Dot Porter Digital

November 1, 2026November 2, 2026

Dead Reckoning: How Medieval Prayer Books Pictured Death

This post was originally a short talk presented for Study Hall-oween: Comedy Inspired By Spooky Lectures, organized by Crossroads Philly on October 30 2026. This is an expanded version of that talk. Sadly, improv is not included here. It was an amazing night! If you ever get a chance to have improv done on your lecture, I highly recommend it.

Books of Hours & the Office of the Dead

Books of hours are personal prayer books that were popular in Europe from about 1300 into the 16^th century. They are centered around a set of prayers called the Hours of the Virgin, which were meant to be prayed every day, eight times over the course of the day, but the books could include many other texts, including a calendar which would list holidays and which saints to pray to on which days, other sets of prayers (sometimes in the local vernacular language), and the Office of the Dead.

Books of hours aren’t all the same, which is why I think they are so fun to study. The chart above (originally published in my blog post Books of Hours as Transformative Works) shows the variation in the contents of the books of hours in Philadelphia. Each book gets a row in the spreadsheet, with all the texts in the order they appear in that book. This chart is organized to center the Hours of the Virgin; that’s the gold bar running down the middle of the chart. You can see from the key that most of the books have many of the same contents, but in slightly different orders (Accessory Texts are any text that aren’t otherwise in the key). Most of them have the Office of the Dead, which is in black and tends to be located towards the end of the books (but isn’t always the last text). The Office of the Dead is a set of prayers offered for the deceased. The office can be prayed either for a specific person, or for all dead people (as would be done on All Saints’ Day), to express a desire that the soul of the dead find peace in heaven.

Books of Hours in Philadelphia

Many of the manuscripts in Philadelphia were digitized through the Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis project (aka BiblioPhilly), which was funded by the Council on Library and Information Resources from 2016 through 2019. (I was one of the co-PIs on this project) 121 complete books of hours were digitized through BiblioPhilly, plus many more fragments and individual leaves from books of hours. (You can see all 222 of them here)

71 of these complete books of hours have opening illustrations for the Office of the Dead. The opening illustration is the one that appears at the very beginning of the office text. Some of these manuscripts include additional illustrations in the Office of the Dead, but for the most part I’m not considering them here.

Some of those that don’t have these illustrations don’t include the Office of the Dead at all, but in some of them the leaf containing the illustration has been cut out (it’s not too unusual for illustrations to be cut out of books of hours, and other types of manuscripts too, to be framed and used as art objects). Others that have the Office of the Dead just never had an opening illustration to begin with. (Not all books of hours have pictures!)

In her book Image and the Office of the Dead in Late Medieval Europe (Amsterdam University Press, 2023), Sarah Schell organizes these illustrations according to three “types” of death: Regular Death, illustrated by a funeral rite, Repellent Death, represented by the dead body, and The Redemptive Death, represented by the biblical characters Lazarus and Job.

Although details and of the illustrations and marginal decorations vary, the central image these types will follow certain guidelines. For the funeral illustrations, the central image will be of a priest or priests, often monks, praying over a coffin draped with cloth. Figures in black gathered around the coffin are official mourners. In the real world, mourners would have been paid. As Schnell says, “The provision of mourning dress, the enfolding black cloaks seen everywhere in ‘regular’ death images, were an important visible marker of the position of the deceased because of the implied financial outlay they represented.”

There are three different subtypes that fall under Repellent death. The first is the burial. The burial at first glance appears similar to the funeral – there will be priests and mourners – but instead of being in a coffin, the corpse is out (although hidden in cloth), and there is the addition of the laborers doing the literal heavy lifting of digging and getting the dead body into the grave.

The second subtype under Repellent death is the skull. Skulls will show up in marginal decorations, but they are especially popular embedded in large initials, particularly in books that don’t have larger illustrations.

The third subtype under Repellent death is the “lively dead” – the corpse who moves, despite being dead. Often, the lively dead interact with the living. The basis of this theme is The Three Living and The Three Dead, a French legend that exists in five variants, found in about twenty manuscripts, the earliest dating from around 1280, so a couple hundred years before most of the books we’re looking at today. In this legend, three young men are accosted by three lively dead, but as we’ll see there are many variations on this theme.

The third type is Redemptive death, that is, the hope devout Christians had that death would unite them with God, and with the everlasting community of the faithful. In this thinking, death was not something to be feared, but instead embraced. These illustrations focus on two characters from the bible: Lazarus and Job. Lazarus, whose story is told in the Gospel of John Chapter 11, died and was entombed for four days before he was raised from the dead by Jesus. This was the last miracle that Jesus performed before the Passion, crucifixion, and his own resurrection. For the medieval devout, these images would have been a reminder that through Jesus, there is life. Job is a character from the Old Testament. He was a good, devout man, who lost everything and was tortured by the devil, but who refused to reject God. These images depict him at his lowest point. In the story of Job, God allows all these terrible things to happen to him, but at the end he is rewarded for his faith – as the medieval devout would hope to be rewarded for their faith, too.

The Illustrations According to Types

In this section, I want to see how the different “types” of death illustrations are distributed among the books of hours in Philadelphia according to date and location the books were made. I didn’t intend to, but this section does include illustrations from all 71 manuscripts that have them. Enjoy!

30 of these manuscripts depict Repellent Death, 24 depict Regular Death, and 17 depict Redemptive Death.

According to this typology the most popular type of illustration is Repellent Death, however when we take subtypes into account things look a bit different. All 24 of the Regular Death illustrations depict funerals. Under the Repellent Death typology, there are 14 burials, 8 depictions of the “lively dead” (that is, living corpses), 6 skulls, and 2 dead corpses. Thus, there are more illustrations of the funeral than there are of any single Repellent Death subtypes.

Under Redemptive Death, there are 9 illustrations of Lazarus, and 6 of Job and 1 special example that we’ll see at the very end of this post.

The illustrations listed by popularity:

Funeral (Regular) – 24
Burial (Repellent) – 14
Lazarus (Redemptive) – 9
Lively dead (Repellent) – 8
Job (Redemptive) – 6
Skulls (Repellent) – 6
Corpses (Repellent) – 2
Secret illustration (Redemptive) – 1

There are also various combinations of the different types of deaths, including two that combine illustrations of the lively dead (Repellent) on the same page as Lazarus (Redemptive).

The Illustrations in Place and Time

The books of hours in Philadelphia were all made in Western Europe, primarily in Flanders and France, with some made in Italy, a few in Belgium, one in England, and one in Spain.

England

The English manuscript was made ca. 1470, which I would say is towards the end of the 15th century, and its illustration is of a funeral (Regular). It’s fairly typical, with monk-priests and six mourners lining the coffin. We can see the book the monks are singing from, and the musical notation is clear!

Here and throughout, image captions link to the digitized manuscripts in BiblioPhilly.

Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) 945_65_6

Spain

This manuscript has been located to Salamanca, Spain – west and a little north of Madrid – and it is dated to the last quarter of the 15th century. It has an illustration of Lazarus (Redemptive). There is a small skull (Repellent) in the bottom margin.

Belgium

There are two manuscripts that are located to Belgium. They are both from the middle of the 15th century, and both have funeral (Regular) illustrations.

There are 11 manuscripts located to Flanders. Historically, Flanders spanned from northern Belgium into France and the Netherlands. Dutch was the vernacular spoken in Flanders.

Nine of the manuscripts from Flanders are from the 15th century. The earliest is dated to the 1430s, and has a funeral (Regular) illustration.

Free Library of Philadelphia (FLP) Lewis E 99

Three of the Flanders manuscripts are from the mid-15th century. Two of them are illustrated by funeral (Regular), including PMA 1945-64-4, which has additional mourners in the margins, and we have our first illustration of Lazarus (Redemptive).

The remaining four are from the later 15th century. We have three more funerals (Regular), one Lazarus (Redemptive) and our first illustration of the lively dead (Repellent) – the three living and the three dead.

Flanders 16th century

There are two 16th century manuscripts from Flanders, and neither of them are illustrated with funerals, instead both have Redemptive illustrations – one is Lazarus, the other Job. The Lazarus illustration also includes a little bit of Repellent death, in the form of skulls in the margins.

It does seems that the later a manuscript is made, the less likely it is to have a funeral, and the more likely it is to have something else.

France

The majority of books of hours in Philadelphia are from France – a total of 47 books, dating from the late 14th century (the earliest book of hours in Philadelphia) to the mid-16th century.

The 14th century manuscript has a basic funeral (Regular) illustration.

University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) Ms. Codex 1566

35 of the books from France are from the 15th century.

France Earlier 15th century

Of the 10 from the earlier 15th c., six are illustrated with the funeral (Regular), three are illustrated with the burial (Repellent), and one is illustrated with Job (Redemptive).

Funeral (Regular)

Burial (Repellent)

Job (Redemptive)

France Mid-15th Century

There are six manuscripts from France dated to the mid-15th century in Philadelphia. Four are illustrated with a burial (Repellent) – but one of the burials is a little different. (UPenn Ms. Codex 1869 is heavily damaged, but it’s clear that this illustration is of a burial) Two of them are illustrated with a funeral (Regular)

Funeral (Regular)

Burial (Repellent)

I find this whole group interesting. PMA 1945-65-11 and UPenn Ms. Codex 1859 picture burials, but the illustrations don’t include a wrapped corpse. In contrast, FLP Lewis E 92 includes an unwrapped corpse in addition to the wrapped corpse being laid in the grave. This last example is also different from the others. There are no priests or mourners. In addition to the laborers laying the body in the grave, a person in a long robe that covers their hands stands beside the unwrapped corpse.

France later 15th century

The largest number of French books of hours in Philadelphia are from the later 15th century. There are 19 of them. As in the Flemish manuscripts, the later manuscripts include fewer illustrations of funerals (Regular) and have more variety in the Repellent and Redemptive illustration types. There are three funerals (Regular), six burials (Repellent), one lone lively corpse (Repellent), four of the living and the dead (Repellent), three of Lazarus (Redemptive), and two of Job (Redemptive).

Funerals (Regular)

There are a few interesting variants in these funeral (Regular) illustrations. FLP Lewis E 123 includes a corpse, which combines the Regular with the Repellent. PMA 1945 65 15 centers the funeral, although the depiction appears to be a processional – the movement of the covered coffin into the church – and the marginal illustrations depict several miracles of Jesus, including the raising of Lazarus at the bottom of the page, combining the Regular with the Redemptive.

Burials (Repellent)

This group of illustrations includes a few things we haven’t yet seen in these books of hours in Philadelphia. PMA 1945 65 10 and LC 5 show the soul of the dead, pictured as a baby, rising to heaven, represented by God peeking out of a hole in the sky. LC 5 also includes a dark figure – a demon, hoping to pull the soul to Hell instead. PMA 1967 30 121 also depicts God in the sky. Although God isn’t visible in FLP Lewis E 208, there are rays of light shining down from the sky – one of the mourners is looking up at it. And PMA 1924 19 1 shows a bright sun with a blue center shining down over the grave.

There is one Belgian manuscript from the late 15th century that has a lively corpse, it is the only lively corpse in our collection that isn’t interacting with a living person. It carries a coffin over its shoulder, and carries a spear.

The Living and the Dead (Repellent)

UPenn Ms. Codex 1056 and FLP Lewis E 212 have standard illustrations of the three living and the three dead, including that the three young men are riding horses. UPenn Ms. Codex 1056 also includes an illustration of a burial (repellent) at the bottom of the page, and something we haven’t yet seen in our collection – an illustration of Jesus bringing the dead out of Hell (through an open Hell Mouth) in the right margin. This could be another subtype under the Redemptive death type. FLP Lewis E 212 also includes a depiction of a tomb with a sculpture of a body (Repellent?) in the foreground.

The other two examples have interesting variants on the theme. FLP Lewis E 98 includes three living, but instead of three young men they are a king, an emperor, and a bishop. They are all being attacked by a single lively corpse, but the corpse wields three spears. Instead of three young men, Rosenbach MS 1057/29 includes a young couple – lovers – being attacked by a lively corpse who holds a spear in one hand and a mirror, facing the living, in the other.

Lazarus (Redemptive)

Temple SPC MSS 133 and UDel MSS 95 Item 31 have fairly standard illustrations of the raising of Lazarus, but PMA 1945-65-13 includes some interesting added details. In the left margin are three lively corpses (Repellent), and in the right margin are three young men riding horses. Two of them are pictured with falcons, one of which has ties on its legs, and the third man carries a horn – they appear to be hunting. Combined, the corpses and the living are a kind of deconstructed three living and three dead (Repellent). A hermit monk appears at the bottom of the page.

The Office of the Dead in PMA 1945-65-13 is heavily illustrated beyond this opening image. In the bottom margin of every page, a living person is lead by a lively corpse. According to the catalog record, there are 62 of these illustrations total.

PMA 1945-65-13, p. 261. La chevalier (the knight)

This manuscript contains even more illustrations, including a rather gory one of souls in purgatory, and one of Job (Redemptive). The whole thing is worth a look.

Job (Redemptive)

These are both fairly standard versions of the theme, although the styles are quite different.

France 16th century

There are 11 books of hours in Philadelphia that date to the 16th century. They are all dated to the first half of the 1500s, so I will look at them all together.

Continuing the trend of later books of hours having a greater variety of illustrations, this set includes one funeral (Regular), two burials (Repellent), one skull (Repellent), three three living and the three dead (Repellent), 2 Job (Redemptive) and 2 Lazarus (Redemptive).

Funeral (Regular)

Burial (Repellent)

Both of these burial images have interesting details. FLP Lewis E 97 depicts the soul being guided towards heaven by an angel. It also includes Judgement Day in the background, with dead rising out of the ground on one side, and other dead suffering in Hell on the other. PMA 1945-65-14 depicts a scene that is reminiscent of that in FLP Lewis E 92, a mid-15th century book of hours pictured above. In this illustration, a group of people, some of whom appear to be monks and nuns, tend to a dead body laid out on a bier. Technically there isn’t a burial happening in this illustration – there is no grave – but even if you don’t want to consider it a burial it is still a type of Repellent death.

Skull (Repellent)

Here and as we’ll see elsewhere, skulls are usually featured either in the margins or as the central decoration within a large initial.

The Living & the Dead (Repellent)

FLP Lewis E 86 is a standard illustration of the three living and the three dead, although it includes a large number of skulls (Repellent) at the bottom of the page. The other two examples also contain some interesting details. Lehigh Codex 18 has a fairly standard illustration of the three living and the three dead, but it is paired with an illustration of Lazarus (Redemptive) in the lower margin. FLP Lewis E 113 is more complex. There is a living person and a lively dead, wielding a spear, but they are joined by a figure that appears to be a devil or a demon, an angel, and a female figure that has been painted entirely in black. At the top of the page is God, peering out of a hole in the sky and holding a sword, while at the living man’s feet there is an open Hell Mouth. The record describes this as “an ornate illumination of the Allegory of Death.”

Lazarus (Redemptive)

UPenn Ms. Codex 1531 is actually printed, not a manuscript, and it was printed ca. 1507. The illustration of the raising of Lazarus (Redemptive) is a metal cut, as are all the other illustrations in the book.

Italy

Finally, there are nine books of hours in Philadelphia from Italy. I like ending with these, because they are fairly distinctive and different from the other one. They are less likely to have full illuminations, and aside from BMC MS 25, which is from the first quarter of the 15th century, they are all dated to the later 15th century.

Funeral (Regular)

Not only is BMC MS 25 the earliest book of hours from Italy in Philadelphia, it is also only one of two with a large illustration, and the only one illustrated by a Funeral (Regular). As we can see looking through the rest of this post, the funeral is more popular earlier in the 15th century and as time passes, the illustrations become more variant.

Skull (Repellent)

There are five manuscripts that are illustrated with the skull, four from the later 15th century and one from ca. 1520.

The skulls (Repellent) are all embedded in the large initial D that opens the text. I am partial to the one in FLP Lewis E 206, which is dated to the early 16th century (ca. 1520) becuase the skull is resting on a book, and I love books.

Corpse (Repellent)

The corpse (Repellent) illustration in FLP Lewis E 121 is, like the skulls above, embedded in the opening initial instead of existing as a large illustration, as for example the lively corpse in FLP Lewis E 128.

Lazarus (Redemptive)

FLP Widener 8 is our second Italian book of hours in Philadelphia which has a large illustration opening the Office of the Dead, but the circumstances are interesting. According to the catalog record, the book “exemplifies the artistic exchanges between France and Italy that occurred in that period. While it was likely written in Paris in a Gothic bookhand in the early fifteenth century, it was illuminated in Naples later in the fifteenth century by both Cristoforo Majorana and another illuminator working in the style of the Master of the della Rovere Missals.” So it was made both in France and Italy. The illustration is of Lazarus (Redemptive), and there is a corpse in the bottom margin accompanied by two angels in the form of small children.

Crucifixion (Redemptive)

The last example from Italy, and of all the books of hours in Philadelphia, is FLP Lewis E 119. The illustration here is the crucified Christ – the Crucifixion – embedded in the opening initial. This seems to me to be a unique example of the Redemptive type, and the perfect way to end this journey through the opening illustrations of the Office of the Dead in Philadelphia’s books of hours.

Closing thoughts

The main pattern I see looking through these illustrations is that the Funeral (Regular) is most popular in the earlier manuscripts, and as time passes the types of illustrations become more variant. It also seems that the Italian manuscripts in general have a different aesthetic, focusing on decorated initials rather than large illustrations. It would be interesting to see if these patterns exist outside of this small selection of manuscripts.

What patterns do you see, when you look through these illustrations? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

October 18, 2026October 19, 2026

The Manuscript Digital Divide: What Drives Selection in Digitization?

Originally presented at the University of Rochester on invitation of the Curating the Middle Ages Working Group, Central New York Humanities Corridor, December 2023. It has been lightly edited. Images are slide screenshots. Except where otherwise stated, all information is current as of November 2023.

Good afternoon, and thank you to Anna and Irina for inviting me to speak today. I appreciate the freedom to choose the topic of my lecture, and I opted to delve into something new. As a result, I find myself posing more questions than providing answers. However, this exploration may bring about greater clarity and direction for future research.

Today, I’ll be discussing what I term the “manuscript digital divide.” The central question revolves around what influences the selection process in digitization. This query arose during my engagement with Suzanne Paul’s book chapter on the curation and display of digital medieval manuscripts in the Cambridge Companion to Medieval British Manuscripts.

Who Decides What Gets Digitized?

While the chapter broadly covers manuscript digitization, Paul highlights a critical aspect: who decides what gets digitized?

Paul says: “Although the creation of digital images of medieval manuscripts has been transformative, it is important to acknowledge that at this point in time, only a very small proportion of the medieval manuscripts that survive as a whole or in fragmentary form have been digitized. Why and how were these ones selected?” (Suzanne Paul, “The Curation and Display of Digital Medieval Manuscripts” The Cambridge Companion to Medieval British Manuscripts. Cambridge University Press, 2020. pp. 267 – 283)

Paul continues by making two claims:

“Very few institutions fund digitization of their collections from their core budget; by and large, the costs of digitization have to be met from external sources.”

And

“Early manuscripts, vernacular manuscripts, illuminated manuscripts, and those with illustrious provenance are at the front of the queue for digitization.”

Now, let’s delve into these two aspects—the funding question and the selection of manuscripts for digitization. Regarding funding, the common belief is that digitization is constrained by budget limitations. Many institutions rely on external sources, be it government funding, grants, or donations. For the sake of simplicity in this discussion, I’ll refer to this as “budget.”

The second point concerns the priority given to certain manuscripts for digitization, with the specific examples given as early, vernacular, illuminated, and those with illustrious provenance.

This paper will explore both the funding and selection processes in detail.

The History of Manuscript Reproduction

Before delving into these claims, let’s briefly touch upon the history of manuscript reproduction. This context is crucial for understanding the evolution of manuscript digitization.

I won’t go into detail here, but I recommend exploring Sian Echard’s talk “‘Secure from the Ravages of Time’: Antiquarian Avatars of Medieval Manuscripts” from the 14th Annual Schoenberg Symposium in 2021 and Bridget Whearty’s book Digital Codicology: Medieval Books and Modern Labor (Stanford University Press, 2022) for a deeper historical perspective.

Screenshot from Sian Echard’s talk ‘Secure from the Ravages of Time’: Antiquarian Avatars of Medieval Manuscripts comparing early facsimiles of a manuscript illumination

Shifting to a historical snapshot of manuscript digitization around 20 years ago, I want to share insights from a national survey I conducted for my master’s paper: Medievalists’ Use of Electronic Resources: The Results of a National Survey of Faculty Members in Medieval Studies (University of North Carolina, November, 2002). This survey asked faculty members in medieval studies about their use of electronic resources. Notably, the resources available in 2002 were limited compared to today.

Projects like “Images of Medieval Manuscripts of the Bodleian Library, Oxford” involved scanning images from existing film, a common practice until the early 2000s. Other projects, such as “Early Manuscripts at Oxford University” and “DScriptorium,” showcased a mix of complete digitized manuscripts, selected images from institutional collections, and additional information such as transcriptions and translations. DScriptorium was a project of Dr. Jesse Hurlbut of Brigham Young University, and should not to be confused with Digital Scriptorium (DS). DS was established in 1997 but wasn’t mentioned in the master’s paper, which seems like an oversight 20 years later. DS organized under a consortium in 1999, which set it apart from the institutions that focused on their own collections.

The Magna Carta at the British Library and the Aberdeen Bestiary were significant digitization projects, offering high-resolution images when many projects did not. Additionally, projects like The Electronic Beowulf and The Canterbury Tales Project focused on individual manuscripts, high-resolution images, and added information.

In 2002, the emphasis was on institutional collections, thematic focus, and to a lesser extent on consortia collaboration, as seen in DS. The Electronic Beowulf included images taken under ultraviolet light, so we can see that in 2002 advanced digital imaging techniques were already part of the conversation.

Digital Manuscript Landscape in 2023

Let’s turn to the contemporary landscape and the data I sought for my research. To find relevant information, I turned to the Digitized Medieval Manuscripts Project, abbreviated as DMMap. This project serves as an invaluable resource by mapping institutions that have digitized manuscripts available, particularly focusing on Western medieval manuscripts.

DMMap originated around a decade ago in the Netherlands, initiated by graduate students. The project involves crowd-sourced data, constantly updated with the latest blog post in May 2023 (Note: In December 2024, the May 2023 blog post is still the most recent one). While acknowledging potential data inaccuracies due to its crowd-sourced nature, it provides a valuable starting point to seeing which institutions have digitized their manuscripts.

The project consists of two primary components: the map and the data. The map visually represents the distribution of institutions globally, while the data offers detailed information about each institution’s digitized manuscripts. Notably, I contacted the project team, and they confirmed the ongoing activity and responsiveness to reported issues. (Note: In December 2024, updates to the data have been made as recently as November 27, 2024)

The map showcases a concentration of institutions in Europe, with representation from the United States, UK, Canada, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and Brazil. Clicking on a specific institution reveals options to explore digitized manuscripts directly or access additional data.

Clicking “Explore additional data” to visit the library’s information page.

A tangent. When I was preparing for this talk in November 2023, I selected the National Library of Wales as my example (for reasons that will be clear later in the talk). But when I clicked on that green button that says “Go to the digitized manuscripts,” I was disappointed to find that the link no longer worked, and I got an error message at the library website.

I went back to the previous page, and found the yellow “Report Data Issue” option.

I filled in a report, and within a couple of days the link in DMMap had been updated to point to the correct page on the NLW website – and it still works in December 2024.

The data section provides a comprehensive view, allowing users to filter based on institution, free cultural works, and quantity (that is, the number of digitized items).

They also provide a data spreadsheet, which I downloaded for further analysis.

My preliminary crunching of the data involved evaluating the number of institutions with digitized manuscripts. Out of 578 institutions (Fisher Library, U. Toronto, was listed twice), spanning 10 countries, the distribution varies, revealing the prevalence of digitization efforts in certain regions. I started by looking at how many institutions in are represented by each country. I didn’t find this information particularly surprising. Many smaller countries have few institutions included in DMMap, while those that have more institutions represented are larger countries, and/or countries known for their manuscript collections and their digitization efforts (Numbers as of November 2023):

Number of institutions	Country/Countries
1	Armenia, Brasil, Bulgaria, Croatia, Iceland, Japan, Norway, Slovakia, Vatican, Wales (10 total)
2	Denmark, Hungary, Portugal, Romania, Russia (5 total)
3	Canada, Estonia, Finland, New Zealand, Sweden (5 total)
5	Scotland
6	Czech Republic
7	Poland
9	Australia
11	Austria, Belgium (2 total)
15	Spain
18	Ireland
22	England
30	Italy
34	Netherlands
69	USA
75	Switzerland
82	Germany
149	France

Digitization Funding

As a reminder, here is Paul’s claim about digitization funding:

“Very few institutions fund digitization of their collections from their core budget; by and large, the costs of digitization have to be met from external sources.”

I started with with Switzerland. The E-codices project stands out due to its commitment to digitize every manuscript in Switzerland, or manuscripts in other countries that were made in Switzerland.

There are 75 institutions total in Switzerland listed in DMMap. The Congregation du Grant-Saint-Bernard also has its own site listed in DMMap, and The Domschatz der St. Ursen-Kathedrale is in Manuscripta Mediaevalia (Handschriftenportal in December 2024), an online portal for German collections. 74 of these institutions are included in e-codices (Congregation du Grant-Saint-Bernard is not included, but Domschatz der St. Ursen-Kathedrale is).

Looking at data from e-codices itself, we can see that DMMap doesn’t include data for every institution in e-codices. There are 86 institutions from Switzerland in e-codices, with 2,806 total manuscripts. While this means the average institution in Switzerland would have 32.6 manuscripts, we all know that’s not the case. 48 of those 86 institutions have fewer than ten manuscripts, and St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek is the outlier on the other end, with 841 manuscripts total.

But what about funding? Funding for e-codices has come from many different sources over the years. There are a couple of different sources for tracking funding information. The chart of selected sponsors from the project’s beginning, which is on the “Brief History” page of e-codice’s “About” section, includes (since 2003) various Swiss foundations, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Foundation, and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation. However this chart is headed “Sponsors (Selection)” so there may be other small foundations not named. There is also a list of current supporting institutions, which as of January 2025 includes many more foundations. The funding for e-codices has been and continues to be substantial.

I want to point out three things about what e-codices has done (beyond, or perhaps in addition to) its funding – in fact, these things no doubt contribute to the great success of this program.

They digitize complete manuscripts, not portions of manuscripts (say, only the illuminated pages). Yes, it is usual today to digitize complete manuscripts, but in 2003 this was not the case.
They digitize only Swiss manuscripts (manuscripts in or from Switzerland) which limits the scope.
The power of building a strong consortium to bring in additional funding and to help keep the project successful over the long term.

France, with 149 institutions, presents a similar scenario. The CNRS BVVM project, funded by the French Ministry of Culture and Ministry of Research, exemplifies the power of consortia in enabling smaller libraries to participate in large-scale digitization efforts. 118 of the manuscript-holding institutions in France are members of the CNRS BVVM.

Turning to the United States, the Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis project (BiblioPhilly) provides another example of what can be achieved through external funding and institutional collaboration. Organized by the Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries (PACSCL), the project ran from 2016 to 2019 with funding from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Fifteen institutions in and around Philadelphia participated, making their medieval and early modern manuscript collections available through a shared digitization effort.

BiblioPhilly brought together 15 institutions from across Philadelphia, institutions with very different collections and resources. The project made 475 codices, along with approximately 1,700 leaves and cuttings, available online. The Free Library of Philadelphia contributed the largest number of manuscripts, while other participants included university libraries, museums, and smaller special collections repositories – some of which own only one manuscript. Some institutions contributed manuscripts digitized specifically through the grant, while others made previously digitized materials available through the project. The resulting collection brought together material that had previously been dispersed institutional collections, creating a much more comprehensive picture of the region’s manuscript holdings.

The project depended on more than grant funding alone. BiblioPhilly essentially acted as a consortium within a consortium, a subset of PACSCL dedicated to medieval and Renaissance manuscripts. Members of the project consortium contributed more than their books. Lehigh University provided administrative and fiscal oversight, Penn Libraries undertook much of the digitization and hosted the images through OPenn, and every institution provided cataloging and metadata support, helping to make the manuscripts discoverable and usable as well as visible.

BiblioPhilly illustrates several of the same principles we saw in e-codices and the BVMM project: digitizing complete manuscripts, defining a manageable regional scope, and building a consortium that can pool expertise and resources. In Philadelphia, collaboration meant that institutions did not need to develop entirely separate digitization infrastructures or raise funds independently for individual institutional projects. Instead, they could participate in a coordinated effort that made their collections part of a larger digital resource. The project demonstrates how external funding, combined with an existing institutional network and shared technical infrastructure, can bring dispersed collections into a single (virtual) collection.

Shifting focus, I want to return to Paul’s second claim:

“Early manuscripts, vernacular manuscripts, illuminated manuscripts, and those with illustrious provenance are at the front of the queue for digitization.”

Briefly, it is not difficult to see the truth in Paul’s claim. Looking again at my master’s paper work from 2002, four projects representing some of the earliest full-manuscript digitization illustrate all four of these points:

Early Manuscripts at Oxford University: included some of the earliest manuscripts containing Old English (including Junius 11, ca. 1000)

Electronic Beowulf: Cotton MS Vitellius A XV, Nowell Codex, ca. 1000, written in Old English, formerly owned by Laurence Nowell and Sir Robert Cotton

The Aberdeen Bestiary: ca. 1200, lavishly illuminated

The Magna Carta (British Library, Cotton Augustus II. 106): one of four copies authenticated with the Great Seal of King John, 1215

Clearly, early in the great experiment of mass manuscript digitization, there was a focus on early, vernacular, illuminated manuscripts with illustrious provenance. It would be interesting to see if that trend still remains today. But that’s not what I am going to do. Instead, I want to complicate this by looking at another vernacular language, and how surviving manuscripts in this language have been treated when it comes to digitization.

While compiling information during the early stages of this work, I noticed that Wales was represented by only one institution in DMMap, the National Library of Wales, despite the fact that Welsh manuscripts are held by institutions throughout Wales and beyond. Welsh is the vernacular spoken in Wales, and I was curious to see how well represented Welsh-language manuscripts are in digitized collections, in Wales and elsewhere.

I turned to Daniel Huws’ book Medieval Welsh Manuscripts (University of Wales Press and the National Library of Wales, 2000) on Welsh vernacular manuscripts, in particular chapter 4, “Table of Welsh Vernacular Medieval Manuscripts” (to 1540). There are 174 manuscripts in this list. Of these, only 64 had been digitized as of November 2023.

Institution	#manuscripts	#digitized
National Library of Wales	130	54
British Library	20	0
Cardiff, Central Library (now Cardiff University?)	8	0?
Jesus College, Oxford (on deposit in Bodleian)	7	6
Bodleian Library	2	2
Cambridge, Trinity College	1	0
Cambridge, Corpus Christi College	1	1 (Parker on the Web)
Shrewsbury School	1	0
Glasgow University Library	1	0
Bangor University	1	0
Bodorgan (private collection)	1	0
Library Company of Philadelphia (?)	1	0
Rylands Library, University of Manchester	1	0

The distribution is strikingly uneven. The National Library of Wales accounts for 54 of these digitized manuscripts, while the British Library holds 20 manuscripts on the list and has digitized none of them. Other repositories have similarly limited digital coverage: six manuscripts at Jesus College, Oxford, were available through Digital Bodleian, along with two at the Bodleian itself and one at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Several other institutions hold Welsh vernacular manuscripts, but none of the manuscripts in my list at those institutions have been digitized.

This is a problem that complicates Suzanne Paul’s assertion that vernacular manuscripts are among those “at the front of the queue for digitization.” Which vernacular manuscripts are we talking about? Frankly, I assume the context of her paper is England, and thus she is talking about English vernacular manuscripts, which do appear to be prioritized in digitization efforts in England and elsewhere. (A full study on this would be interesting!)

Welsh-language manuscripts do not appear to have enjoyed the same priority. The figures suggest that a manuscript’s vernacular status alone does not explain its likelihood of being digitized; language, location, institutional resources, and the historical circumstances of a collection all matter. The situation is especially striking when we consider manuscripts held in repositories in England. The British Library’s Welsh manuscripts remain unavailable in digital copies, despite the institution’s substantial digitization activity and the importance of these manuscripts to Welsh literary and cultural history. This disparity invites us to consider the longer history of the relationship between England and Wales, including the unequal power relations through which Welsh language and culture have been marginalized. I would not argue that the figures alone establish a direct causal relationship between that history and contemporary digitization decisions. But the pattern raises important questions about whether the priorities and structures of digitization reproduce older inequalities in practices and policies of cultural heritage digitization.

There is also an economic dimension to this problem. Several institutions in Wales hold medieval manuscripts, but many have only a handful, and the resources available to digitize them are not necessarily comparable to those of larger national and university libraries. Even when a collection contains only one manuscript, digitizing it still requires equipment, staff time, infrastructure, and long-term digital preservation. A national library with an established digitization program can make substantial progress, but smaller institutions may struggle to make their holdings available without external funding or collaborative support. The Welsh example therefore brings together both of the questions raised by Paul: funding affects what can be digitized, and the assumptions guiding selection affect which collections receive attention. The result is that manuscripts can remain digitally invisible not because they lack cultural or scholarly significance, but because the institutions that hold them lack the resources—or the incentive—to make them accessible.

In conclusion, these examples suggest that the manuscript digital divide is shaped by more than the availability of external funding or the perceived significance of individual manuscripts. Switzerland’s e-codices project, France’s BVMM, and Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis demonstrate how sustained funding, a clearly defined scope, and collaboration among institutions can support digitization at scale, including for collections held by smaller institutions. But the Welsh case demonstrates why we must also examine the cultural and historical assumptions that shape our priorities. If early, illuminated, and famous manuscripts are obvious candidates for digitization, and if vernacular manuscripts are supposedly among those prioritized, we need to ask whose vernacular languages and whose cultural heritage benefit from that attention. As Paul herself warns, “there is a risk that this accessibility gap will continue to widen and a new digital canon will form,” in which manuscripts available on screen become the primary objects of study while those without digital copies are overlooked. Addressing this problem requires not only more funding and collaboration, but also a critical examination of how digitization priorities are established. We need to ask not just which manuscripts have been digitized, but which remain inaccessible, whose collections they belong to, and what the consequences of that absence are for the histories we are able to tell.

August 5, 2026August 5, 2026

Not Just “Can We?” but “Should We?” and “Why?” Understanding Digital Manuscripts as (Big) Data

Last Spring, Bridget Whearty and I published our article “Not Just “Can We?” but “Should We?” and “Why?” Understanding Digital Manuscripts as (Big) Data” in Digital Philology. Here is a taste of that, and a link to the open access copy if you would like to read more.

Abstract: It has been over a decade since the runaway popularity of “big data” hit industry and academia in the early 2010s. Today, big data and the artificial intelligence (AI) programs that feed on them are no longer being embraced with quite as much enthusiasm. With this growing awareness of the darker sides of (big) data and AI as its foundation, this article explores the challenges of working with datasets of digital manuscripts, particularly for those who seek to treat digital manuscripts as big data. We examine big data approaches that focus on digital manuscript images and those working with structured manuscript metadata, outlining what end-users must be aware of before plunging into the world of digital manuscripts as big data. Throughout, we emphasize the ethical and environmental costs in using machine learning and other AI approaches to analyze massive datasets of medieval manuscripts. The article concludes with a series of considerations for researchers who want to engage with digital manuscripts as (big) data.

Read more here

July 21, 2025March 29, 2026

A Franken-Book-of-Hours: From Physical to Digital and Back Again

This paper was originally presented at the International Medieval Congress in Leeds, UK, in July 2025. It was part of the session In Memoriam Johanna Green, III: Digital Medievalisms and owes a huge debt to Johanna Green, who was a great scholar and a great friend.

Thank you to Christine and Colleen for organizing these sessions and for accepting my paper. I’m excited to talk with you about a project that I’ve been working on for a while, one that was very much inspired by Joanna.

I want to begin by saying a few words about her. I first met Joanna online—I’m not sure exactly when—but I remember clearly meeting her in person at Kalamazoo in 2018, when she organized a series of Digital Skin sessions. I presented alongside her and Bridget Whearty on Saturday, May 12, 2018, at 3:30 PM—so it’s fun to be able to date that precisely. The work we did together, and the conversations that followed, were deeply formative for this project and others.

Everyone has talked about how brilliant and supportive Joanna was—and she truly was—but she was also so much fun. When I think of her, I smile. She was funny, creative, deeply thoughtful, and passionate about the materiality of manuscripts—especially what happens to materiality when manuscripts are made digital.

A screenshot from Johanna’s Instagram account

I’m sure many of you have read her article Digital Manuscripts as Sites of Touch: Using Social Media for “Hands-On” Engagement with Medieval Manuscript Materiality (Archive Journal, September 2018). I found this quote particularly meaningful, both for this talk and in general:

“The content and codex of a manuscript are materialized by interaction with a technological platform: the text is materialized by the technology of the codex; the physical codex is materialized when it is manipulated by the hand; the digital image is materialized when it is called on screen and touched by the audience’s fingertips. All are connected to one another because all must be “materialized” by interaction with the technological platform, interaction made manifest by the hand. They are made “real” because they are experienced.”

– Johanna Green, “Digital Manuscripts as Sites of Touch: Using Social Media for “Hands-On” Engagement with Medieval Manuscript Materiality” Archive Journal, 2018

In other words, interaction—physical or digital—is a key part of a manuscript’s materiality

Much of what I’ll show today is inspired by various projects and collaborations. I won’t go into detail on all of them because of time, but I’m happy to talk about any of them afterward.

One major influence is Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis (or BiblioPhilly), a Council on Library and Information Resources–funded project that digitized around 475 codex manuscripts from across Philadelphia, including a large number of Books of Hours. We not only photographed the manuscripts, but also created collation models for many of them. If you’re unfamiliar with collation models, I’ll explain them briefly in a moment.

I co-direct the VisColl Project with Alberto Campagnolo. It began on July 26, 2013, when I sent a message to the TEI listserv asking if anyone wanted to collaborate—and Alberto replied. We’ve been working together since. Essentially, we’ve developed a software tool and data model for creating structural models of manuscripts and mapping their contents.

Between 2019 and 2022, I also worked on a project called Books of Hours as Transformative Works. If you’re not familiar with the term “transformative work,” it comes out of fandom studies—think of fan fiction or fan art—where people respond emotionally and creatively to something they love. I wanted to apply this framework to Books of Hours, which are perfect for this kind of interpretation. People in the Middle Ages and Renaissance loved their Books of Hours, and you can see that in how they personalized and handled them. Kathryn Rudy has written extensively about this, showing how people left physical marks—kissing, touching, and so on.

Visualizing Structure and Variation

So what was I doing? I was looking at variations in the texts across many Books of Hours, mostly from collections in Philadelphia and the Walters Art Museum.

Here, each manuscript is laid out according to its structure. The Hours of the Virgin—which is typically the central text—is in gold. You can see what comes before and after it in each manuscript. In another version of the visualization, all the manuscripts are scaled to the same length, allowing us to compare how long or short each one is. You can immediately tell which manuscripts have more content and which are more minimal.

Building My Own Book of Hours

On January 24, 2022, I decided it would be fun to make my own Book of Hours using VCEditor, the structural modeling software that uses the VisColl Data Model. I used digitized pages from the BiblioPhilly project and assembled a new manuscript by virtually “cutting” and combining pieces from different books.

Imagine I have a table full of Books of Hours. I open one up, take the calendar section, and place it aside. Then I open another, take the Hours of the Virgin, and so on—compiling my own version, but doing it digitally.

To guide the structure, I turned to Roger Wieck’s list of standard contents and orderings for Books of Hours in Painted Prayers.

Although Books of Hours as Transformative Works challenged the idea of a fixed order, for this exercise I followed Wieck’s list. You can view the model at tinyurl.com/b-of-h.

The structural diagram links to digitized images. You can see how each section is drawn from different source manuscripts, mostly 15th-century and mostly Paris Use.

Here is a complete listing of the sections and the manuscript from which each section is drawn.

Elaine Treharne—and many others, including myself and, I think, some people in this room—have talked about what digitization does to a manuscript. Essentially, you’re taking a thing apart virtually. You’re deconstructing it, and then reconstructing it through interfaces.

Here’s a very common type of interface—probably the most common: the book reader. It’s designed to imitate the experience of sitting and paging through a book. You see the individual leaves, but you also get this opening. We can tell there’s something artificial going on—there’s this black line in the middle—but it’s obviously just two photos placed side by side.

Then you have things like gallery view, which is another kind of interface—just a different way of interacting with the digital object.

VCEditor itself is yet another interface. Instead of viewing the manuscript as something you read page by page, you’re seeing it as a structural object. For example, when I click this button, it pops up a view—not of a page opening—but of a physical leaf.

This is a bifolium, two leaves physically connected. If you were to take the book apart, you’d get this single sheet, but you’d never see these two pages side by side in the bound book. They don’t face each other in the codex.

And I had this realization just yesterday, during Carrie’s paper in the first Johanna Green Memorial session: what I’m doing is making an interface for a digitized book—or multiple digitized books—but it’s a physical interface, not a digital one.

After building this digital structure, I wondered: Could I print it out and bind it as a physical book?

So I did. Eventually.

At first, I made mistakes—like printing the back of the sheets upside down. (Some of these sheets have found their way into the current binding structure in the form of guards.)

Eventually, I got clean bifolia printed, organized them into quires (based on the structure of the parent manuscripts) and began sewing them onto leather thongs. I had never bound a book before, but I got a sewing frame, learned the basics, and bound the manuscript.

(more photos of the first binding of the Frankenbook)

By mid-2022, I had a bound textblock—but I didn’t love it. Something felt off. Then, earlier this year, I had an idea: what if I did a Coptic binding? I’d been resisting it because no historical Book of Hours has a Coptic binding. But then I thought—this is already a weird, hybrid, anachronistic object. Why not?

(The finished version – with a Coptic binding! The boards are 3D-printed, quire guards are from misprinted quires, and the thread is color-coded to the contents using the same colors as the data visualization for Books of Hours as Transformative Works.)

I also started thinking about covers. Should I do something like the leather cover of MS Codex 1056? Or a fancy treasure binding, made of metal with embedded stones? Or a chemise binding, like a 15th-century noblewoman might have carried?

I couldn’t decide. And then, talking to my artist friend Christine Kemp (who works in our makerspace), I had a revelation: why not make interchangeable jackets for the book?

At this point I took a step back and I thought—what am I doing? What I’m making is basically an artist’s book.

I found this blog post from the Smithsonian Unbound Blog to be helpful:

An artist’s book is a medium of artistic expression that uses the form or function of “book” as inspiration. It is the artistic initiative seen in the illustration, choice of materials, creation process, layout and design that makes it an art object. A book that only contains text is simply a book; even if authored by an artist, it would be a book that belongs in a book store or the shelves of a library.

What truly makes an artist’s book is the artist’s intent…

And what is my intent? I want to make something that draws on everything I know about manuscripts. Not just Books of Hours, but all manuscripts.

Re-use of manuscripts is something that happened historically. People took books apart and put them back together in new ways. They used fragments to make other things. I’m doing that too—just in a more modern and creative context. So I gave myself permission to explore that.

Part of the inspiration came from #dhmakes, which is a creative digital humanities community. I started engaging more with that group.

Then in May, I went to the Society for Textual Scholarship Conference, where Emily Brooks—who was just hired at Penn and who I’ve been working with—gave a talk “Treasuring Pop Bookishness: Remediating Ornamental Codex Culture in Contemporary Fandoms.” Obviously, that’s right up my alley. She talked about how, historically, book decoration reflected the values and identities of the people who owned them—and how similar practices are alive today in fandoms, where people personalize books by decorating them or adding things, making them their own.

Screenshot from Emily Brook’s talk, showing a historical binding alongside a fan binding.

I’ve also been experimenting with what I’m calling speculative codicology. I gave a talk on this in Bloomington, also in May. It’s inspired by speculative fiction—imagining a world that’s just slightly different from ours. It’s explicitly creative. It’s not about reconstructing the past; it’s about doing something new. I think it’s really important to say: I’m not trying to make a manuscript that would have existed in the past—I’m doing something different.

And of course, artist’s books have been another source of inspiration. I have embraced this.

Christine is working with me to create bindings. So far we’ve made a chemise (fabric) binding, and a leather binding, and we will soon start on a treasure binding (with assistance from Emily Brooks, and with stones donated by my son, who has a geology collection).

The first is the chemise binding, made of purple minky fabric, with gold machine-embroidery inspired by Walters MS W99. The inside lining is a dragon from FLP Widener 7, which is the Frankenbook’s Calendar.

The second is a leather binding, inspired not by any exiting book of hours, but instead by parchment and leather bindings of Medici ledgers, several of which we have in our collection.

I also made one myself, inspired by fragment reuse. I printed an antiphonary fragment from our collection, at scale, and used it to wrap the Frankenbook.

The artist(s) enjoying the fruits of their labor. (Christine Kemp on the left, Dot Porter on the right)

I want to end by returning to Joanna. I think she would’ve loved this project. One of her favorite manuscripts, MS Euing 26, is itself a 19th-century scrapbook—cuttings pasted together from a 15th-century book. Her interest in creativity, reuse, and materiality resonates deeply with what I’ve been exploring here.

Thank you, and I’d love to take your questions or show you the book after the session.

July 21, 2025July 21, 2025

Coffee With A Codex as an Online Community

This paper was presented via video at the SHARP Conference in July 2025. The video is posted here, followed by a transcript. A Q&A follows the talk and is transcribed at the end of this post.

I’m Dot Porter. I’m the curator for digital humanities at the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies and the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts in the University of Pennsylvania Libraries. I am sorry I can’t be here in person, but I would like to thank the SHARP organizers for allowing those of us who can’t attend in person to join virtually. So here is my recording of my talk. So thank you.

Coffee with a Codex began as an improvised outreach solution during the COVID-19 pandemic. Launched by me in January, 2021 at the University of Pennsylvania’s Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies, Coffee with a Codex offers a weekly, 30 minute informal Zoom session featuring primarily medieval and early modern manuscripts. The concept was and is simple: a book, an overhead camera, and a reasonably knowledgeable host, (that’s me) and also sometimes guest hosts who actually know a lot more than I do, which is always great to have. And we engage in spontaneous commentary while turning the pages of the book. It’s basically a show and tell.

And here is the setup with the overhead camera arm, so you can get a look at what it looks like from my side of things. And here are a couple of shots from when I was with Sophia Adams, who was a visiting scholar and she was looking at this 15th century prayer roll. And this is a view from a camera that’s in the room.

And it’s just sort of showing us as we’re doing setup. And then when we switched to the camera view, here is what the camera saw.

So you get in that case, both the far away and the close up. But this is what view looks like when we’re the program.

Now in its fifth year, the last four having been recorded with videos posted to YouTube and made available in the past events area of the webpage, Coffee with a Codex has grown into a fixture for a loyal group of manuscript enthusiasts, drawing between 25 and 40 attendees each week, depending on the topic of the manuscript. Many of these people are regulars.

In contrast to highly produced asynchronous content, Coffee with a Codex emphasizes synchronous, intimate, real-time engagement. But perhaps most notably, it has fostered a sense of community among an audience that spans disciplines, professions, and continents. This paper examines Coffee with a Codex through the lens of its 2024 participant questionnaire, focusing on how viewers experience the program and how they perceive its community aspects. The findings reveal not only deep appreciation for the program’s content and delivery, but also a strong sense of belonging and shared purpose.

Coffee with a Codex emerged from a long-standing SIMS commitment to integrating manuscript studies with digital engagement. Previous initiatives like Video Orientations, these are two to three minute videos that are posted to YouTube and also linked to our catalog records, which provide brief formal introductions to manuscripts. And Virtual Classroom Visits, virtual in-person curated manuscript visits with classes. Had already tested methods for remote object-focused teaching. But the pandemic, with its widespread restrictions on physical access, created both necessity and opportunity. Coffee with a Codex was built on that foundation, a lightweight, scalable, and personable format made possible by institutional support, smartphone cameras, and the willingness of myself and my colleagues at SIMS to be open to what was, at the beginning, very much an experiment. As my colleague, Nick Herman, Schoenberg Curator of Manuscripts, and I describe in our co-authored chapter in Mobile Heritage, which was published this year, “Coffee with a Codex represents a shift in manuscript outreach. Rather than relying on two-dimensional facsimile databases, which we also have many of at SIMS, the project returns attention to the physicality of the book, its weight, movement, texture, and sound. In doing so, we challenge the assumptions about access, audience, and authority.

Coffee with a Codex differs significantly from asynchronous content. It is ephemeral, participatory, and anchored in shared time. Its low threshold design, that is free registration, no prior experience, and short sessions, opens manuscript experiences to broader audiences. Participants are invited to type questions in the chat, which I repeat for the camera. As the recordings on YouTube don’t include the chats, neither do they include the attendees’ video and answer as I can. And here is the saved chat from our most recent event from last week.

And I’ve color coded the bars that are covering up the names. So you can see that there is one person. This was actually this person’s first time attending. So he had a lot of questions and a lot of things to say. You can see my colleague, Amey Hutchins, Manuscripts cataloging librarian, she attends sort of as my assistant and she’s there answering questions and then a couple of other people are chiming in and we have beginners. We have people saying things like that big red S looks like it was waiting for more decoration because we had a sort of, you know, lonely looking red colored initial with a lot of space around it. We’re trying to figure out what’s happening. Um, here’s someone asking me to zoom in on the lettering because we do have folks who are very interested in the letter forms and want to see that, so there’s a wide variety of folks and I’m very welcome to like comments and questions on this sort of thing. It’s one of my favorite, actually favorite parts of the event. But as one viewer wrote in response to the questionnaire, “I am not in the library or manuscript worlds, but I love the history of books and manuscripts.” That statement is emblematic of Coffee with a Codex’s power to welcome the curious and not just the credentialed.

So the 2024 Coffee with a Codex questionnaire was distributed via the program’s mailing list in the last months of the year. It included multiple choice and open-ended questions about attendance habits, asynchronous viewing, interest in online communities, preferred platforms and reflections on the program itself.

In total, we received 60 responses. This represents a self-selected group, many of them longtime participants. So the results aren’t statistically representative, but I really wanted to just hear what people had to say. The range and richness of the qualitative feedback provide valuable insight into the affective, intellectual and communal dimensions of coffee with a codex.

So what are some findings?

So the rest of this is basically going to be quotes, quotes from people, which is great. Participants frequency of attendance varied with most describing themselves as regular but flexible viewers. So Here are some examples. I try to attend when my schedule allows. I’m not able to attend as often as I would like. I wish I could come more often. I’m the department head. We all know how that is. As a full-time medical school faculty member, it’s hard for me to make all the talks.

And that’s also nice to see, right? Because a medical faculty member is not, that’s not English, it’s not art history, but they’re still interested in coming and I love that. This variability underscores the value of the recordings which some participants watch.

When live attendance isn’t possible, although the responses imply that we need to do better maybe with marketing the videos as an extension of the live sessions. So I think the recordings are good when I can’t come. And then here’s this responder who didn’t even know. I didn’t I know you’ve had recordings on YouTube and I’m going to check them out.

Respondents overwhelmingly affirmed Coffee with a Codex as a meaningful community experience. There were a lot of these. I love it. I feel like I’m part of a group that shares the same love and passion for rare materials as I do. An intelligent, cordial gathering. Most welcome. It’s lovely. That and Amey are a wonderful team. I look forward to this presentation. I like it as a gateway to a much needed weekend. Some participants also articulated a desire to grow the community. I am a 2025 MLIS candidate. I love it. You’re doing a great job. I tell my classmates. I tell librarians. I tell archivists. I want everybody to come. I belong to two international interest groups. I encourage you to test options for growing and keeping younger followers.

And yes, this is something I really want. People to come who are sort of new to manuscripts, and I want them to feel welcome, so that’s nice to see. Thank you for this wonderful program. It is appreciated that you have this group, and I have shared it with various friends.

Others expressed appreciation for Coffee with a Codex’s educational value. I look forward to these friendly meetings, which enrich my own research. And some framed the experience emotionally. Being transported each week to another country and century is wonderful. It puts the hardness of current events into some perspective.

And that is particularly nice to see because the world is really terrible right now. And my response to that has been to focus on bringing joy where I can. Not that I’m ignoring what’s happening in the world, but maybe for a half hour, we can focus on something that’s beautiful. And so I like to see that other people are doing that too. And then, of course, I love Coffee with a Codex. It’s such a lovely break in the week.

The responses suggest that Coffee with a Codex has grown beyond its original format into what we are defining through this session as a community of the book, a group formed around shared engagement with physical books. This, I think, makes Coffee with a Codex community distinct from Brian Stock’s textual communities, which I read a little bit about as I was preparing this. I didn’t think it really fit, but that’s nevertheless an obvious comparison that may be worth further analysis. Participants are not just watching. They’re participating in a ritualized event guided by an expert and joined by others who return week after week.

Importantly, I think, Coffee of the Codex attracts both traditional and non-traditional audiences, including attendees with creative rather than scholarly interest in manuscripts. Several respondents identified themselves as calligraphers, bookbinders, or artists with specific interests in material and visual details. So here are a couple of quotes from them. I’m a calligrapher and bookbinder, so seeing the letter forms is nice. And I always, I do, I talk about the bindings. I’m always pointing out things with that because I’m very interested in structure. I’m calligrapher and the letterforms are a major interest. And then I love seeing the art and the marginalia and the creatures. We don’t actually have a whole lot of manuscripts like that. But when we do, we look at them and that’s great.

These specialized comments demonstrate that Coffee with a Codex offers not just access, but also inspiration, potentially sparking new questions and creative applications. The community appears to be intentional and sustained rather than incidental. The program’s format, which is live, unscripted, personable, is designed to foster trust and continuity. As host, I am not a disembodied narrator but a regular presence, and the objects are not abstractions but are touchable and audible things.

In the 2024 questionnaire with a view towards expanding the community out of the weekly Zoom events, I asked about interest in community platforms, specifically Slack, Discord, or Facebook groups. There was definitely interest, but no clear consensus. One respondent wrote, I only know Facebook. I suggest you go with whatever is more likely to attract the largest number of participants. Yes, which is smart, especially among students and up and coming professionals. And then another cautioned, I would vote for Facebook, but since the last turn to the extreme, right? I don’t intend to use the platform. The other two, I don’t know.

This reflects a broader digital challenge, how to build community in a fragmented platform ecosystem, especially when we do have these sort of political concerns about what these platforms are supporting. Um, so we haven’t moved forward with any platform, although I am still interested in the possibility of doing this. And I think there would be a welcome in our, um, regular community as well.

I also think there are broader implications for Coffee with a Codex. It offers a compelling model for other institutions. It’s a repeatable, low cost, high touch format for engaging communities with rare materials. Its success depends not on scale, but on presence. The act of showing up each week to handle a book with care on camera for whoever wants to look.

In conclusion, Coffee with a Codex began as an emergency workaround and evolved into a beloved program with a committed audience. As the 2024 survey shows, Coffee with a codex isn’t just about manuscripts. It’s about people. It has created a rare space for shared looking informed listening and quiet joy. One participant summed it up very well. Your tireless dedication is much appreciated. Please don’t stop. I love it, and I’m not going to stop. So thank you very much for listening.

Q&A

Hi, everyone. I’m sorry I can’t be there in person to answer questions. So I asked Liz and Bridget to send me a few questions, and maybe they’re questions that you have. So I’ll do that now.

The first question, which is a general coffee with a codex question, How do you select which manuscripts to showcase when?

There’s not a lot of science to it. I have a spreadsheet where I put manuscripts as I come across them. Maybe I’ll be doing a virtual classroom visits, or I’ll be doing some other kind of project. I curated an exhibit last year. And as part of that, I looked at a whole lot of manuscripts from the collection, and I added them to the list, and then I just sort of schedule them as they come up. I do try to have a mix in the schedule, so the next couple of weeks I actually had two 15th century Italian manuscripts kind of together. We do have a lot of 15th-century Italian manuscripts in the collection so I guess it’s forgivable, but I try to. Have some variety, especially in terms of cultural background and language and that kind of thing. So I’m not just doing Latin manuscripts all the time. Although this past year, I tried to be a little more systematic. I did a search of our catalog by date of publication, which is the date that we have dated the manuscripts to. And so this year, there were a lot of early manuscripts. But again, I tried to mix them up. So you’d have like one of our early Latin ones, and then followed by like one our early Arabic ones, that kind of thing. So but now I’m sort of back to being a little bit more piecemeal, which I think is fine. I don’t, you know, I try not to stress about it too hard, except in terms of being having that variety. I will say, as I have guest hosts, I have I now have some regular guest hosts. So Louis Meiselman is our Judaica cataloger, and he picks his own manuscripts. It’s usually whatever he’s been cataloging. I also have graduate students who have guest hosted with manuscripts that they’ve been working on, so obviously they pick them. And occasionally, my colleague Nick Herman, who’s our curator of manuscripts, he will also pick his own manuscripts. And I like that too, because then I don’t have to be responsible for making the selection. But that’s a good question. So that’s how that goes.

Next question. In the range of people attending, do you find more people wondering about content or is it mostly a materiality crowd? So it’s a little bit leading, like I’m little bit leading because I am a materiality person. And I am not primarily a content person. It’s not a secret. I, and I often say it, like at the start of the event, I’m like, look, like especially if it’s something, like if it was an Arabic manuscript or a few weeks ago, I did some Arabic and Coptic, like I can’t read Arabic, I can’t read Coptic. I can not read a lot of languages. And so if people have like really detailed, if they want to see what a particular page says, I can’t help. Very frequently, there are other people on the call who can, because they’ll come and know more than me, which is fantastic. And so then that can sort of help out with the content part. But I’m very much materiality. If there are folks who are really content, they just have to put up with me talking about materiality, and I think for most people, that’s fine. So as a sort of self self-selects a little bit, and it’s hard for me to say, what people are actually coming for. All right.

Next question. Who are your attendees? Mostly already manuscripts people, or do you find yourself working with advanced professionals and totally untrained lovers of manuscripts? And how do you engage that full range?

I think that presentation actually answered the question. And it is like a broad swathe of experts and also newbies and also artists, which is great. I know that there are some folks from the Society for Creative Anachronism too who come. So it’s a great variety. How do I engage? I think I engage by sharing my knowledge, which, again, tends to be material, and also by making it a conversation. I’m not giving a lecture. I’m like, here’s the thing, ask me questions. And people do ask questions in the chat, as you saw from that one screenshot. You know, there’s very much a question and answer and also sharing knowledge and conversation. And I think that helps a lot. It helps me make people comfortable. Another thing that I do is I’m not afraid to admit when I don’t know something. I think, that’s a really important aspect, being willing to say when I don’t know something. And I think that makes the experts more willing to step up and share. And it makes people who are newbies and maybe don’t know as much feel more comfortable, like, oh, she’s the person who’s leading the event and even she doesn’t like know everything. And I think that can be really helpful. Good question.

So the last question, affect, I love affect. You are an enormous lover of manuscripts as well as highly trained and experienced. How much of that love do you share in Coffee with a Codex versus say Inside My Favorite Manuscript podcast (which is a podcast I hosted a few years ago. I don’t do anymore, sad.) And how do you decide the balance of pleasure and rigor? So I’m all pleasure. It’s all about like, Let’s have fun. I actually think about it as manuscript fandom. I have a long history in fandom, and I do feel like what I do is a type of fandom work. That said, I don’t want to lie about the stuff, which is one of the reasons why I’m not afraid to say when I don’t know something. The thing that I have is I have access. Right, like I am a curator in this library, and we have these incredible collections. And I don’t know everything about everything in the collection, and I don t have to, because I have a camera and I can show it on Zoom. And I feel like that’s the least that I could do. For me, it really is about like sharing this amazing thing that we have with the world, even when I can’t tell you every single thing about it. But the community, you know, that’s sort of where the community can kind of step in. And it’s one of the reasons why I also love having guest hosts who do tend to be more knowledgeable than I am. So that’s really valuable. Yeah, so great question. And I think that was the last one.

So if you have a question that I didn’t answer, if you want to know more about Coffee with a Codex, if you’re interested maybe in setting something like this up at your institution, I would love to That is, yes, dorp at upenn.edu. And again, I’m really sorry I couldn’t be there in person. I’m with you in spirit. And I hope you all have a wonderful day.

April 25, 2025July 1, 2025

Speculative Codicology

In March 2025, I presented a talk for the “Medievalia at the Lilly Library” annual event called “VCEditor as a Tool for Speculative Codicology.” I started the talk with a description of the VisColl Project, which is concerned with the practice and theory of modeling and visualizing the physical construction (aka collation) of codex manuscripts. Next, I talked about VCEditor, which is the current version of the software we use to build and visualize models (using the VisColl Data Model).

August 22, 2024April 25, 2025

Addendum: Full citations for Specific Knowledge post

This post serves as an addendum to Specific Knowledge: Cassandra Daucus on Manuscripts, published by From Beyond Press.

If you’re here because you read the Specific Knowledge post and you’d like to know more about the manuscripts in the figures, welcome! Below you’ll find full citations, links to the catalog records and digital facsimiles, and videos where they exist.

All the books featured in the post are from the collections of the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries.

March 19, 2024April 25, 2025

Collection Sharing as a form of Digital Collections Security

This blog post was originally conceived as a contribution to Now You See It Now You Don’t: Sustainable Access in a Digital Age, an event organized by the Bodleian Library and held on Zoom on February 7, 2024. Although my name appears in the list of contributors, I caught the flu that week and wasn’t able to attend. But I was prepared, and even though I’ve no doubt other people there said similar things, I wanted to post this for FOMO if for no other reason. This post consists of screenshots of my slides, and accompanying notes that explain my points further.

April 4, 2023April 25, 2025

IMFM Episode 15: Jo Koster on prayer, manuscript digitization, and women’s literacy in the middle ages

Tumblr was borking so I am posting the show notes over here this week. Welcome to my blog!

March 28, 2023April 25, 2025

Manuscripts, Humanity, and AI

(a few words originally posted on Twitter on March 27, 2023)

Image of a manuscript, generated in MidJourney by Suzette van Haaren

I’ve been trying all morning to figure out what bothers me about these Mid journey-generated manuscripts without simply sounding like a Luddite, and I think I finally have it.