“In the beginning”...bringing the scrolls of Genesis and the Ten Commandments online

A little over a year ago, we helped put online five manuscripts of the Dead Sea Scrolls—ancient documents that include the oldest known biblical manuscripts in existence. Written more than 2,000 years ago on pieces of parchment and papyrus, they were preserved by the hot, dry desert climate and the darkness of the caves in which they were hidden. The Scrolls are possibly the most important archaeological discovery of the 20th century.

Today, we’re helping put more of these ancient treasures online. The Israel Antiquities Authority is launching the Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library, an online collection of some 5,000 images of scroll fragments, at a quality never seen before. The texts include one of the earliest known copies of the Book of Deuteronomy, which includes the Ten Commandments; part of Chapter 1 of the Book of Genesis, which describes the creation of the world; and hundreds more 2,000-year-old texts, shedding light on the time when Jesus lived and preached, and on the history of Judaism.

Click here to read this article from Google

The Geese Book – medieval manuscript now available online

One of the most interesting manuscripts of the late Middle Ages is now available online – The Geese Book, a lavishly and whimsically illuminated, two-volume liturgical book, can now be accessed through a project from the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.

The Geese Book was produced in Nuremberg, Germany between 1503 and 1510, and gives the complete liturgy compiled for the parish of St. Lorenz, which was used until the Reformation was introduced in the city in 1525.

The volumes are renowned for their high quality decorative illumination including fanciful pictures, provocative and satirical imagery of animals, dragons, and wild people. The work takes its name from an enigmatic illustration showing a choir of geese singing from a large chant manuscript with a wolf as their choirmaster. A fox, who has joined the choir, extends his paw menacingly in the direction of one of the geese.

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

Medieval Arabic manuscripts, East India Company papers, to go online

The British Library and Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development have unveiled an ambitious partnership to transform people’s understanding of the history of the Middle East, and the region’s relationship with Britain and the rest of the world.

The £8.7 million project was announced this morning at the British Library’s flagship building in St Pancras, London. Its plans will digitise more than 500,000 pages from the archives of the East India Company and India Office, in addition to 25,000 pages of medieval Arabic manuscripts – all of which will be made freely available online for the first time.

The digitisation will take place over the next three years at the British Library, in close cooperation with the new Qatar National Library, and much information will be available in both Arabic and English. Once live, the site will also offer users the opportunity to add their own Gulf-related stories and memories, enabling them to contribute to the online resource, whether by sharing images of mementoes and old photographs, or by recounting the stories their grandparents once told them. In this way, historical items from living memory will be added to the archive of items dating back several centuries.

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

European medieval and WWI history digital archiving project gets €6.5m in EU funding

Trinity College Dublin (TCD) is leading a four-year collaborative project called CENDARI to digitise geographically dispersed historical data from the medieval European era and from World War I so scholars, and eventually the public, will be able to access everything from illuminated medieval gospels to WWI propaganda using one online portal.

 The CENDARI project, which stands for Collaborative European Digital Archive Infrastructure, has just been awarded €6.5m by the European Commission's Seventh Framework Programme to carry out the project.

 Apparently the aim is for CENDARI to provide a model that is not only relevant for the digitisation of historical data, but also for other scientific fields, such as biomedical images and environmental data.

Click here to read this article from Silicon Republic

University of Oxford and Vatican to digitize 1.5 million pages of historical texts

A collaboration between the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Library and the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana at the Vatican will bring historical texts dating back to the Middle Ages into the digital era. 1.5 million pages from both collections will be digitised and made publicly available.

The Bodleian Libraries and the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana will embark on a new collaborative digitisation project with the aim of opening up repositories of medieval and early modern texts and making a selection of their remarkable treasures freely available online to researchers and the general public worldwide.

The digitised collections will be in three subject areas: Greek manuscripts, 15th-century printed books (incunabula) and Hebrew manuscripts and early printed books. These areas have been chosen for the strength of the collections in both libraries and their importance for scholarship in their respective fields. The project will span four years and will result in approximately 1.5 million pages being made available in digital format

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

Medieval Monastic Library of Lorsch recreated online

The unique holdings of the medieval monastic library of Lorsch, currently scattered over 68 libraries worldwide, are being re-compiled into a virtual library. Heidelberg University Library and local government officials in Germany have been working since March of 2010 to publish the 330 surviving Lorsch manuscripts and manuscript fragments online. The project by the name of “Bibliotheca Laureshamensis – digital” is being funded by the State of Hesse with 450.000 euros and will continue through 2013.

“The virtual reconstruction of the former library of Lorsch Abbey, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, gives us the chance to study the abbey’s intellectual foundation, and the Carolingian world view in general, in depth for the first time”, said Eva Kühne-Hörmann, the Hessian Minister of Higher Education, Research and the Arts, during the presentation of the project. “This outstanding endeavour, which is of great interest to the State of Hesse, has united experts from Hesse and Baden-Württemberg in an exemplary, cross-border cooperative effort that reflects the historic significance and geographical location of the monastic library of Lorsch between the palatinate and the diocese of Mainz.”

The Bibliotheca Laureshamensis – digital project will see the digitisation of the abbey’s codices. In addition, scientific descriptions detailing the origin, owners, appearance, handwriting and content of the library’s manuscripts will be compiled in a project database. For the first time, researchers will have comprehensive and systematic access to the Lorsch manuscripts, a fact that opens up entirely new possibilities of research.

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

The Walters Art Museum Receives $265,000 NEH Grant to Digitize Over 100 Flemish Manuscripts

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has granted the Walters Art Museum $265,000 for a three-year project to digitize, catalog and distribute 113 illuminated medieval manuscripts from Flanders, present-day northeastern France and Belgium. This project, Imaging the Hours: Creating a Digital Resource of Flemish Manuscripts, will digitize 45,000 pages of text with over 3,000 pages of illumination from the 13th through 16th centuries. A highlight will be the digitization of a collection of 80 Books of Hours—prayer books of personal devotion—which were the “bestsellers” of the Middle Ages, often sumptuously illuminated in gold and painted by masters of the time.

“Just as the Walters provides access without admission fee to our permanent collection, we are also making it available as part of our public mission. The museum is grateful to the NEH for its continued generous financial support allowing us to provide a free worldwide online resource of preservation-quality, digital manuscript surrogates to anyone with an Internet connection,” said Walters Director Gary Vikan.

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

Mapping the Medieval Countryside project receives £528,000 in funding

A new project from King’s College London and the University of Winchester will allow researchers to explore the lands of medieval England as never before has received over half a million pounds in funding.

The three-year project is led by medieval historian Professor Michael Hicks at Winchester, and Paul Spence, Senior Lecturer at Kings’ College London’s Department of Digital Humanities. It will digitise hundreds of years worth of records showing the land held by tenants at the time of their death. The ‘Mapping the Medieval Countryside: The Fifteenth Century Inquisitions Post Mortem’ project has been made possible by a £528,000 grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

Medieval records of the Church Courts of York now online

Fascinating records from the Church Courts of York are now available on-line at the Borthwick Institute for Archives at the University of York, allowing historians new insights into a huge variety of topics over many centuries.

From arguments about church taxes on liquorice, roses and pigeon dung, to families disputing wills and inheritance, the records paint a vivid picture of the social, economic, political, religious and emotional world of people living in a period from the 14th to 19th centuries.

Digitisation of the York Cause Papers, which record the proceedings of the ecclesiastical courts of York from 1300 to 1858, has been funded through a grant from JISC, the UK’s technology consortium for higher and further education. The development means the papers are set to become one of the most widely-used historical records in the UK.

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

Computers Piece Together Scattered Medieval Scrolls

It's like something out of "The Da Vinci Code": Hundreds of thousands of fragments from medieval religious scrolls are scattered across the globe. How will scholars put them back together?

The answer, according to scientists at Tel Aviv University, is to use computer software based on facial recognition technology. But instead of recognizing faces, this software recognizes fragments thought to be part of the same work. Then, the program virtually "glues" the pieces back together.

This enables researchers to digitally join a collection of more than 200,000 fragmentary Jewish texts, called the Cairo Genizah, found in the late 1800s in the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo. The Cairo Genizah texts date from the ninth to the 19th centuries, and they're dispersed amongst more than 70 libraries worldwide. Researchers will report on their progress in digitally reuniting the Cairo Genizah during the second week in November at the 2011 IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision in Barcelona.

Click here to read this article from LiveScience

Library completes digitization of medieval manuscripts

The secrets of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library on the sixth floor of Van Pelt Library have now been revealed on the internet. A two-year grant funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities has allowed Penn to finish digitizing medieval and Renaissance manuscripts produced before 1601. A second grant was secured in March to digitize manuscripts from 1601 to 1800.

“Penn in Hand: Selected Manuscripts,” an online collection, currently offers over 1,400 online facsimiles of manuscripts. The collection also includes over 100 facsimiles of the Lawrence J. Schoenberg Collection, a collection of late medieval and early modern manuscripts donated in April by 1953 College graduate and Wharton MBA recipient Lawrence Schoenberg.

Van Pelt is one of the first American libraries to have a large public digitized collection that is free of charge, said Nancy Shawcross, curator of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library.


Click here to read this article from the Daily Pennsylvanian 

Lost and Found: The Secrets of Archimedes opens at the Walters

In 1999, the Walters Art Museum and a team of researchers began a project to read the erased texts of The Archimedes Palimpsest—the oldest surviving copy of works by the greatest mathematical genius of antiquity. Over 12 years, many techniques were employed by over 80 scientists and scholars in the fields of conservation, imaging and classical studies. The exhibition Lost and Found: The Secrets of Archimedes will tell the story of The Archimedes Palimpsest’s journey and the discovery of new scientific, philosophical and political texts from the ancient world. This medieval manuscript demonstrates that Archimedes discovered the mathematics of infinity, mathematical physics and combinatorics—a branch of mathematics used in modern computing. This exhibition began yesterday at the Walters from and will run until January 1, 2012.

Archimedes lived in the Greek city of Syracuse in the third century B.C. He was a brilliant mathematician, physicist, inventor, engineer and astronomer. In 10th-century Constantinople (present day Istanbul), an anonymous scribe copied the Archimedes treatise in the original Greek onto parchment. In the 13th century, a monk erased the Archimedes text, cut the pages along the center fold, rotated the leaves 90 degrees and folded them in half. The parchment was then recycled, together with the parchment of other books, to create a Greek Orthodox prayer book. This process is called palimpsesting; the result of the process is a palimpsest.

Click here to read this article from History of the Ancient World

Oxford scanner reveals secrets of documents, ancient and modern

A scanner which combines the convenience of a desktop scanner with the functionality of a powerful laboratory imaging device has been developed at the University of Oxford’s Classics Department, and is now being commercialised by a new company Oxford Multi Spectral Limited which was today spun out by the University’s technology transfer company Isis Innovation.

The scanner was developed for imaging ancient papyri and the technology has been used to successfully scan, restore and archive over a quarter of a million historically significant manuscripts.

Click here to read this article from History of the Ancient World

John Rylands Library to digitize late medieval Koran

Technology is to enable scholars for the first time to study a complete manuscript of one of the world’s most important and largest Korans. The book’s ornate 88 x 60 x 18 cm pages – the size of a plasma television – are kept at The University of Manchester’s John Rylands Library.

Experts at the John Rylands Library are using digital technology and the internet to reunite the 470 page Rylands Koran of Kansuh al-Ghuri with two missing leaves, discovered in the 1970s at the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin.

Up to now, scholars have been unable to study the precious items – thought to be at least 500 years old – because they are too fragile. But now, the reunited digitised resource will be freely available for research, teaching and learning using Turning the Pages technology on a dedicated website.

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

See also this news report from the BBC

See also this news report from the Mail Online

Gale Adds Medieval and Renaissance Works to British Literary Manuscripts Online

Gale, part of Cengage Learning, today announced the release of British Literary Manuscripts Online, Medieval and Renaissance, the second installment of the British Literary Manuscripts Online series. Following the release of the first installment in May 2009, this new digital archive brings approximately 565,000 pages of unique author manuscripts into the hands of students, educators and researchers.

“This fascinating series, selected from a multitude of leading world libraries, delivers insights into the culture and context surrounding centuries of British literary achievement,” said Jim Draper, vice president and publisher, Gale. “Gale is proud to be the first publisher to conceptualize and publish a collection of this vast range and depth.”

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

Lindisfarne Gospels and the Old English Hexateuch added to British Library Digitised Manuscripts

We are delighted to announce that full colour images of two iconic treasures, the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Old English Hexateuch, have been added to our Digitised Manuscripts site.

The Lindisfarne Gospels is one of the great masterpieces of medieval western art. Dated conventionally to the first decades of the 8th century, the manuscript is adorned with beautiful carpet-pages, miniatures of the evangelists, and decorated initials.

Click here to read the full post from the British Library

The Bangor Pontifical Project celebrates first anniversary

The Bangor Pontifical Project, launched one year ago by Bangor University and Bangor Cathedral in Wales, has just reached its first significant milestone. Completion of phase one, funded by a Welsh Assembly grant, has enabled conservation and rebinding of the Bangor Pontifical and digitization of its 340 pages. The manuscript was photographed by the cutting-edge Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music (DIAMM) last spring, and viewers may now zoom in on the excellent high-quality images via the open access Bangor Pontifical Project website.

The Bangor Pontifical is the only complete liturgical manuscript known to survive from the medieval diocese of Bangor, and one of just two extant books from medieval Wales as a whole to contain substantial plainchant notation. Inscribed as belonging originally to Anian, bishop of Bangor, it is now confidently dated to the first quarter of the fourteenth century.

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

Reading Europe: European culture through the book

Europeana, Europe’s digital library, museum and archive, has launched an online exhibitions that explore highlights of the continent’s literature. Reading Europe: European culture through the book showcases the full texts of 1,000 of Europeana’s most fascinating books, from medieval cookbooks to 18th century English bestsellers.

Many literary masterpieces can be found in their earliest printings, including Don Quixote in the first Spanish edition and Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot in the first Russian edition. Visitors can browse richly decorated manuscripts and discover compelling historical works like Jammers Minde – the fascinating 17th century autobiography of a King’s daughter and her 22-year imprisonment in Copenhagen’s infamous Blue Tower. Reading Europe offers a unique opportunity to view literary gems in 32 languages, from Albanian to Yiddish.

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

British Library digitises Greek manuscripts

The British Library has digitised over a quarter of its Greek manuscripts (284 volumes) for the first time and made them freely available online at www.bl.uk/manuscripts thanks to a generous grant from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation.

The website provides researchers with access to high quality digital images of a major part of the British Library’s Greek manuscripts collection, supported by enhanced metadata which enables users to search using key words.

Scot McKendrick, Head of History and Classical Studies at the British Library, said, “This website offers everyone, wherever they may be in the world, the opportunity to engage for the first time with over 100,000 pages of newly digitised, unique manuscripts which provide direct insights into the rich written legacy of the Greeks of classical antiquity, Byzantine times, the Renaissance and beyond. The Stavros Niarchos Foundation, which funded this project, has generously agreed to fund a second phase and we look forward to presenting a further 250 manuscripts in full in 2012.”

Click here to read the article and video on Medievalists.net

Medievalists work to restore damaged 14th century manuscript

A team of medieval scholars are undertaking a project to restore a 14th century manuscript, which was had been badly damaged in the Second World War, and was believed to have been unrecoverable.

Gregory Heyworth, associate professor of English at the University of Mississippi, and three students are using a portable, high-power, multispectral digital imaging laboratory to reveal writing found in a text called Les Esches d’Amour (The Chess of Love), which is a 14th century Middle French poem.

Click here to read the article on Medievalists.net