Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts

RBML is home to one of the major collections of Western European pre-modern manuscripts between the North American coasts, including over 80 codices and rolls/scrolls, approximately 1,500 fragments, and more than 100 examples of pre-modern diplomatics, or legal manuscripts. While most of this material is in Latin, the collection also includes works in medieval and Renaissance versions of various vernaculars, including French, Italian, German, Dutch, and Spanish, with additional manuscripts in Hebrew, Arabic, and Persian. The collection is particularly strong in the area of medieval pastoral care (inclusive of sermon compilations, preaching and confessional guides, exempla collections, penitential manuscripts, and priest’s miscellanies), but also includes devotional and liturgical works, mysticism, scholastic theology, canon and civil law, illuminated manuscripts, choir books, biblical, Quranic, and Torah texts, and even late-antique and early-medieval geographical treatises. Altogether, our holdings span more than 700 years’ worth of materials written by hand on various writing surfaces from the Near East to the Western shores of Europe and, in one notable case, across the Atlantic to early Colonial Mexico.