About

Scope

This catalogue provides descriptions only of those western medieval manuscripts that have been digitised and published on the Cambridge Digital Library (CUDL).

These manuscripts are from the collections of Cambridge University Library, the Fitzwilliam Museum and a number of college libraries. In broad terms, this corpus encompasses manuscripts written in Greek, Latin and European vernacular languages that were made prior to approximately 1550.

They represent the output of a number of externally funded projects, as well as ad hoc digitisation. Further details of these projects are provided on dedicated collection pages on CUDL. Acknowledgement of funders, where relevant, is encoded within each description.

The descriptions

Most of the records in this catalogue provide detailed manuscript descriptions. The information is presented in keeping with the standards of manuscript cataloguing that have developed since the mid-19th century. Each record should contain information about the texts that that manuscript contains, the book’s material characteristics, and details of its date and place of origin, its provenance and its acquisition by its current repository.

The descriptions are accompanied by bibliographies of publications that make specific reference to this manuscript, including editions (where available) of the texts that it contains.

Technical details

The manuscript descriptions are encoded in XML according to the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). They conform to a customisation of those guidelines produced through a collaboration between Cambridge University Library and the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Details of this schema are publicly accessible online. Full records in both this online catalogue and its Oxford counterpart should therefore be broadly comparable in approach and level of detail.

This platform was developed by Mike Hawkins of the Digital Initiatives team at Cambridge University Library.

Future development

Further updates to the catalogue will follow in due course. The first priority will be to generate and upload outline records for every medieval manuscript at Cambridge University Library and the other participating repositories in Cambridge.

Version details

The website was launched on 30 Sept 2026. A version history of all of the data that it contains is available in a Github repository. Major changes in the future will be summarised in a release history.