Manuscript, paleography, and book history resources
by Nick
Printed sources have generally been at the vanguard of early modern digitisation projects, but manuscript sources are starting to catch up, together with resources on the technological aspects of books (printing, binding etc). Here are some links I’ve seen floating round the blogosphere in the past few weeks.
First, the Beinecke now has a Flickr photostream. It includes the Paleographical Commons, a collection of early modern handwriting. The material has a Creative Commons atribution licence, so you can copy and distribute it so long as you attribute it to them. Here are some gems (all courtesy of the Beinecke, naturally).
Medical recipes from an anonymous late 17th century MS collection, compiled by a member of Cambridge University. This page includes liquorice balls and cakes for colds:
Doodles from the beginning of a mid-seventeenth century collection of poems:
Address and broken seal from a letter by Henry Rich, first earl of Holland, to Frances Rich, Lady Paget:
First page of the same letter:
Another useful resource is hosted by the English Faculty at Cambridge, which is in the final year of its 3-year Scriptorium project. It’s digitising various manuscript miscellanies and commonplace books from between 1450 and 1720. Not a great deal is online at the moment, but more is scheduled to go up soon. It also has the fantastically useful early modern handwriting course.
Princeton has a great online exhibition about hand bookbindings. More useful resources can be found in this post at bookn3rd (a great blog about book history by a postgrad at the University of London).
Thanks for posting these resources – it’s great to see that manuscripts are catching up.
I’m a grad student, and one of my project assistant tasks is to transcribe the letters of Robert Southey. While I’ve been able to work on several in person, many of the letters I’ve been transcribing are terrible reproductions – I imagine a lurid history of being photocopied, and then photocopied again – or photographed, scanned, printed, and then photocopied. They’re faint, blurry, held at strange angles (so that only part of the page is in focus, say right down the center), and occasionally with an arm or hand in the margin. Never before have I appreciated quality digital reproduction of primary materials!
[…] Resources and Reproductions Filed under: Uncategorized — Rachel Lee @ 11:03 am Via Mercurius Politicus: A list of resources for manuscript and book history, including online collections, exhibits, and […]
[…] Politicus has found some splendid manuscript, palaeography and book history resources. Manuscript sources are the next big growth area for digital early modernists, as digitizers work […]