Emperor Frederick I in a manuscript from Hochschul und Landesbibliothek Fulda (100 D 11) Today we will be looking at the digitized medieval manuscripts from the Hochschul- und Landesbibliothek Fulda (University and State Library of Fulda). You can access them here.
It has been a busy Easter here at Sexy Codicology. You have certainly seen our posts on our Facebook page (almost 4'000 Likes! Wohoo!), we also wanted to create a short video with miniatures from various books of hours representing the death and resurrection of Christ but, alas, time was to short and we didn't manage. Nonetheless, we saw fantastic illuminated manuscripts this week, especially from the Getty Museum's website (we reviewed it here). So, as a late Easter present, we have made a selection of the most beautiful scenes from the Getty Museum's digitized medieval manuscripts. All the images in this post are from the Devotional Books collection and cover most of the events celebrated during the Holy Week. As you may notice, most of the miniatures below come from Book of Hours from the 15th / 16th century. I truly recommend looking at Ms. Ludwig IX 19. The miniatures in this manuscript are particularly evocative and present all the events that are narrated in the Bible.
A couple of days ago I received an email from Cambridge Trinity College. I was kindly asked if it was possible to update the link to their digitized medieval manuscripts on the DMMmaps. The email mentioned that they have "been hard at work updating and making it look prettier". Moved by curiosity, I went to give a look and updated the link.
One of our favourite institutions that shares digitized medieval manuscripts online is the J. Paul Getty Museum. The reasons are many, and we will explore them in this post. This is just a small fraction of all the objects available on the website. There are at least 107 digitized medieval manuscripts, and each one is stunning.
The "A Medieval Manuscript a Week" series promotes digitized medieval manuscripts that are made available under Creative Commons Licenses, Public Domain or Open Content.
There is something genuinely thrilling in discovering a digitized medieval manuscript! The DMMmaps Project is our small attempt to help everyone find these incredible books, by bringing together the libraries that make them available online.
Not all digitized libraries are created equal, and some are more interactive than others. Few let you listen to medieval music. One of the few is the Ville de Laon library.
The Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel (HAB) is a German library, located in the heart of the country, not too far from Hannover. Founded in 1572 it is now home to 900,000 books and 734 digitized manuscripts. There are 16 different collections to browse through, plus several manuscripts coming from other 10 institutions. Every collection has a brief description of its contents: how many manuscripts are in the collection, how many of these are medieval, in which languages there are written, how old they are (oldest and newest,) their provenance, and a list of the digitized manuscripts.