I recently learnt, through my colleague Laetitia Ciccolini, that the National Library in Rome has digitized and released online some of their medieval manuscripts[1]. My tweet about it has had much more echo than I expected, which I’d interpret as a sign that this digital repository was still little known:
Did you know? 69 medieval manuscripts now at the National library in Rome are online!
— Pierre Chambert-Protat (@chaprot) July 25, 2019
➡️ https://t.co/miDOWO2Gnj
E.g. this copy of Augustine’s De Genesi ad litteram dating from the first half of the 6th century (😱😱😱), MS Sess. 13, f. 81v-82r (also #notalion) pic.twitter.com/JXewfdptGB
In fact, the repository is regrettably poorly devised, if not frankly user-hostile. You can’t easily know what books are or aren’t available, since the shelfmarks are not displayed — and the “Advanced Search” hardly helps. The embedded reader doesn’t allow you to do much, aside blindfoldedly leafing through the book; there is no easy way to provide a usable link to this or that page, and of course there isn’t a download button anywhere, not even for individual pictures. All beginner’s mistakes that ought to disappear from all medieval manuscripts digital repositories; and we can only hope that the BNC Rome will sometime come up with a newer version of their platform that allows researchers to actually work on their resources.
In the meantime, I thought it useful to provide at least a handlist of the 69 manuscripts that are indeed available.
Continuer la lecture de Digitized medieval manuscripts of the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Roma
Notes. —- They also have a repository for “Modern and Contemporary Manuscripts” which, as for now, helds 6’191 items. [↩]