These manuscripts form a crucial evidence base for the humanities, and research into their histories has important benefits for a wide range of disciplines.Īs the result of changes of ownership over the centuries, medieval and Renaissance manuscripts are now spread all over the world, in collections across Europe, North America, South America, Asia, and Australasia. They are also objects of research in their own right, with disciplines such as paleography and codicology examining the production, distribution, and history of manuscripts, together with the people and institutions who created, used, owned, and collected them. They provide inspiration and illustrations for films, novels, and artworks, and increasingly for sharing on social media. They provide crucial evidence for research in many disciplines, including textual and literary studies, history, cultural heritage, and the fine arts. Ranging from elaborately decorated volumes to individual documents and single pages, they often feature among the treasures of libraries, museums, galleries, and archives, and are frequently the focus of exhibitions and events in these institutions.

Hundreds of thousands of European medieval and Renaissance manuscripts have survived until the present day. It enables large-scale analysis and visualization of their history and movements over the centuries. The second project, Mapping Manuscript Migrations, funded by the Trans-Atlantic Platform under its Digging into Data Challenge from 2017 to 2019, extends the earlier work to a much larger scale, and implements a Linked Open Data framework for combining and managing data related to medieval and Renaissance manuscripts. It investigated ways of reconstructing the history of this vast, but now-dispersed collection, by bringing together data from a range of digital and non-digital sources. The first, funded by the European Union between 20, focused on the manuscript collection assembled in the nineteenth century by Sir Thomas Phillipps. This article reports on recent work in manuscript studies, drawing on two major international projects. Discovering these manuscripts is heavily dependent on the quality and consistency of descriptive data about them, but the current situation is very mixed and inconsistent, despite several national programmes (such as Manuscriptorium in the Czech Republic, e-codices in Switzerland, and Biblissima in France) and a major international effort by Europeana. These manuscripts are increasingly being made available in digital formats, although the extent is perhaps less than expected a recent report on the situation in Germany estimated that only about 7.5% of the country’s 60,000 manuscripts had been digitized.

This article examines issues affecting the reuse of data relating to collections of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts in libraries, museums and archives.

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