1. Using Images of Medieval
Manuscripts: Historical Perspectives
and Future Possibilities
Andrew Prescott, King’s College
London

2. Experimental image of London, British Library, Cotton MS. Otho B x, f. 54v, taken
with a Roche Kontron digital camera under ultra-violet light in 1993.
We now have over 21 years of experience of using this type of technology in MS
studies, but apart from ‘how to’ guides and works of advocacy, we don’t have any
reflective discussion on the implications of these approaches for manuscript
studies. Have our approaches so far been the right ones? What type of scholarly
dialogue can we / should we be developing with this technology?

3. Utrecht Psalter, produced in Epernay between 816 and 823

6. Illustrations from J.O. Westwood,
‘Archaeological Note of a Tour in Denmark,
Prussia and Holland’, Archaeological
Journal 16 (1859). Westwood had noticed
an 1832 discussion of the manuscript by
Baron van Tiellandt, and travelled to the
Netherlands to see it.

7. Silver nitrate photographs of the Utrecht Psalter commissioned by
the British Foreign Office to assist in dating the manuscript, 1872

9. Photographs of the
Utrecht Psalter made in
the British Museum
using the autotype
process, 1876

11. Detail from autotype
facsimile of the Book of
Kells prepared for the
New Palaeographical
Society under Bond’s
supervision

12. Lessons of the Utrecht Psalter
Controversy
• Potential of new technologies to explore historical
artefacts in new ways
• Importance of maintaining scholarly and critical
approach
• Need to engage with technology, bringing specialist
understanding to bear
• Need to take opportunities as they present
themselves…
• …while developing a strategic approach
• These are all lessons that resonate in current
understanding of digital humanities

13. ‘And then I once again blush for shame when I remember the librarian from Poitiers in
1948, who treated me with awe because I came from the city of the Utrecht Psalter, the
existence of which I was not even aware of’. Hans Freudenthal.

14. 150 Years of Imaging the Utrecht Psalter
• 1859: Westwood sketches
• Early tracings and lithographs in British Library, Add. MSS. 22291,
26104
• 1873: British Museum facsimile
• E. T. DeWald, Illustrations of the Utrecht Psalter
• 1982: full colour facsmile, Codices Selecti, Graz
• 1996: CD-ROM presentation, full digital facsimile linked to translation
of text
• 2000: CD version also made available online
• By 2005, the CD version was no longer working on modern machines
• By 2011, the online version of the CD also not working, and switched
off
• Digitisation of facsimile available via Warburg Institure iconographic
database and
• 2013: new digitisation, financed by alumni of University of Utrecht.
Available only as facsimile.
• Currently plans to develop full textual apparatus online.

15. Imaging of the Beowulf manuscript using fibre optic backlighting to reveal letters and
words concealed by nineteenth-century conservation work:

16. Two sets of transcripts made for
the Danish antiquary Thorkelin,
now in the Royal Library
Copenhagen, compared with the
original manuscript

18. Autotypes of Beowulf manuscript
prepared by Charles B. Praetorius
(1818-1900) in 1880 and
published by Julius P. Zupitza for
the Early English Text Society.
Note how these autotypes were
prepared before the current pencil
foliation of the manuscript was
inserted.

19. William Kilbride, ‘Whose Beowulf Is it Anyway? ‘, Internet Archaeology 9.
http://dx.doi.org/10.11141/ia.9.12

20. A.S.G. Edwards, ‘Back to the Real’, Times
Literary Supplement, 7 June 2013
• Digital surrogates more expensive version of
microfilm
• Make it difficult to assess material
characteristics
• Discourage engagement with originals and
provide excuse for libraries to restrict access
• Expensive activity which diverts resources
from more pressing priorities such as training
in palaeography and conservation of originals

21. Edwards:
The Codex Sinaiticus is an interesting test case for apologists of digitization. Last year I was told
that the Codex Sinaiticus site got about 10,000 hits a month. That might seem a strong
justification for digitization. But it seems doubtful whether even a small fraction of that number
have the appropriate training – codicological, linguistic and textual – to approach the work in an
informed way. If my audience analysis is even broadly correct, the British Library is investing
heavily not in scholarship, but in a new branch of the entertainment industry.

22. Lost leaves from Codex Sinaiticus found in St
Catherine’s Monastery in Egypt in 1976

23. Text of Mark 1:1 in the British Library portion of the Codex Sinaiticus under standard
light, showing corrections including insertion of the phrase ‘Son of God’.

24. The same section of Mark 1:1 under raking light, with transcription and translation

26. Google Books Isn’t Necessarily the Model
• Google Book search has become the pattern of ‘big digitisation’.
Manuscript digitisation such as Codex Sinaiticus frequently described
as boutique digitisation
• But a project such as Sinaiticus Is more complex in its aims and
ambitions
• With book search, assumption that the primary purpose of digitisation
is more quickly to locate information in the book
• With manuscripts, we are often as much interested in the physical
characteristics of the book as its contents. Images are therefore
important. Same applies to many other categories of material in
galleries, libraries, archives and museums
• Museums, library special collections and archives all share this
concern with using digitisation to investigate objects. Google Books
paradigm might not be best approach for manuscript studies

27. A Different Approach?
• Have we been too preoccupied with creating allembracing interfaces to simplify online access?
• Are we simply replicating the ‘flat’ information offered
by print facsimiles and editions I an online
environment?
• Should we instead be assembling archives of
information about manuscripts?
• As we start to use digital technologies as tools to
explore manuscripts, we will have multiplicity of
representations and information
• We will want to establish multi-faceted networks of
information about particular manuscripts

31. William Schipper, 'Dry-Point Compilation Notes in the
Benedictional of St Æthelwold', British Library Journal, 20 (1994),
17-34

32. The dry point note ‘In’ is not readily visible in this ‘vanilla’ digitisation of f. 27v of the
Benedictional of St Æthelwold. Ideally we need a series of images exploring different
aspects of this folio.

33. The words ‘Item alia’ under ‘thesauros’ on f. 63v are
barely noticeable on the ‘vanilla’ digitisation
Some very simple image processing would make
the dry point note clearer, if only the image was
downloadable (it isn’t)

35. Dr Adrian Wisnicki of Birkbeck College, University of London, working in blue
light at the National Library of Scotland. Dr Wisnicki and other members of
the Livingstone diary project spent 2 weeks at NLS taking images of David
Livingstone's diary and letters

37. RTI Scanning by
University of
Southampton team at
the Louvre, 2011

39. Kathryn Rudy, ' Dirty books : Quantifying
patterns of use in medieval manuscripts using
a densitometer ' Journal of Historians of
Netherlandish Art , vol 2 (2010) , no. 1-2 , pp.
1-26

40. Using the Diamond Light Source to Recover Palimpsest Text

41. http://www.ted.com/talks/william_noel
_revealing_the_lost_codex_of_archime
des.html

42. http://collection.britishmuseum.org

43. Future Approaches
• We need to break away from fixed silo
presentations and rethink our view of facsimiles
and editions
• Use digital technologies as a tool to explore
manuscripts
• Archives and networks of information about MSS
rather than online facsimiles and editions
• Forget about the interface; concentrate on
storing and sharing our data openly
• The future edition might be simply a SPARQL
endpoint

44. We also need to think about ways in which we can
deal with very large quantities of data. This site
(http://aalt.law.uh.edu) contains over 8,000,000
images of medieval legal and administrative records
from England with virtually no metadata. How do we
best explore it, recording and sharing our
explorations?