Biblissima Resources
This page lists all the resources developed and maintained by Biblissima's founding partners: digital libraries of manuscripts and early printed books, various types of catalogues and scientific databases, specialised corpora and textual editions, as well as resources that can be found in the Biblissima toolkit.
A large part of the resources listed below are intended to be integrated into the Biblissima portal, a unified access point to medieval and renaissance written cultural heritage (VIII-XVIII c.).
Go to the Biblissima portal (beta)
Bibale
This database contains information on everything pertaining to the transmission of medieval texts in Western Europe, from the texts themselves to the last known owners of the manuscripts, making it possible to retrace their history from one version to the next, from one book to another and from owner to owner.
Bibliothèque virtuelle des manuscrits médiévaux
Developed and maintained by the IRHT, the BVMM is the repository for all the digital reproductions of the medieval manuscripts that are currently held in municipal and university libraries in France.
Bibliothèques médievales de France
This index of catalogues, inventories and various lists of medieval manuscripts (8th-18th centuries) will be enriched with data gathered from archival collections: notarial acts pertaining to books and libraries from cities in Southwestern France (before 1500), and libraries of the Loire Valley castles and of those who visited and lived in them throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
Bibliothèques Virtuelles Humanistes
The Bibliothèques Virtuelles Humanistes programme gives access to cultural heritage documents and draws together several types of digital resources: facsimiles of works from the Renaissance that were digitised in France's Centre region or at partner institutions; Epistemon, a textual database that contains transcriptions in XML-TEI; as well as transcriptions and analyses of notarial minutes and manuscripts.
BnF archives et manuscrits
This online catalogue contains records for manuscripts and other cultural heritage items that are held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (département des Manuscrits, département des Arts du spectacle, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, etc.).
BnF Authority Files
Authority files for people and works with unique identifiers, produced by the BnF and also exported to the Virtual International Authority File (VIAF). These authority files will be the common denominator for all the different resources in Biblissima and will make it possible to link databases, digital image repositories and digital editions of medieval library inventories.
Books within Books
This database lists fragments of Hebrew manuscripts. Jewish libraries — private collections which suffered destruction more than any other — are only partially preserved today. Traces can be found of the remains of these collections in the fragments that were reused in Christian books. Through the identification, digitisation and study of these fragments it will be possible to reconstruct a virtual European Jewish library.
BUDE
This database on humanism and the transmission of texts has been online since 2007 and contains extensive information on the humanists. BUDE aims to build a vast corpus of Renaissance-era handwriting and will evolve to allow the automated comparison of different hands.
Catalogue Collectif de France (CCfr)
The Union Catalogue of France (CCFr) provides access to approximately 30 million documents held in French libraries by simultaneously querying the BnF's Catalogue générale, the University Documentation Catalogue (SUDOC), the Heritage Database (Base patrimoine) and the catalogues of major public libraries. It can also be used to locate manuscripts specifically, through the Catalogue général des manuscrits des bibliothèques publiques françaises, the Répertoire des manuscrits littéraires français du XXème siècle (PALME) and the Catalogue des Archives et manuscrits de la BnF (BAM).
Collatinus
This lemmatisation and morphological analysis tool for Latin texts is available for Windows, Mac OS and GNU/Linux (Debian). Lemmatise a single word or a whole text in Latin, translate the lemmas using the bundled Latin translation dictionaries, and display the corresponding syllable quantities and flexion.
Collatinus-web
This is the online version of Collatinus, a lemmatiser and morphological analyser for Latin texts. Use it to look up a word in 6 Latin dictionaries, to inflect a lemma, or to scan, lemmatise or analyse the morphology of a Latin text. Collatinus Web is developed by Yves Ouvrard and Philippe Verkerk, with contributions from the Biblissima team.
Collections of Greek Manuscripts in Europe
This corpus will form the basis of an interdisciplinary study and comparison of collections of Greek manuscripts in France and other European countries during the 16th and 17th centuries: physical description of the manuscripts from the selected collections, bibliography and history of the books, comparison with the information recorded in Monfaucon's Bibliotheca bibliothecarum.
Comparatio
Comparatio focusses on the liturgical chants found in medieval Latin manuscripts. It includes not only the text of the liturgical chants, but also the music, transcribed from manuscripts of diverse origins (France, Germany, Italy and Central Europe). This musical database aims to aid in identifying the origin of liturgical manuscripts through the study and comparison both of different versions of antiphons and responsories as well as of their textual variants.
Correspondence during the Renaissance
This correspondence brings to light a great deal of information about the exchange of books between scholars and book collectors. The corpus will be expanded through the study of the most important collections of correspondence, starting with Pellicier, Peiresc, Pierre Daniel, Les Chifflet, Jacques Auguste de Thou, Charles de l’Écluse, Jacques Dalechamps, Pinelli.
CR2I
The Catalogues régionaux des incunables informatisés project seeks to digitise the Catalogues régionales des incunables in MARC-XML/TEI. The incunabula records will be published online as a free and interoperable catalogue that contains all the information of the CRI enriched with links to other online catalogues and digital facsimiles of incunabula.
Dom Bernard de Montfaucon's Bibliotheca bibliothecarum manuscriptorum nova…
This digital edition will be based on the handwritten notes that were compiled for the collected inventories of manuscript libraries published in 1739. These notes, which are written in different hands, are part of the collections formerly held by the Maurists and contain a great deal of information that is not included in the original printed edition.
URL: https://www.unicaen.fr/services/puc/sources/maur/accueil
E-ktobe
This database on Syriac manuscripts provides information on their physical characteristics, colophons and text, as well as manuscript annotations. It contains a great deal of information on people, places and dates concerning the making of Syriac manuscripts.
Esprit des livres
This database indexes pre-nineteenth century catalogues for the sale of books, which are currently held in French libraries. Book sale catalogues are an essential source of information for the study of private libraries, yet they are not well-known to those who specialise in old collections of manuscripts.
Eulexis
Online lemmatiser of Ancient Greek texts: use it to look up terms in Ancient Greek dictionaries (Liddel Scott-Jones, Pape, Bailly), check the flexion of a lemma, and lemmatise a Greek text. Eulexis is developed by Philippe Verkerk, with contributions from the Biblissima team.
Europeana Regia
Europeana Regia aims to reconstruct important collections of European royal manuscripts, from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, in the form of a virtual library. The project focuses on three groups of manuscripts which are currently dispersed throughout Europe: Carolingian manuscripts, manuscripts from the Library of the Louvre during the reign of Charles V and Charles VI of France, and the library of the Aragonese kings of Naples.
Gallica
Gallica is the digital library of the Bibliothèque nationale de France and its partners and has been online since 1997. It contains digitised manuscripts and printed books, maps, periodicals, photos and a collection of illuminations.
Gloss-e
This portal is dedicated to the study of biblical gloss and commentary in the Middle Ages. The core component of the project is a digital edition of the Glossa ordinaria based on the Editio Princeps, an incunable printed in Strasbourg between 1480 and 1481.
Guide to Cataloguing Bookbindings
This guide to cataloguing medieval and early modern bookbindings includes TEI schemas for describing the bindings, developed by the Réserve des livres rares at the BnF in cooperation with the École nationale des chartes. Available for anyone to use, this tool will be particularly useful for cultural heritage institutions whose collections include old books.
Humanist Hands
This corpus of humanist autograph manuscripts will be digitised, with a particular emphasis on Libri amicorum (books of friends) that contain numerous handwriting samples. They will then be used in the development and configuration of an image comparison tool to identify the scribes and annotators of old books.
Index of Greek Manuscripts Inventories
The Greek section at the Institut de Recherche et d'Histoire des Textes has begun indexing the booklists of Greek libraries known to have existed before the fall of Constantinople, which are much less well-known than their Latin counterparts. The data gathered from this study will be added to the Bibale database.
Initiale
Maintained by the "Section des manuscrits enluminés" at the IRHT since 1990, this online catalogue lists the illuminated manuscripts held in French public collections (except those of the Bibliothèque nationale de France): 10,500 manuscripts, in addition to more than a thousand illuminated incunables and early printed books.
Interactive Album of Medieval Palaeography
A collection of transcription exercises which provide students and amateurs who wish to improve their skills with the opportunity to train themselves in the practical application of palaeography: reading manuscript texts.
Jonas
This online database was launched in 2002 and aims to build up an index of medieval texts and manuscripts in Occitan and the langues d’oïl, in addition to providing a tool for the in-depth study of hagiographical manuscripts.
La Croix du Maine and Antoine du Verdier's "Bibliothèques françoises"
Gallica and Google Books have both published digitised versions of the Bibliothèques françoises (1773), which was first published in 1584 and has since become an important tool for researchers. A TEI transcription of this first bibliography of French-language authors will replace the existing OCR-processed version of the text, which is completely unusable in its current state.
Library of Charles V and Charles VI of France
This research project, begun in 2007, is an important contribution to all studies on the library of the kings of France, and on the flourishing of libraries among the laity in general. In the final phase of the project, the inventory lists of the king's library will be digitised and published as a critical edition. Further data on the manuscripts themselves and the texts they contain will also be collected and made available.
URL: http://www.europeanaregia.eu/en/historical-collections/library-charles-v-family
Mandragore
This iconography database contains images and descriptions of illuminated manuscripts held at the BnF (département des Manuscrits and the former Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal). More than 180,000 records describe approximately 6,100 manuscripts, the earliest from Ancient Egypt and the most recent of which include modern manuscripts. Each record provides extensive information on the decor, including the textual context, as well as information about the place and date of illumination, and the name of the artist or workshop when available.
Manuscripta Medica
This database, originally designed to describe the medical manuscripts held at the BnF (over 500), will be expanded to include Latin medical manuscripts that are held at other French libraries. The resulting data will be compared to those found in other major European libraries with particular attention given to translations of Greek and Arabic medical texts into Latin in the 11th to 14th centuries.
Medium
This database was developed for managing the manuscript reproductions that are archived at the IRHT. It also serves as a hub, by linking together the different scientific databases developed by the research teams at the IRHT.
Minims and Oratorians
The Order of the Minims and the Oratory of Saint Philip Neri each built up impressive libraries. The systematic analysis of the Minims' archives will aid in understanding the evolution of their libraries and the circulation of texts in their historical context. As regards the Oratorians, a teaching congregation, research will focus on their libraries in Paris and elsewhere in France.
Miroir des classiques
This index, begun in 2005, lists the French and Occitan translations of classic Latin and Greek texts. All the different translations and any reworkings of a given text are listed under the original title of the source text. For each translation, there are descriptions of the manuscripts and early printed books in which it can be found.
Pinakes
This database provides information on the manuscript tradition of pre-sixteenth century Greek texts. The project began in 1971 at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto; in 1993 the Greek section at the IRHT took over its management and continues to enrich it with new data to this day.
Rabelais FORSE Project
The FOnds Rabelais et ses Sources En ligne project (Rabelais's Collection and its Sources Online) has several aims: reconstructing Rabelais's library, editing a small corpus of his correspondence, and digitising books that Rabelais once owned and annotated. The manuscript of his Cinquième livre will also be made available online.
RegeCart - Regestes de cartulaires
The RegeCart database gives access to onomastic indexes drawn from 571 cartularies, chronicle-cartularies and bullaries (primarily from the provinces of Rheims and Sens) that were studied by the IRHT's Diplomatic section between 1942 and 1970. It also includes reproductions of the analyses of the individual acts in each cartulary and codicological descriptions of the cartularies.
Reliures.bnf.fr
This database presents an increasingly wide selection of bindings that are representative of the history of bookbinding in France. When launched in April 2013, it listed approximately 200 bindings, including many emblematic "treasures" from the collections of the Réserve des livres rares at the BnF (16th to 18th centuries).
Sanderus electronicus
A digital edition of the Bibliotheca belgica manuscripta by Antonius Sanderus, which contains the collected historical inventories of manuscripts in Belgium and France, published in 1641-1644.
Sermones.net
Corpus of digital editions of sermons. The CIHAM has developed its expertise in oral traditions that have later been set down in writing through the digital edition of Jacobus de Voragine's sermons, for which the collaborative tool ScolastiX was designed.
Sorbonne Project
The data gathered from this corpus of old inventories and preserved manuscripts will make it possible to reconstruct the different collections that were once held at the Library of the Sorbonne College and trace their history. The data will be added to the Bibale database and the inventories will be published online as a digital critical edition.
SourcEncyMe
The SourcEncyMe project (Sources des Encyclopédies Médiévales) focusses on the history and transmission of Greek, Arabic and Latin texts on philosophy, science, theology and history, which were included in Latin encyclopaedic compilations from the 13th century onwards.
Telma
Telma (Traitement électronique des manuscrits et des archives) provides the scientific community with access to corpora of primary sources and the finding aids necessary to manipulate and study them. It contains two kinds of corpora: resource indexes and critical editions of manuscript sources, which may or may not be linked to digital images of the documents.
Theleme
Techniques pour l’Historien en Ligne : Etudes, Manuels, Exercices. This portal provides access to a number of educational tools (studies, manuals, exercises) designed to be an introduction for students and a wider audience to the different scientific methods and techniques used in historical research.
Virtual Library of Mont Saint-Michel
The abbey's historical library has survived to this day in remarkable condition and is currently preserved at the Public Library in Avranches. It contains more than 200 medieval manuscripts and a large collection of early printed books (currently being studied) acquired by the monks between the beginning of the 16th and the end of the 18th centuries.