Open Collections recently saw some new additions to the Western Manuscripts and Early Printed Books repository — a selection of medieval era manuscript fragments. These digital copies are from two different physical collections stored in UBC’s Rare Books and Special Collections. One collection is comprised of medieval manuscript fragments and the other, medieval music manuscript fragments.

Single leaf from a book of hours, 1400-1450, from France.

The fragments are used as subject matter by Prof. Kwakkel for two UBC courses: LIBR 548F – History of the Book and LIBR 579D – Special Collections Librarianship. They make for interesting study material as each are handwritten on vellum leaves with date ranges between the 13^th and 17^th centuries. Many are illuminated with gold and have additional decorative features.

Single leaf from a Latin psalter, 1200-1250, from France.

With 22 new fragments, there will now be a total of 95 items available for viewing in the Western Manuscripts collection. Although this is a relatively small collection, it draws a significant audience with 84,962 views to date. The visitors are from the USA, Canada, United Kingdom, China, Germany, France, Italy, Russia, Netherlands and Romania.

The fragments are considered rare and come from a variety of primary sources, making each item unique and valuable. Browsing them you will encounter leaves from a Vulgate Bible, a Latin Bible, a St. Alban’s bible, breviaries, liturgical manuscripts, psalters, antiphonaries, choir books, and musical graduals.

Single leaf from an antiphonary (Psalm 41).

Single leaf from the Collectanea in omnes D. Pauli Apostoli Epistolas.

Single leaf from a Latin Bible: Exodus 1-4.

Single leaf from a Latin psalter, ca. 1300, from France.

When digitizing historic materials, there are always considerations and challenges. For this project, the most significant challenge came from an oversized choirbook leaf that was too large to document in a flatbed scanner. This two-sided item had to be photographed with our TTI machine, a large format digitization tool that utilizes a camera and special software. Each side was photographed in four sections, and the images were later merged in Photoshop. Here is the outcome of this process:

Side one: single leaf from a choir book, possibly 15th century.

Side two: single leaf from a choir book, possibly 15th century.

Overall, it was an excellent experience digitizing and uploading these medieval manuscripts. We enjoyed working with such resonant cultural artifacts and are pleased to be sharing them with the public.

If you would like to learn more about UBC’s Western Manuscripts, please visit two previous blog posts about this collection: Western Manuscripts (2014) by Matthew Murray and The Beauty of the Western Manuscripts (2018) by Paula Arasaki.