Recently Digitized Manuscripts from the BAV

Welcome! This project is a continuation of the work started by Jean-Baptiste Piggin tracking new manuscripts added to the digitized manuscripts of the Vatican Libraries. Each week we add a new page with the manuscripts from the previous week, with title, author, date and incipt where possible. Announcements of the weekly update will be posted to Mastodon, anyone with additions, corrections or information about any manuscripts is invited to contact me there and I'll add it here.

Please note that this page only lists the most recent seven entries. For older entries, please look in the yearly archive files:

Manuscripts are browsable by Fond, the term for collection, in much the same way that they are on the official BAV website. The listing here provides all high-quality digitized manuscripts, that is those not from scanned microfilm, along with the same metadata one would find in the weekly listings and a thumbnail. For some of the collections, notably Latin collections, Vat.gr and Rossiani, this generates a very large page.

In addition to the weekly entries listed above, there are a series of custom pages where groups of manuscripts are pulled from the database using custom queries. These Ad Hoc query pages are available with brief descriptions of the contents and sometimes the reason for that specific query. Please contact the editor if you have an query you'd like generated as part of this collection.

2026 Week 7

Only four manuscripts have been digitized so far this week

2026 Week 6

A solid showing this week, with fifty-five manuscripts digitized, forty-six of those were uploaded on Friday. The vast majority, forty-four, came from the Ott.lat fond. The bulk of the remaining came from Barberini fonds, with five from Barb.lat, two from Barb.or and one from Barb.ar. All of the remaining contributions were single volumes, one each from...

2026 Week 5

On Friday of this week eighteen manuscripts were digitized, the only day of activity. Of those, sixteen were from Ott.lat, and one each from Chig and Vat.lat. At the right is f.121r from Ott.lat.2150, a glossed copy of Porphyry's Isagoge dated to the 13th C. This text is roughly an introduction to Aristotle's Categories and formed the basic textbook on ...

2026 Week 4

Only six manuscripts were digitized last week, all from the Ott.lat collection. At the right is f.33v from Ott.lat.2071, a composite manuscript of the 14th C. The first part, which includes this folio, is the Summa of William of Ockham, probably the most well known name of any of the 14th C English philosophers due to his Razor. This manuscript has a ...

2026 Week 3

A total of thirty-three manuscripts were digitized this past week. They came entirely from the Ott.lat, with twenty-five, and Barb.lat, with the remaining eight manuscripts. To the right is a page from Ott.lat.1410, a copy of the works of Virgil with glosses by Servius. This is f.49r, which contains the start of the Aeneid, starting "Arma virumq[ue] can...

2026 Week 2

A total of thirty-seven manuscripts were digitized this week. These were split between Ott.lat, which added twenty-four, and Barb.lat which added thirteen. This brings the total number of manuscripts digitized from the Ott.lat collection to more than 1600, or about a half of the total collection, with a further 200 digitized from microfilm. To the rig...

2026 Week 1

Only five manuscripts were digitized this week, all from the Ott.lat collection. To the right is f.288v from Ott.lat.644, one of the approximately thirteen surviving manuscripts of the Dux neutrorum, a Latin translation, mostly from the Hebrew, of Maimonides's Guide to the Perplexed. This manuscript is French in origin, and was held by the Benedictine Ab...