The Armour Archive

About the Catalogue:

As electronic resources continue to permeate scholarship, the challenge of keeping abreast with new developments becomes ever more pressing. The Catalogue of Digitized Medieval Manuscripts seeks to provide a technological solution to a simple and rather delightful "problem": the breathtaking increase in the number of medieval manuscripts available on the web in their entirety, but in a bewildering range of venues and formats. Digitizing medieval manuscripts and releasing the images on the web has a long history, but the number of digitized manuscripts rises swiftly as the cost of high-quality digital images decreases, and the expertise needed to create easily navigable web sites becomes more common. What has been notably lacking, however, is any centralized site to collect and disseminate basic information about what is available.

The Catalogue of Digitized Medieval Manuscripts offers a simple and straightforward means to discover medieval manuscripts available on the web. Very much a work in progress, the database will initially provide links to hundreds of manuscripts, which we expect quickly to grow to thousands. Basic information about the manuscripts is fully searchable, and users can also browse through the complete contents of the database. As the project develops, a richer body of information for each manuscript, and the texts in these codices, will be provided, where available.

The Catalogue first began to take form in Christopher Baswell's talk at the MLA conference in December, 2005. Generous support by the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, has enabled Professors Matthew Fisher and Christopher Baswell to develop this site, and make it publicly available in its current form through the CMRS web site. An additional grant from the UCHRI (University of California Humanities Research Institute) made possible additional data entry, and substantive refinements to the back-end technologies in place. We welcome feedback on your experience using the website. We also particularly welcome suggestions of sites offering fully digitized medieval manuscripts that are not currently found in our database: please use the "Suggest a Site" link below.

Science Daily wrote:...

Fisher set out two years ago to remedy the situation. With the assistance of two graduate students in English, a computer developer from UCLA's Center for Digital Humanities and Christopher Baswell, a former UCLA professor of English, Fisher decided to collect links to every manuscript from the eighth to the 15th century that had been fully digitized by any library, archive, institute or private owner anywhere in the world.

In December 2008, the group launched the initial results. The UCLA-based Catalogue of Digitized Medieval Manuscripts now links to nearly 1,000 manuscripts by 193 authors in 20 languages from 59 libraries around the world, allowing users to flit from England to France to Switzerland to the United States — to name the locations of just a few of the featured repositories — with the click of a mouse.

Highlights of the virtual holdings include:

* The largest surviving collection of the works of Christine de Pizan, one of the first women in Europe to earn a living as a writer. The manuscript was commissioned by Queen Isabeau of France in 1414 and is now held by the British Library.
* An Irish copy of the Gospel of John, bound in ivory and presented to Charlemagne sometime around 800, now in the library of the monastery of St. Gall in Switzerland.
* The Junius manuscript, one of only four major manuscripts preserving poetry in Old English. Dated to around 1000, the book is now among the holdings of Oxford's Bodleian Library.

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In its first three weeks of operation, the site had almost 5,000 visitors from Australia, England, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, Austria, Canada and all over the United States. In addition to librarians and academics, the site has been visited by hobbyists from such groups as the Society for Creative Anachronism.