Subject Guide ~ Medieval and Renaissance Studies

Excellent guide to using medieval manuscripts by Cynthia Turner Camp, Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Georgia.

The Library holds around 11,000 manuscripts, 2,500 papyri, 43 ostraka, 566 incunabula, 1,681 sixteenth century printed books, 592 periodicals on related subjects and a total of 126,527 books dating from the seventeenth to the twentieth century.

The Biblioteca Digital Hispánica is the digital library of the National Library of Spain. It provides free access to thousands of digitized documents, including printed books, manuscripts, drawings, engravings, brochures, posters, photographs, maps, atlases, sheet music, historical press and sound recordings.

Catalogue contains descriptions of manuscripts, drawings, and archival fonds on various media held by several departments, as well as descriptions of the Bibliothèque’s institutional archives since the 17th century.

This catalogue is exclusively in French.

Access slowly being restored after cyberattack in October 2023.

Search the British Library's collection of illuminated manuscripts.

Collection of online resources by Cynthia Turner Camp, Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Georgia.

Free access to the Vatican Library’s digitized collections of manuscripts and incunabula.

An ongoing project to present digitizations of medieval manuscripts on interactive maps.

Web gateway to manuscript collections in Parisian libraries other than the Bibliotheque Nationale. In French.

Includes most of the kinds of books used between 1000 and 1500 A.D.: prayer books and poetry, Bibles and political propaganda, philosophical works, and fantastic histories.

The Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (HMML), located at Saint John's University in Collegeville, Minnesota, has created the world's largest archive of manuscript photographs in both microfilm and digital format. HMML staff travel the world to identify important manuscript libraries that need photographic preservation. HMML's archives now contain more than 140,000 complete manuscripts, totaling more than 50,000,000 manuscript pages.

Major Parisian center for manuscript studies with databases and other tools for researching and working with manuscripts in Latin, French and many other languages.

Click on "Manuscripts" then enter your keyword search.

From the Austrian Academy of Sciences Institute for Medieval Research.

Thousands of images from The Morgan Library. The images and accompanying descriptions are the product of a collaboration between the Morgan and the Index of Christian Art and spans some ten centuries of Western illumination, and contains manuscripts from all the major schools, including some of the great masterpieces of medieval manuscript art.

The collection of manuscripts held by the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek is one of the most extensive and most important of its kind: Over 41,000 Occidental and 18,000 Oriental or Asian manuscripts, around 70,000 music manuscripts, around 1,100 sets of modern papers and over 36,000 autographs secure a place for the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek among the top libraries of the world.

The SDBM continuously aggregates and updates observations of pre-modern manuscripts drawn from over 14,000 auction and sales catalogs, inventories, catalogs from institutional and private collections, and other sources that document the sales and locations of these books from around the world.

The collection spans some ten centuries of Western illumination, and contains manuscripts from all the major schools, including some of the great masterpieces of medieval manuscript art.