John Rylands Library holds an incredible collection of incunables. As part of a partnership with Gale Publishing, the Centre for Heritage Imaging & Collection Care (CHICC) have embarked on an ambitious project to digitise a number of them. Earlier this year, Gale selected a small number for the CHICC team to begin with. Now available online in the Rylands Medieval Collection are (JRUL reference number in brackets):
- Luca Pulci, Cyriffo Calvaneo (13735)
- Marsilio Ficino, De Christiana religione (16751)
- Cristoforo Landino, Formulario di epistole (17427)
- Aesopus moralisatus (17645)
- Luca Pulci, Il Driadeo (18183)
- Domenico Cavalca, Frutti della lingua (9785.1)
- Domenico Cavalca, Specchio di Croce (9785.2)
- Angelo Poliziano, Silva cui titulus Manto (20797.1)
- Angelo Poliziano, Silva cui titulus Rusticus (20797.2)
- Angelo Poliziano, Silva cui titulus Ambra (20797.3)
- Angelo Poliziano, Silva cui titulus Nutricia (20797.4)
- Gerardus de Lisa, Mirabilia Romae (21324.1)
- Suetonius, De grammaticis et rhetoribus (21324.2)
- Sextus Aurelius Victor, De viris illustribus (21324.3)
- Soprascripti et introscripti di lettere (21324.4)
- Giovanni Boccaccio, Decamerone (18201)
CHICC are currently digitising another 57 incunables from our collection, the majority of which were printed in England. Photography is nearly complete & so begins the painstaking job of cataloguing them all…. All incunabula will be freely available online in 2011.
If anyone has a particular interest in incunabula, it is worth having a look at the Cambridge Incunabula Project, which aims to create specialist records for all the incunables in the Library’s online catalogue, with special emphasis on copy-specific information such as anomalies, rubrication, decoration and illumination, annotations, binding, marks of ownership, and provenance. The Project cataloguer is Dr. Laura Nuvoloni – have a look at her blog.
