One of the Cambridge colleges has put its manuscripts online; or rather, has allowed an American university to do it for them. Thanks to the catalogue in the last item, I find that the Parker library at CCC is online here.
The website is a bit useless. What you want is a list of manuscripts and a bunch of PDF’s to download. What you get is one of these airy-fairy-force-the-user-to-do-a-junk-registration, and then badly categorised materials – no search by author, as far as I could see. The most useful access seems to be the browse by title. This gives a single page, from which the alert can pick out the stuff they want. The actual stuff underneath that, for each manuscript, seems normal, if fussy.
But I can’t avoid saying this: how these people love to obtrude themselves between the user and the actual page images! You have to click repeatedly to get an image of a page large enough to read; then the same for the next page, etc. Come on, guys; think of the user for once!
Most of the collection is medieval, lots of it concerned with Old English, some of it stuff by Parker himself. But there’s a copy of part of Orosius there, some stuff by Isidore of Seville, Augustine, Jerome on Ecclesiastes, a sermon by Chrysostom, some Bede, Nennius, Origen on Numbers, letters of Symmachus, and bits of Sulpicius Severus.
Great to have it online, anyway.
Working on the iconography of the myth of the phoenix in mediaeval times, I am looking for an illumination of the MS CCCC 53, fol. 200b : the phoenix in its egg of spice.
Best regards, F. Lecocq, Maître de Conférences, Université de Caen