Traces of ownership in the books
The Mmmonk corpus list
Mmmonk unites the manuscripts that were once part of the libraries of St Bavo’s, St Peter’s, Ten Duinen and Ter Doest. But over the course of the centuries, the manuscripts have been dispersed to different parts of the world. Research is necessary to determine whether a manuscript once belonged to these abbeys. Fortunately, there many types of evidence that allow us to retrace the provenance of a manuscript.
Take a virtual tour through the Mmmonk manuscripts to learn about the various types of provenance evidence in medieval books.
Research
The compilation of the list of manuscripts is based on the study of secundary sources, e.g. the Corpus Catalogorum Belgii and the Bibale database, as well as on first hand observations and research. As the research continues, new Mmmonk manuscripts keep surfacing. This will probably continue to happen in the future, especially when new technologies like IIIF and Artificial Intelligence will be applied to provenance research. It is, for instance, perfectly plausible that we will soon start training computers to scan large IIIF bodies of images to search for the 17th century library stamp from the Dunes Abbey or for the handwriting of a specific scribe from the St Peter’s scriptorium.
Counting manuscripts
A caveat about the way we count manuscripts. We consider every individually existing item as one manuscript. In other words: every object that has a shelf mark or call number, counts as one manuscript, even though it might be a single leaf coming from a codex that also survived. This is a pragmatical decision. The virtual Mmmonk library is built with IIIF manifests, and manifests are created per call numbers.
(Evelien Hauwaerts, 2022)