Manuscript Studies – RSA Digital Resources

vHMML: Online Resources for the Study of Manuscript Cultures

https://www.vhmml.org/

vHMML offers resources and tools for the study of medieval, Renaissance, and early modern manuscripts, archives, and art and currently features manuscript and art cultures from Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. The site houses high-resolution images of manuscripts, many of them digitized as part of HMML’s global mission to preserve and share important, endangered, and inaccessible manuscript collections through digital photography, archiving, and cataloging. It also contains descriptions of manuscripts from HMML’s legacy microfilm collection, with scans of some of these films.

Power of Petitioning in Seventeenth-Century England

https://petitioning.history.ac.uk/

‘The Power of Petitioning in Seventeenth-Century England’ is a two-year project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council which began in January 2019. The project team includes Brodie Waddell (Birkbeck), Jason Peacey (UCL) and Sharon Howard (Birkbeck), supported by many other scholars and contributors. This study will be the first to examine petitioning systematically at all levels of English government over the whole century. The project will create a valuable new resource by transcribing and digitising a corpus drawn from seven key collections of petitions held at national and local archives, totalling over 2,000 manuscripts. This corpus, when combined with careful contextualisation, allows us to offer new answers to crucial questions about the major social and political changes that unfolded in this formative period.

Marburger Repertorium zur Ubersetzungsliteratur im deutschen Fruhhumanismus (MRFH)

The MRFH provides access to early humanist translators and their German works. The project covers the university and the Heidelberg court, as well as the cities of Strasbourg, Basel, Augsburg, and Nuremberg. A total of 144 works from the period of 1450–1500 are listed. The project also covers the transition from manuscripts to printed books. A total of 122 manuscripts and 145 incunabula have been examined and described in detail. The later printed tradition up to the year 1600 has only been included in short entries, which include 273 printings from the sixteenth century. Digital images of manuscripts and prints have been incorporated.

Secrets of Craft and Nature in Renaissance France. A Digital Critical Edition and English Translation of BnF Ms. Fr. 640

A production of the Making and Knowing Project, this edition provides a transcription and English translation of Ms. Fr. 640, composed by an anonymous “author-practitioner” in 1580s Toulouse and now held by the Bibliothèque nationale de France. This manuscript offers unique firsthand insight into making and materials from a time when artists were scientists. The research resources in this edition explore the manuscript’s context and diverse topics.

Manuscript Pamphleteering in Early Stuart England

Manuscript Pamphleteering in Early Stuart England offers a survey of the vast hidden archive of early Stuart England’s manuscript pamphlets.

GEMMS: Gateway to Early Modern Manuscript Sermons

The Gateway to Early Modern Manuscript Sermons (GEMMS) is a SSHRC-funded project to create an open-access, group-sourced, comprehensive, fully searchable, online bibliographic database of early modern (1530-1715) sermon manuscripts from the British Isles and North America.

The database is a finding aid for all types of manuscripts related to sermons, including complete sermons, sermon notes and reports of sermons, held in numerous repositories in the UK, Ireland, the USA and Canada. GEMMS endeavours to make manuscript sermons more accessible for a wide variety of researchers, to encourage research on manuscript sermons and to provide a forum for the development of an online community of sermon scholars.

Early Stuart Libels

Early Stuart Libels is a web-based edition of early seventeenth-century English political poetry from manuscript sources. It brings into the public domain over 350 poems, many of which have never before been published. The edition is divided into chronological and thematic sections for ease of navigation. It is fully searchable by name and source.

Mapping Manuscript Migrations

Mapping Manuscript Migrations (MMM) allows users to find and study medieval and Renaissance manuscripts and their movements and navigate the network of connections between people, institutions, and places associated with these manuscripts.

Rome Reborn: The Vatican Library and Renaissance Culture

A Library of Congress Exhibition from 8 January–30 April 1993 (Vatican Library manuscripts). This older version of the site has some additional images and better image credits.

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 copy specific records.