Guides: Subject Guide ~ Medieval and Renaissance Studies: Manuscript Collections

Using Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts

Using Medieval Manuscripts: Getting Started
Excellent guide to using medieval manuscripts by Cynthia Turner Camp, Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Georgia.

Manuscript Collections

British Literary Manuscripts Online: Medieval and Renaissance This link opens in a new window
565,000 pages of rare manuscripts from the Medieval and Early Modern periods including letters, poems, stories, plays, chronicles, religious writings and commonplace books. These works of 1,000 authors were selected from the collections of the British Library, National Library of Scotland, Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Folger Shakespeare Library. Coverage: 1120-1660.

Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts
Search the British Library's collection of illuminated manuscripts.
Digital Facsimiles
Collection of online resources by Cynthia Turner Camp, Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Georgia.
Digital Vatican Library
Free access to the Vatican Library’s digitized collections of manuscripts and incunabula.
Digitized Medieval Manuscripts
An ongoing project to present digitizations of medieval manuscripts on interactive maps.
Enluminures
Web gateway to manuscript collections in Parisian libraries other than the Bibliotheque Nationale. In French.
Free Library of Philadelphia’s digital collection of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts
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.
Hill Museum and Manuscript Library
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.
Index of Medieval Art
The Index of Christian Art has digitized slides of several personal research collections that are of significant medieval interest. Among the collections are historical photographs that document key European and Eastern monuments and notable works of art from Classical, Byzantine, and Gothic stylistic periods.
Institute de Recherche et d'Histoire des Textes
Major Parisian center for manuscript studies with databases and other tools for researching and working with manuscripts in Latin, French and many other languages.
J. Paul Getty Museum
Click on "Manuscripts" then enter your keyword search.
Mandragore (Illuminated Manuscripts at the Bibliotheque Nationale de France)
The collections of the National Library of France are home to tens of thousands of manuscripts.
Continually growing, Mandragore has more than 170,000 works. .
Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts
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.
Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts
The Illuminated Manuscripts of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek and Museum Meermanno-Westreenianum in the Netherlands.