The British Library holds the world’s largest collections of books made or owned in England between the end of Roman Britain and the Norman Conquest of 1066. These books trace the development of writing, society, economy, government and religion from the 7th to the 11th centuries. We are delighted to announce that 175 of these manuscripts can now be viewed in full online on our Digitised Manuscripts website. We’ve produced a complete list of the Anglo-Saxon manuscripts available as of March 2017.
The subject matter covers the Quranic sciences and commentaries, hadith, kalam, Islamic jurisprudence, mysticism and philosophy, Arabic grammar and philology, dictionaries, poetry and other literary genres, history, topography and biography, music and other arts, sciences and medicine, texts relating to the Druze and Bahais, Christian and Jewish literature, and other subjects such as magic, archery, falconry and dream interpretation.
On the margins of manuscripts, Camillo told us, we could expect to find, courtesy a scribe or a commentator - padaccheda (word division), anvayokti (explanation of syntax), padārthabodha – a gloss or a quotation, laukika and alaukikavigraha (ordinary language and technical grammatical explanations) and tātparya – an authorial explanation, a gist. In addition we might find decoration, corrections and an invocation.
From intriguingly detailed illustrations to random doodles, the drawings and other marks made along the edges of pages in medieval manuscripts—called marginalia—are not just peripheral matters. “Both tell us huge amounts about a book’s history and the people who have contributed to it, from creation to the present day.”
Yale University Press’ fascimile edition of the Voynich Manuscript will be released November 1st. The book includes an essay by novelist and historian Deborah Harkness. A second limited-run edition will be released by Siloe, a Spanish publishing house. The limited edition will faithfully reproduce the book’s texture and design.
