Information
Online (Harvard affiliates only)
Open access
Open access
Manuscripts & Incunabula - General
- 15th century Book Trade"The key-idea of MEI is to analyze and cathegorize each provenance clue by century (possibly decade) and by geographical area (city and/or country), so that the more the book was used and read in the past – underlined, annotated, rebound, decorated etc. – the more we have provenance blocks of information for describing it and thus retrievable data for research."
- The Archeology of Reading"The Archaeology of Reading in Early Modern Europe (AOR) uses digital technologies to enable the systematic exploration of the historical reading practices of Renaissance scholars nearly 450 years ago. This is possible through AOR’s corpus of thirty-six fully digitized and searchable versions of early printed books filled with tens of thousands of handwritten notes, left by two of the most dedicated readers of the early modern period: John Dee and Gabriel Harvey."
- Book owners online (BOO)Book Owners Online is a directory of historical book owners, with information about their libraries, and signposts to further reference sources. It currently covers seventeenth-century English owners and has begun to be expanded.
- BASIRA: Books as Symbols in Renaissance ArtBASIRA is an open-access database of representations of books and other documents in art.
Manuscript Databases
- DMMmap - The Digitized Medieval Manuscripts mapLocalizes through geomapping museums and libraries with important digitized manuscript holdings.
- The Schoenberg Database of ManuscriptsThe Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts (SDBM) makes available data on medieval manuscript books of five or more folios produced before 1600. Its purpose is to facilitate research for scholars, collectors, and others interested in manuscript studies and the provenance of these unique books.
- Catalogue of Digitized Medieval Manuscripts (UCLA)Full text digitized medieval manuscripts from late antique to medieval authors, compiled by the University of UCLA. This extensive database gives access to highly important manuscripts from important libraries worldwide.
- MANUSMANUS è un database che comprende la descrizione e le immagini digitalizzate dei manoscritti conservati nelle biblioteche italiane pubbliche, ecclesiastiche e private.
- Manuscripta MedievaliaA feature of this site is that digital images of all printed mss. catalogues of German collections are searchable by incipit. Also contains high quality digital images of nearly 100 manuscripts, multiple indexes to iconography and manuscript literature. Supports searching by manuscript identifiers or thematically. In German.
- The HMML Manuscript DatabaseThe HMML manuscript database contains information on over 95,000 codices and over 250,000 texts (works) in the collection. Include the source number and the name of the field that needs correction and send to HMML. Manuscript Search. Find manuscripts by city, library, or shelfmark. Search for Texts or Works. Find Images and Metadata about Images.
- EnluminuresA joint production of CNRS and Direction du Livre et Lecture, this searchable database includes more than 14,000 images from over 1200 illuminated manuscripts. In French.
- Digital ScriptoriumDigital Scriptorium is a growing consortium of American libraries and museums committed to free online access to their collections of pre-modern manuscripts. Our website unites scattered resources from many institutions into a national digital platform for teaching and scholarly research.
- Zentrale Verzeichnis digitalisierter Drucke (ZVDD)Contains approximately 1.450 digitized manuscripts and incuables from the 15th century.
- FragmentariumFragmentarium is a scholarly social network that enables libraries, collectors, researchers and students to upload medieval manuscript fragments and to describe, transcribe and assemble them online.
- MirabileCatalog of manuscripts in European libraries. Searchable: author, title, signature, possessor, library. With bibliographies, descriptions and links.
- manuscripta.atMittelalterliche Handschriften in Oesterreich
- Late Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts on the WebSiân Echard, Department of English, University of British Columbia
Incunabula & Early Printed Books Databases
- Universal Short Title Catalogue (USTC)The Universal Short Title Catalogue (USTC) is a collective database of all books published in Europe between the invention of printing and the end of the sixteenth century.
- English Short-Title Catalog ESTC (1473-1800)ESTC is a vast database designed to include a bibliographic record, with holdings, of every surviving copy of letterpress produced in Great Britain or any of its dependencies, in any language, worldwide, from 1473-1800. In order to increase access to these items, we include references to microfilm, digital, and other facsimile versions.
- Census: Renaissance liturgical imprints / Modern Bibliographic CitationsThis is a database of information about worship books printed before 1601. The interest lies in global questions about worship in Renaissance Europe, by the means of the European books of ritual for the several Catholic churches and also books for Protestant and Jewish faiths during the tumultuous generations before 1601.
- Heritage of the Printed Book Database (HPB)"The Heritage of the Printed Book Database (previously called the Hand Press Book Database) is a steadily growing collection of files of catalogue records from major European and North American research libraries covering items of European printing of the hand-press period (c.1455-c.1830) integrated into one file. This makes it possible for information to be retrieved in one single search across all files."
- Early European BooksCovers a broad range of subjects such as literature, history, music, art, linguistics, and religion. "Early European Books" aims at providing digital access to continental printed texts before 1701 by offering full-color, high-resolution facsimile images scanned directly from the original printed sources. Each item in the collection is captured in its entirety, complete with its binding, edges, endpapers, blank pages, and any loose inserts, providing information about the physical characteristics and provenance histories of the original artefact. "Early European Books" is searchable on the bibliographic descriptions that accompany each facsimile and the database provides functionality that allows to pinpoint images that contain manuscript annotations and various kinds of non-textual printed matter, such as illustrations and maps. The full text of the documents included in "Early European Books" is not searchable. "Early European Books" is issued as a series of collections, each offering access to the early printed books of one or more major libraries.
- Zentrales Verzeichnis digitalisierter Drucke (ZVDD)Contains ca. 3500 manuscripts and incunables from the 15th century, ca. 85.500 early printed books from the 16th century and ca. 177.000 books from the 17th century (and later digitizations as well).
- Gutenberg BibleDigital version of the Göttingen Library copy of the Gutenberg Bible and also the Model Book for painting manuscripts which was used to illuminate the Göttingen Bible.
- MEI - Material Evidence in Incunabula"MEI is a database specifically designed to record and search the material evidence (or copy specific, post-production evidence and provenance information) of 15th-century printed books: ownership, decoration, binding, manuscript annotations, stamps, prices, etc. MEI is linked to the Incunabula Short Title Catalogue (ISTC), provided by the British Library, from which it derives the bibliographical records, and it allows the user at last to combine searches of bibliographical records (extracted from ISTC) with copyspecific records."
- Archivio dei possessori (Bologna)"L'archivio dei possessori dell'Archiginnasio è una base dati che raccoglie le riproduzioni dei segni di possesso presenti sui volumi posseduti dalla biblioteca, divisi per tipologie: note manoscritte, timbri, ex libris, ex dono, superlibros e segnature di collocazione."
- Early Printed Books"Early Printed Books focuses on what was unique about books printed during the hand-press period in the West—those features particular to works printed between 1450, when the printing press began to be developed in Germany, and 1800, when the machine press began to take its place across the Western world."
Palaeography databases
- DigiPal - Digital Resource and Database of Palaeography, Manuscript Studies and Diplomatic (London)"DigiPal is a new resource for the study of medieval handwriting, particularly that produced in England during the years 1000–1100, the time of Æthelred, Cnut and William the Conqueror. It is designed to allow you to see samples of handwriting from the period and to compare them with each other quickly and easily. "
- Italian Paleography (Newberry Library)"The Italian Paleography website presents 102 Italian documents and manuscripts written between 1300 and 1700, with tools for deciphering them and learning about their social, cultural, and institutional settings."
Projects on annotations
- A digital archive of early modern annotated books"Annotated Books Online is a virtual research environment for scholars and students interested in historical reading practices. It is part of the research project “A Collaboratory for the Study of Reading and the Circulation of Ideas in Early Modern Europe” funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) and co-ordinated by Arnoud Visser. Generous additional funding was provided by Anthony Grafton for the edition of Gabriel Harvey’s annotations to Livy (Mellon Foundation)."
- The Archaeology of Reading"The Archaeology of Reading in Early Modern Europe (AOR) uses digital technologies to enable the systematic exploration of the historical reading practices of Renaissance scholars nearly 450 years ago. This is possible through AOR’s corpus of thirty-six fully digitized and searchable versions of early printed books filled with tens of thousands of handwritten notes, left by two of the most dedicated readers of the early modern period: John Dee and Gabriel Harvey."