Temporary

24 January 2014

State Library of Victoria Medieval Manuscripts Online


The Ascension of Christ, historiated initial ‘C’, Italy, 15C
(State Library of Victoria, RARES 096 IL I)
The State Library of Victoria in Melbourne holds 27 medieval and renaissance manuscripts. Last year the SLV finished digitising nearly all of its manuscripts along with five manuscripts held by the Art Gallery of Ballarat.

The digitisation scheme stemmed from an Australian Research Council (ARC) funded project, which involved a number of activities, including the digitisation of the manuscripts in the State Library of Victoria and select manuscripts from the Ballarat Fine Art Gallery, together with the development of on-line links with other manuscript collections in Australia and New Zealand and the contribution of research findings to manuscripts in these collections as appropriate. The project is spearheaded by Professor Margaret Manion, whose team is creating detailed entries on each manuscript which are being uploaded into the catalogue records. A full list of participating individuals and institutions is provided in each of the detailed entries.

The project followed on from the SLV's highly successful 2008 exhibition 'The Medieval Imagination', which brought together manuscripts from collections in Australia, New Zealand and Cambridge, UK, and saw over 100,000 people pass through its doors. Some of the notable SLV manuscripts displayed and now digitised include: an early thirteenth-century copy of Ptolemy's Almagest with astronomical diagrams and translated from the Arabic by Gerard of Cremona; a mid-eleventh-century manuscript of Boethius's De musica (the oldest known book in Australia); a fifteenth-century illustrated copy in English vernacular prose of Guillaume de Deguileville's The pilgrymage of the Lyfe of Manhoode and The pilgrymage of the Sowle; and a lavish fifteenth-century manuscript comprising three works (including the Scriptores historiae Augustae) commissioned for Lorenzo de Medici and still in its original binding.

As a way of promoting these manuscripts, I have listed them below with links to the digitised versions (title hyperlinks), catalogue records, many of which include provenance information, and the detailed descriptions completed to date. References cited in the records refer to:

Margaret Manion and Vera F. Vines, Medieval and Renaissance Illuminated Manuscripts in Australian Collections (Melbourne: Thames and Hudson, 1984)

K. V. Sinclair, Descriptive Catalogue of Medieval and Renaissance Western Manuscripts in Australia (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1969)

Bronwyn Stocks and Nigel Morgan (eds.), The Medieval Imagination: Illuminated Manuscripts from Cambridge, Australia and New Zealand (South Yarra, Vic: MacMillan Art Pub., 2008)

And now the manuscripts!

State Library of Victoria
1. Boethius; Anon. [sometimes called Pseudo-Hucbaldus], De musica; Musica enchiriadis [and] De organo, Northern Italy, eleventh century
Catalogue record
Description

2. Petrus Comestor; Stephen Langton, Historia scholastica; Expositio litteralis in historiam scholasticam [and] Exposito moralis in historiam scholasticam, 1200
Catalogue record

3. Epistles of St. Paul with the Glossa ordinaria by Anselm of Laon, Central Italy (Gaeta), ca. 1200
Catalogue record
Description

4. Ptolemy, Almagest, translated from the Arabic by Gerard of Cremona, Northern Italy (the Veneto?), ca. 12001225
Catalogue record
Description

5. Psalter-Hours, Use of Liège, Latin and French, Southern Netherlands (Liège), ca. 12701279
Catalogue record

6. Vulgate Bible (Leviticus) with the Glossa ordinaria of Walafrid Strabo, France (Paris), perhaps first quarter of the thirteenth century
Catalogue record
Description

7. Antiphonal (fragment), Central or Northern Italy, late thirteenth or early fourteenth century
Catalogue record
Description

8. Statutes and treatises on medieval English law, Latin and Law French, ca. 1300
Catalogue record
Description

9. Antiphonal-Hymnal, Dominican use, with excerpt of De musica of Jerome of Moravia, France (Paris), 13351345
Catalogue record

10. John of Gaddesden, Rosa Anglica, England, fourteenth century
Catalogue record

11. Flavius Josephus, De bello judaico libri VII: Latin translation attributed to Rufinus of Aquileia, Spain (Catalonia), 1400
Catalogue record

12. Forty-nine illuminated and historiated initials from Italian manuscripts (cuttings), Italy, fourteenth and fifteenth century
Catalogue record
Description

13. Giles of Rome, Archbishop of Bourges, De regimine principum, France, 1429
Catalogue record

14. Guillaume de Deguileville, The pilgrimage of the lyfe of the manhode; and, The pilgrimage of the sowle, England (Lincolnshire), ca. 1430
Catalogue record 
Description

15. Book of Hours (fragmentary), France (Besancon), ca. 14301440
Catalogue record

16. Eutropius; Paul the Deacon, Scriptores historiae Augustae and Breviarium ab urbe condita; translations and additions by Paul the Deacon; Historia Romana by Paul the Deacon, Italy (Florence), ca. 1479
Catalogue record

17. Book of Hours, Use of York, Flanders (Bruges), ca. 1470ca. 1490
Catalogue record
Description

18. Book of Hours, Use of Paris, France (Paris), ca. 1490
Catalogue record
Description

19. Book of Hours, Use of Rome, Southern Netherlands, ca. 1490
Catalogue record

20. St. Jerome, Commentaries on Isaiah, Netherlands (Roermond, Limburg), 1497
Catalogue record

21. 16. St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, Augustini opera, fifteenth century
Catalogue record
Description

22. Liber Obsequialis, Use of Constance, and Breviary (fragment), Latin and German, Southern(?) Germany, (1) fifteenth and (2) early twelfth century
Catalogue record
Description

23. Pontifical, for the Bishop of Mirepoix, France, ca. 1500ca. 1520
Catalogue record

24. Liber antiphonarius Romanus, 1566
Catalogue record


Art Gallery of Ballarat
1. Eadmer (d. 1124?); Bede, Life of St Wilfrid and extracts from Bede's Historia ecclesiastica, Northern England, 1150
Catalogue record

2. Pontifical, with excerpts from the Summa theologia of St Thomas Aquinas and the Regula ad inveniendum principium lunae (added 1451), Italy (Veneto or Emilia-Romagna), ca. 13501380
Catalogue record

3. Calendar and medical diagrams, Northeast England (Durham?), ca. 14001420
Catalogue record

4. Book of Hours, Use of Rome, Italy (Florence), 1450
Catalogue record

5. Prayer Book, Southern Netherlands, ca. 1544
Catalogue record

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