For now, though, check out this great interview with Noel at the TED Blog, where he makes an eloquent plea for Creative Commons licensing of all medieval. Let's hope other institutions quickly follow. A few of the manuscripts in the collection have been highlighted here, and boy are they showstoppers - lavish illustrations, intricately carved ivory and precious metal covers, hymnals, psalters and a phenomenal bestiary. The British Library is playing catch up with more visionary institutions, such as the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore under curator William Noel. There are also pieces on the wider background of illumination, book-making, science and learning in the Middle Ages. Articles on subjects like medieval legal, medical and musical writing place the works in their historical context and significance. The BL portal presents a selection of manuscripts.
Manuscript pages can be downloaded as individual images or the entire manuscript can be download as a PDF. They can be annotated online and the annotations downloaded as json files for sharing. Manuscripts can be viewed side-by-side for comparison. He spent his reign struggling to hold onto power and desperately attempting to raise funds from western rulers.
Baldwin II was born in Constantinople in 1217 and became Latin Emperor in 1228 at the age of eleven. They are grouped according to themes, authors, places and centuries for ease of navigation and can be searched in English, French and Italian. The final Latin Emperor of Constantinople was Baldwin II, nephew of the first emperor and issuer of our golden bulla. The BnF portal provides access to all 800 manuscripts. With this corpus being of undisputable scientific interest, the programme is also characterised by several manuscript recovery operations: digitisation, online dissemination, restoration, scientific description and even mediation. Among these manuscripts are a few precious, sumptuously illuminated examples such as the Benedictional of Winchester around the year 1000, the Bible de Chartres around 1140 or the Great Canterbury Anglo-Catalan Psalter produced circa 1200. Produced between the eighth and the end of the twelfth century, they cover a wide range of subjects, illustrating intellectual production during the early middle ages and the Roman period. They are also of unique artistic, historical or literary interest. The manuscripts have been selected for their historical significance in terms of relations between France and England during the Middle Ages. The carefully curated collection features works created in Medieval England and France between 7 A.D.
To make some of these masterpieces accessible to the general public, both libraries worked together with funding from the Polonsky Foundation, a charitable organization that focuses on preserving and sharing cultural heritage primarily through the digitizing of important collections. The BL and BnF have the largest collections of medieval illuminated manuscripts in the world. IV 1419), an eight-century codex containing a tax register.Ĭomments and feedback are very welcome, and we are particularly keen to hear from colleagues who are using the Digitised Manuscripts website in the classroom.England and France may have had one or two little issues with each other in the Middle Ages, but all is forgiven now and 800 medieval illuminated manuscripts have been digitized and made available to the public on the websites of the British Library and Bibliothèque Nationale de France. In the coming weeks, we expect to post online Papyrus 131, containing the Athenaion Politeia along with other texts, and the decorated binding of Papyrus 1442 (P. See also the announcement on our Medieval Manuscripts blog: I 229, Latin deed of a sale of a slave boy): VIII 1073, fragment of the Old Latin Genesis): IV 654, fragment of the Gospel of Thomas): Available to view online, along with new catalogue entries, are:Įgerton Papyrus 2 (P.
The British Library is happy to announce the digitisation of a small group of particularly significant papyri.