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 33

The library was on vacation for the last two weeks, but work has now resumed. So far twenty-four manuscripts have been digitized this week

2026 Week 30

A more active week for digitizing with forty-one manuscripts added to the repository. These were split between Barb.lat, contributing twenty-nine, and Ott.lat adding twelve. At the right side is p.98 from Ott.lat.2983, an early 18th C text on mushrooms. Although this one is not dated, the preceding volume is a Herbarium by the same author, Tommaso Chel...

2026 Week 29

Only fourteen manuscripts were digitized in the past week. These were almost entirely from the Ott.lat collection, with only two outlying volumes from Vat.gr. To the right is f.84r from Ott.lat.3037, an 18th C book about alchemy. This page depicts some vessels, in either glass or terra-cotta, for distillation At the bottom is a bit of the title decora...

2026 Week 28

Only eighteen manuscripts were digitized this week. Following the pattern of last week, the largest contributor was nine manuscripts from Barb.lat. The rest of the work consisted of eight manuscripts from Ott.lat and a lone manuscript from Vat.gr To the right is f.65r from Ott.lat.2879, a late 14th, or early 15th, century manuscript containing the writin...

2026 Week 27

A total of thirty-three manuscripts were digitized this week, the bulk of them coming in on Friday. Surprisingly the largest contributor, adding sixteen, was Barb.lat. This has been an active Fond for the last few months, but rarely the highest contributor. As might be expected, the second contributor was Ott.lat, adding eight. The final manuscript cam...

2026 Week 26

This week completes the first half of the year, and the library digitized only twenty manuscripts. Returning to recent patterns, most of these, fourteen in total, came from the Ott.lat collection. The remainder consisted of five Barb.lat volumes and a single icon from the Comb collection. To the right is the verso of the front flyleaf from Barb.lat.216...

2026 Week 25

Twenty-five manuscripts were digitized the past week, unusually for the Vatican, the majority of these were uploaded on Sunday. Most of the manuscripts this week, twenty-two, came from Borg.Copt. The last three manuscripts came from. Barb.lat, giving two, and one volume only from Ott.lat. It is not clear if this is the start of a new pattern in digitiz...

Recently Digitized Manuscripts from the BAV

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