Medieval and Renaissance Mediterranean Manuscripts

It is not just Europe’s written culture of the period up to 1600 that was preserved by scribes in individually made manuscripts, but also that of Ancient Greece and Rome.  Each manuscript is a unique witness to this transmission, and has a part to play in the study of history and texts. This has been recognized by Princeton’s great donors, including Robert Garrett, Grenville Kane, Robert H. Taylor, and the Scheide family, and also by the Library’s curators. Medieval and Renaissance history, and the histories of written texts, are central to the research and pedagogy undertaken at the university. The power of digitization to democratize access to early European manuscripts has been recognized by our peers: those of Yale, Harvard, and Penn have all been digitized; all the medieval manuscripts in the City of Philadelphia have been digitized. It is high time that Princeton digitized its manuscripts, and added them to the international online corpus. Digitization does not just transform access to these materials, it also enables a whole range of possibilities for humanities computing, from optical character recognition and to art historical comparison and presentation.