The digital medieval manuscript: approaches to digital codicology

As I click the digital medieval manuscript opens on my screen: a list of bright images and a collection of metadata, structured by software that contains the object. The age-stained parchment, the miniatures and golden marginal decorations look familiar. When I turn its leaves, however, I do not hear the slight crack of the buckling page, nor do I feel the book’s weight in my hands. Instead I touch my trackpad and swipe, pinch and zoom to explore the medieval book. The digital manuscript facsimile is not the medieval manuscript. And yet, the two are intrinsically entangled.

With digitization gaining ever-more importance, we encounter medieval manuscripts mostly in their digital form. This thesis explores how digitisation affects the way we perceive, handle, encounter, keep, preserve, and understand medieval manuscripts. It reflects on how manuscripts move as cultural objects in an increasingly digital culture. On the basis of three case studies, each focusing on one manuscript and its digital counterpart(s), I reveal cultural and social consequences of making, handling and keeping manuscripts in online environments. I explore digital codicology as a method for analysing digital facsimiles of medieval manuscripts: using codicological tools to understand digital facsimiles, what they are and how they function in the world. Like the codicologist, the digital codicologist aspires to analyse the digital manuscript facsimile’s material elements, its place as cultural object and carrier of knowledge and tradition, and its position in history. With that, this study reveals the importance and the beauty of the digital medieval manuscript.