Digitizing the University of Pennsylvania's Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts, 1000-1600

FAIN: PW-50296-09

University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, PA 19104-6205)
Nancy M. Shawcross (Project Director: August 2008 to November 2011)

The digitization of 800 codices, documents, and fragments constituting the entirety of medieval and Renaissance primary sources held by the university's Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Penn proposes to produce & make freely available on the Internet digital facsimiles of its collection of European manuscripts from 1000 to 1600. With a total project cost of $790,272, Penn requests $292,958 from NEH to fund salary & fringe benefits for 2 years for 1 full-time digital data coordinator & 2 full-time digital camera operators. Penn's collection comprises approximately 800 discrete items, totaling approximately 320,000 pages and offers important research material in the fields of art history; English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish literatures; European political, social, and economic history; the history of science and technology, including alchemy; the history of witchcraft; legal studies; music; religious studies; and philosophy. The project will provide 3 entry points for the facsimiles: access through a hot link in the WorldCat and local cataloging records, access via Digital Scriptorium, and access through a project-specific website with faceted searching.

Associated Products

Penn in Hand: Selected Manuscripts (Web Resource)
Title: Penn in Hand: Selected Manuscripts
Author: Nancy Shawcross
Abstract: The site offers bibliographic information and digital facsimiles for selected collections of manuscript codices, texts, documents, papers, and leaves held by Penn's Rare Book & Manuscript Library as well as those privately owned by Lawrence J. Schoenberg (C'53, WG'56). Penn holds over 2,000 Western manuscripts produced before the 19th century; medieval and Renaissance manuscripts comprise approximately 900 items, the earliest dating from 1000 A.D. Its holdings of Indic manuscripts is the largest in the Western hemisphere with more than 3,000 items. The Lawrence J. Schoenberg Collection emphasizes secular topics, especially science and mathematics, and includes tablets from the 21st to 18th centuries B.C.
Year: 2009
Primary URL: http://dla.library.upenn.edu/dla/medren/index.html
Primary URL Description: front page for the site

Machaut in the Book: Representations of Authorship in Late Medieval Manuscripts (Article)
Title: Machaut in the Book: Representations of Authorship in Late Medieval Manuscripts
Author: Karen L Fresco
Abstract: This two-year project, funded by the Mellon Foundation and lead by Deborah McGrady (UVA) with Ben Albritton (Stanford), is titled "Machaut in the Book: Representations of Authorship in Late Medieval Manuscripts." The research will culminate with a spring conference in 2013 at UVA, followed by a published collection of essays based on team members' research.
Year: 2013

Obscurity and Memory in Late Medieval Latin Manuscript Culture: The Case of the "Summarium Biblie" (Book)
Title: Obscurity and Memory in Late Medieval Latin Manuscript Culture: The Case of the "Summarium Biblie"
Author: Lucie Dolezalova
Abstract: An examination of the biblical mnemonic aid "Summarium Biblie," which during the Middle Ages was an extremely popular (even omnipresent) text, which is today very obscure to us.
Year: 2012
Primary URL: http://www.academia.edu/2166043/Obscurity_and_Memory_in_Late_Medieval_Latin_Manuscript_Culture_The_Case_of_the_Summarium_Biblie
Primary URL Description: The website provides an image of the cover and the table of contents and information about ordering. In the book an image from a Penn manuscript was used (Figure 11) and discussed on pages 136-137. The footnote provides the url for the website funded by the NEH.

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