
Catalogue record

Alfred and Isabel Reed Medieval Manuscripts Online

Leaf from a French Book of Hours,
fifteenth century (RMMF19)

It gives me great pleasure to announce that images and descriptions of the Dunedin City Library's holdings of medieval manuscripts from the Alfred and Isabel Reed Collection are now available on Flickr:

Profile

http://www.flickr.com/people/dplmedmss/

Collections (7)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dplmedmss/collections/

Sets (71)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dplmedmss/sets

 

The images include a selection from each bound manuscript, and the recto/ verso of each individual leaf and fragment. I did not resize the images, so visitors can get access to the original files.

The site was created with the aim of promoting and providing on-line access to one of New Zealand's largest collections of medieval manuscripts. Collection highlights include: a leaf and bifolium from a ninth-century Bible in Carolingian script (RMMF 1a and 1b), which are among the oldest manuscript leaves in the country; a mid-fifteenth-century copy of the Wycliffe Gospels (MS 6) and a leaf from a Wycliffite Lectionary (RMMF 20) dated to the same time period; a portion of a fourteenth-century Bible (MS 4a), identified by Christopher de Hamel as having been written in the Cistercian Abbey of Byszewo (or Koronowo), near Gdansk, the first manuscript of Polish origin to be identified in New Zealand; leaves from the fourteenth-century 'Bohun Bible' (RMMF 13a and 13b); a fifteenth-century Dutch Book of Hours (MS 12) from the library of Alexander Boswell, 8th Laird of Auchinleck, and a second Dutch Book of Hours (MS 10) brought to New Zealand by Walter B. D. Mantell in 1840, one of the earliest medieval manuscripts to be transported to the colony.

 

I would like to acknowledge and thank Christopher de Hamel, Margaret Manion, and the family of the late Vera F. Vines, for granting permission to reproduce the relevant descriptions in Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in New Zealand Collections (London, 1989). This information has been updated to reflect recent scholarship (most notably by de Hamel, Alexandra Barratt, and Richard Gameson). References are provided. I would also like to thank Paul Hayton, former electronic services co-ordinator for Dunedin Public Libraries, and Will Noel for his guidance.

Noah to Edward IV: The Canterbury Roll Digitised

Courtesy of the University of
Canterbury Library

The University of Canterbury has digitised its fifteenth-century manuscript roll, which traces the genealogy of the kings of England from Noah to Edward IV. The roll, which measures 489 centimetres in length, has been in the university's collections since 1918 and is the only medieval roll known in the Southern Hemisphere.

The website aims to 'provide a high quality digital archive of the manuscript that will allow an international public to view and make use of this unique treasure [which has been] photographed to an archival standard in an effort to aid its preservation and to ensure the best viewing experience'.

The scrolling contents page allows visitors to navigate through the roll and includes a general commentary on/ description of each section. The informative website also provides an introduction to the roll and the overall project, explores the provenance of the manuscript, and offers commentary on the scroll's biblical and mythological elements and use as a tool in political propaganda.

The roll can be viewed in its entirety here and downloaded here.

The digitised manuscript project was developed by Chris Jones, Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Canterbury. Much of the work was done by Maree Shirota, one of Chris's Honours (now MA) students, whose master's thesis is centred on the Canterbury Roll.

Congratulations to everyone who was involved in this very worthwhile project!

Medieval Bookbindings Blog

A new blog created by Alexandra Gillespie, Associate Professor in English and Medieval Studies, University of Toronto, with contributions by Emeritus Professor Alexandra Barratt, University of Waikato:

http://medievalbookbindings.com/

Recent posts include a description and very clear images of a sixteenth-century binding and its medieval manuscript endleaves from the Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries, and Alexandra Barratt's discovery last year of vellum quire guards taken from an early ninth-century Carolingian Bible and sewn into a fifteenth-century binding (also in the Grey collection).

Sixteenth-century binding brass hook-clasp fastening and fore-edge book
marks; New Testament, probably Netherlands, late twelfth or early thirteenth century; Auckland Libraries, Sir George Grey Special Collections, Med. MS G.140

Alexandra G. and Alexandra B. have done great work identifying and expanding upon what is known about early bindings, and the manuscript waste found in them, held in New Zealand collections. The site will cover a variety of bibliocentric topics (not just New Zealand and not just bindings), so I am definitely excited about future posts!

If interested in receiving email alerts, click the 'Follow' function icon towards the bottom of the page/ screen (may not appear in Chrome).