The Digital Scriptorium
Towards a Renaissance in medieval manuscript studies
The conjunction of “digital,” which conjures up a high-tech, 21st-century mode, and “scriptorium,” a term specific to the Middle Ages—the place where scribes practiced their trade—seems at first an odd juxtaposition. What can lightning-fast digital technology have in common with the painstaking, laborious process of copying and illumination that went into the production of medieval manuscripts? What this rather odd pairing of words represents is a project that will bring the words and art of the Middle Ages to computer screens around the world.
The Digital Scriptorium now underway at Bancroft, in collaboration with Columbia University, will digitize and make available on the World Wide Web the two universities’ medieval and early Renaissance manuscript holdings. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Digital Scriptorium will comprise a database of some 10,000 images by early 1998.
Images chosen from the two institutions’ holdings in medieval manuscripts will represent almost 700 codices and 2000 documents from the 8th to the 16th century. These documents, which provide the basis for scholarship on the cultural heritage of western civilization, are crucial links to our past.
The project is intended as a prototype that will eventually allow participation of other institutions in the United States and Europe and provide virtual access to information about medieval manuscripts. An important aspect of the project is collaboration with other institutions to develop an SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) encoding scheme for manuscript descriptions. Bancroft was a lead participant in development of the Encoded Archival Description or EAD [see “Quill Pens to Pixels: Bancroft’s Catalog Evolves,” Bancroftiana No. 108], and brings that experience working with SGML to this project.
Medieval manuscripts are the most numerous surviving artifacts from the Middle Ages. They preserve a large body of imaginative literature and scientific knowledge from antiquity to the age of print. They contain more well-preserved artistic works than do the panel paintings, frescos, and sculptures of the entire Middle Ages. And yet, for all their importance, because of their inaccessibility they have received relatively little attention from the general public and only sporadic study from the scholarly community. Unique, easily damaged, and often of enormous value, they are usually available only to scholars who can gain access to the manuscript reading rooms of the institutions that hold such treasures.
The Digital Scriptorium will change this situation dramatically, making the manuscripts available to anyone with an Internet connection. Broad availability of illuminated manuscript pages has obvious implications for medieval studies and art history, but can also be used in elementary and secondary schools as ready illustrations of life in the Middle Ages.
Of course, the Digital Scriptorium will also enhance the scholarship of those who already have access to these ancient gems. Academic readers of medieval manuscripts will certainly increase in number as a new generation of scholars is trained in the use of these primary sources. Courses on paleography (the study of ancient writing), generally limited to a handful of major research universities, can now be taught at institutions that do not have their own collections of medieval manuscripts.
A current example illustrates this point. A paleography course at Rutgers University is integrating virtual and actual manuscripts for its study of pre-gothic script. Since Rutgers has no manuscripts of this date, the students are each assigned an image from Columbia’s on-line prototype that includes examples of beneventan, visigothic, pre-carolingian, and carolingian hands. The students and their professor will then go to Columbia where each student will have a brief study period with the genuine manuscript. Availability of the on-line manuscripts will give the students more time for study both before and after their relatively brief viewing of the real thing. Students may also browse the on-line images at their leisure.
One of the goals of the current grant is to determine the cost to scholars of locating and studying manuscript materials important for their research. If the Digital Scriptorium can save scholars time and money, will they be willing to help finance expansion of the project by paying for access to it, either individually or collectively, through institutional site licenses?
Digitization projects are expensive, and the amount of money available to institutions, either from internal sources or in the form of grants, is limited. The economic study that is part of the Digital Scriptorium—being carried out by Malcom Getz, Professor of Economics at Vanderbilt University—will allow us to propose a sound business plan to ensure the project’s long-term viability as other institutions join Berkeley and Columbia. Without such long-term viability, the effects on scholarship will be limited, regardless of the Digital Scriptorium’s technical success.
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Despite the new-fangled technology, the Digital Scriptorium has its roots in the traditions of scholarship on the Middle Ages—a field that has always taken advantage of the technology of the day. |
The Digital Scriptorium Web address is sunsite.berkeley.edu/Scriptorium |
The advent of printing allowed reproduction of hand-engraved facsimiles of manuscripts. Plates from the 18th and 19th centuries are often surprisingly beautiful and accurate, especially given the fact that the artist had to engrave mirror images of the script. By the late 1800s, photography and photo-lithography provided much more precise reproductions. For the first time entire manuscripts —not samples—were reproduced. More recently microfilm, color photography, and laser-scanned facsimiles have aided scholars in comparing codices.
Continuing this scholarly tradition, the Digital Scriptorium is applying modern technology to these ancient codices and fragments. Internet access brings all the advantages of previous technology, and more. Digitization of the originals is inexpensive enough for the project to digitize at least one image (and in many cases several), in color, from each item in the collection.
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Publishing on the Internet brings its own “virtual” advantages as well. Images from books that now sit on shelves 3,000 miles apart can appear together on the screen. The Digital Scriptorium will recreate that moment in history when like books were together, whether in a single room, town, or country.
A dramatic example of such a discovery illustrates the potential of the technology. BANC MS UCB 87 at Bancroft, with texts on Alexander the Great, and Plimpton MS 169 at Columbia, with calendar verses, were both copied in the south of France by Antonius Vicentius in the 1440s, but we did not know this until images from the two manuscripts were compared side by side on the computer screen. Antonius’s execrably idiosyncratic handwriting and the identical erosion of the two manuscripts’ paper corners leave no doubt that they initially formed part of the same volume. This type of analysis will be possible from a computer terminal, without traveling to Berkeley or Columbia.
The accessibility of the Internet to the general public, students, and scholars; numbers of images available; the potential to document and make available a large range of manuscripts; the advantages of color reproduction—all these will make the Digital Scriptorium a powerful new tool that will lead to a Renaissance in the study of medieval manuscripts.
Merrilee Proffitt is a Digital Library
Development Specialist at The Bancroft
Library and project manager of the
Digital Scriptorium at Bancroft.
Dr. Consuelo W. Dutschke is Curator,
Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts,
Rare Books and Manuscripts Library
at Columbia and project manager
of the Digital Scriptorium there.
Volume 112
Spring 1998
Table of Contents
DeFeo, Conner papers add to Bancroft’s Beat collection
From the Director: What does Bancroft collect?
The Digital Scriptorium
Towards a Renaissance in medieval manuscript studies
Robert Frost Collection includes photos inscribed by the poet
Bancroft Fellows research images of the American West, history of Mexico’s Cora Indians
Freshmen discover the wonders of Bancroft
Bancroft staffer in the spotlight
An Oral History of Jack Stauffacher From letterpress to computer-designed fine printing
Where is the last portrait of Mark Twain?
