Description of the Collection

The Special Collections Department of the Syracuse University Library is fortunate to hold a small but significant collection of Latin medieval manuscripts on parchment of Spanish, English, Italian, French, Flemish, and German/Austrian origin which range in date from the thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries. The collection includes an apocalyptic text by Telesphorus; glossed decretals of popes Innocent IV and Gregory IX; a Dominican gradual of saints; a part of the Old Testament which consists of a fragment of the Books of Tobit and Esther, and a complete Book of Judith; and six Books of Hours.

The artwork represented in these manuscripts vary in content and style from decorative initials to historiated initials, from intricately ornamented decorative floral borders to narrative scenes and borders, and from incompleted line drawings to partial and full page religious compositions.

In May of 1999, the Special Collections department embarked on a digitization project with the following objectives: to gather full descriptive information on the ten western medieval manuscripts of the collection; photograph selected images from each manuscript, and digitize these images for display on the web.

The Digital Scriptorium served as a model for gathering information for a multilevel description. Three of the levels of description--manuscript, part, & text are available in table format for each manuscript of the Syracuse University collection, in addition to a brief descriptive summary and images from selected folios. With a few minor variations, the fields and contents of the Digital Scriptorium catalog descriptions have been closely followed. A more detailed description and definition of the individual fields can be found in the Data Dictionary available at http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Scriptorium.

The index to the Medieval Manuscripts provides links to pages, each with a brief description of a particular manuscript, from which viewers can access a table with detailed catalog information on the individual manuscript or view individual images in jpg format. (Please see About Images, Acknowledgments, and Contact Information for more details on copyright, credits, and requests for tif versions of the images.)

Site Map

Medieval Manuscripts Page | Special Collections Home
Medieval Manuscripts on the Web
Citations to Medieval Manuscripts in the Collection
Additional References: Print & Web Sources
About the Images | Acknowledgments | Email & Contact Information