Library Guides: Resources for Medieval Manuscript Studies: Home

Special Collections

These resources are available in Ellis Library to MU students, faculty, staff, and visitors. Selected resources are also available online:

Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts

This page is an inventory of all medieval and Renaissance manuscript materials in Special Collections with links to digitized content where applicable.

Fragmenta Manuscripta Collection

Fragmenta Manuscripta is a collection of over 200 manuscript leaves and fragments dating from the eighth to the seventeenth century. Originally gathered by seventeenth century book collector John Bagford, the collection offers scholars examples of book hands, decorations, and texts.

Pages from the Past Collection

This collection includes single leaves from manuscript and printed books to 1873 and is completely digitized.

Digital Collections

British Library Digitized Manuscripts
Almost 900 Greek manuscripts and some of the most important papyri, ranging in date from the first to the 18th centuries, are now included in the Digitised Manuscripts site.
Digital Scriptorium
Digital Scriptorium is a growing consortium of American libraries and museums committed to free online access to their collections of pre-modern manuscripts. The website unites scattered resources from many institutions into a national digital platform for teaching and scholarly research.
Fitzwilliam Museum, Illuminated
ILLUMINATED invites you to view multiple images within each manuscript, zoom in on details, discover drawings hidden beneath the painted surfaces, learn about the pigments and the advanced scientific methods used for their identification, and explore the relationships between scribes, artists and original owners.
Harvard University Medieval Manuscripts
Assembled through gifts and purchase over the past two centuries, this collection includes works in Latin, Greek, and most of the vernacular languages of Europe that are the primary sources for the study of the literature, art, history, music, philosophy, and theology of the periods.
J. Paul Getty Museum Manuscripts
The Museum has built an expansive and balanced representation of the art form, with holdings totaling over 200 complete books and individual leaves that span the ninth to sixteenth centuries.
Johns Hopkins University Digital Library of Medieval Manuscripts
The Digital Library of Medieval Manuscripts (DLMM) currently encompasses the Roman de la Rose Digital Library and the Christine de Pizan Digital Scriptorium. It offers a research environment in which the 13th-century narrative of the Rose and the works of late 14th/early 15th-century author, Christine de Pizan, can be explored in their manuscript context.
Lawrence J. Schoenberg Collection, Univerisity of Pennsylvania Libraries
The Lawrence J. Schoenberg Collection includes nearly three hundred manuscripts and documents ranging in date from ca. 1900BC to the 20th century, with particular focus on the eras of the Middle Ages and Renaissance.
Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts at the Beinecke Library
Examples from the Library's Medieval and Renaissance collections documenting the history of human thought from the Byzantine era through 1600.
Morgan Library and Museum Medieval & Renaissance Manuscripts
There are thousands of images from The Morgan Library & Museum’s renowned collection of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts available on this website.
New York Public Library Digitized Manuscripts
The New York Public Library possesses one of the largest and finest collections of medieval and Renaissance illuminated manuscripts in North America.
Walters Art Museum, Manuscripts and Rare Books
With more than 900 illuminated manuscripts, 1,250 of the first printed books (ca. 1455 - 1500), and an important collection of post-1500 deluxe editions, this extraordinary collection chronicles the art of the book over more than 1,000 years.
Wellcome Library Medieval and Early Modern Manuscripts

Resources for Medieval Manuscript Studies

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