Manuscripts online at the Walters Art Museum

A bunch of gospel manuscripts and other items, mostly illuminated, are online at the Walters Art Museum here.  Blessedly, the Walters has made the images truly accessible:

This Web page links to complete sets of high-resolution archival images of    entire manuscripts from the collection of the Walters Art Museum, along    with detailed catalog descriptions. They are available for free under a Creative      Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license.  Manuscripts    images and descriptions were created and are provided through Preservation    and Access grants awarded to the Walters Art Museum by the National    Endowment for the Humanities, 2008-2014.

Images are offered in four sizes:

  1. Master TIFF (600PPI for text pages/1200PPI [or highest resolution    attainable] for illuminated pages
  2. 300PPI TIFF
  3. JPEG (1800 pixels on the long side)
  4. Thumbnail JPEG (190 pixels on the long side)

For an animated “turning the pages” presentation of the manuscripts and    downloadable PDFs, visit    the Walters Art

Well done the Walters!  This is what we want.  Serious users of the collection do not want to be trapped by some custom “viewer application”.

What of the mss?  Well, they aren’t that interesting to us.  There is a large collection of Korans, for instance.  Here are a few that might be of wider interest:

There are also a bunch of Armenian gospel manuscripts there, which makes me wonder whether we actually have a critical edition of the Armenian bible yet?  Metzger deplored the absence of one in his book on the versiones decades ago.

A useful resource, I think.

 

 

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2 thoughts on “Manuscripts online at the Walters Art Museum

  1. Hi Roger,

    There is an edition of the Classical Armenian translation of the Bible that is used as the “critical” edition, though more than a hundred years old:

    Astuatsashunch’ matean hin ew nor ktakaranats’, hamematut’eamb ebrayakan ew yunakan bnagrats’ [Old and New Testaments of the Bible, compared with the Hebrew and Greek texts] (Constantinople, 1895). The large file has been divided into three parts for manageability:

    Hin ktakaran/Old Testament-1, in 312 pdf pages. Genesis to Ruth. File size: 40.9 MB [http://rbedrosian.com/Downloads4/Bible1_grabar_OT_GentoRuth.pdf];

    Hin ktakaran/Old Testament-2, in 724 pdf pages. Kings to Malachi. File size: 33.2 MB;
    http://rbedrosian.com/Downloads4/Bible2_grabar_OT_KingstoMach.pdf

    Nor ktakaran/New Testament-3, in 301 pdf pages. File size: 12.9 MB [http://rbedrosian.com/Downloads4/Bible3_grabar_NT.pdf].

    Regards,
    Robert

  2. Robert,

    Thank you very much for these details and links. It’s not an area that has been nearly enough explored.

    All the best,

    Roger

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