Facsimiles of Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts: Library Websites: Digital Images

The Online Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts is a searchable database of some of the western illuminated manuscripts in the British Library. The Library holds one of the richest collections of medieval and renaissance manuscripts in the world.

The Catalogue includes descriptions and images of western manuscripts with pictorial and decorative embellishments, from fully painted miniatures to decorated initials. In order to maximize the number of images, the Catalogue includes digital scans of existing slides as well newly-commissioned digital images. As a result, the image quality can vary.

The illuminated manuscripts in the following collections are included in the Catalogue: Additional, Arundel; Burney; Egerton; Hargrave; Harley; Henry Davis; Hirsch; King’s; Lansdowne; Sloane; Royal; Stowe and Yates Thompson (Oriental, for Hebrew illuminated manuscripts). PLEASE NOTE: manuscripts in the Cotton collection are not yet included in the Catalogue.

Search across a consortium of American libraries and museums' collections of digitized pre-modern manuscripts.

Houghton Library's distinguished collection of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts includes works in Latin, Greek, and vernacular languages of Europe.

Collaborative project of Bibliotheque Mazarine, Bibliotheque Sainte-Genevieve, le CNRS- Institute de Recherche et d'Histoire des Textes, le Centre Informatique National de l'Enseignement Superieur, le Ministere de l'Education nationale. Advanced search screen provides index lists of manuscript title and numbers, artist/school,subject of illumination, etc. Selected pages and illuminations have been digitized. The database contains more than 1600 manuscripts and 31,000 images.

The Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge is a magnificent collection of over 600 medieval and Renaissance manuscripts and around 8,000 books printed prior to 1850. Over 500 manuscripts have been digitized. A considerable portion of the collection was bequeathed to the College by Matthew Parker (1505-1575) in 1575. Matthew Parker was a master of the College, antiquarian, historian, and Archbishop of Canterbury. The Parker Library has one of the most significant collections of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts in the world. Stanford University Libraries has partnered with Corpus Christi College, Cambridge since the inception of Parker on the Web, contributing technical expertise from its digital library team.

CORSAIR is a single database providing unified access to over 250,000 records for medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, rare and reference books, literary and historical manuscripts, music scores, ancient seals and tablets, drawings, prints, and other art objects. CORSAIR also serves as the gateway to one of the largest repositories of medieval images on the Internet, providing links to more than 15,000 digitized images from the Morgan's collection of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts. Users may page through every illustrated leaf within a manuscript, or search for individual images by place or date of creation, artist's name, illustration type, and subject.

Website by Robert D. Peckham, University of Tennessee at Martin, provides links to collections of fully digitized medieval manuscripts (text only); links to individual digitized manuscripts (including illuminated mss.); links to collections of selected medieval manuscript pages (including illuminated mss).