stephan huller

Okay so I finally received an email today from the Vatican Library explaining to me what I have to do to order this page:

Does anyone know how I should describe what I am looking for? I am only interested in one page, right? How do I explain what I want from the manuscript to this guy?

Roger Pearse

You need to give him two things:

a) Enough information to identify the manuscript. I.e. the "shelf-mark".

What's one of those? Well, manuscripts are always given a "shelf-mark" in a collection, and usually divided into collections. This is because big libraries often acquire whole bunches of manuscript from a single donor, so name the "collection" after them. So for instance "Vaticanus Palatinus Latin. 123" means a Latin ms. numbered 123 in the Palatine collection in the Vatican. That's a complete shelfmark. In this example, the "Palatine" collection all came from the Rheinland palatinate at Heidelberg at the end of the 30 years war, hence the name "Palatine". Migne will NOT usually have an adequate shelf-mark. He often gives no useful info at all. So one has to do some research. Now I'm not quite clear myself what you are looking for, so ... give me some hints, and I can offer a few more thoughts.

b) Enough information to identify the page to be photographed. I.e. the "folio number" and whether you want the "recto" or "verso".

People who own manuscripts need to identify the pages. So they write a number in pencil at the top right of each leaf (not page). This way, if a leaf goes missing, at least you know which one! The front of the leaf/folio is the "recto"; the reverse is the "verso".

NB: The word "folio" in this context has nothing to do with the "folio" size of books (although most manuscripts are folio in size, as it happens).

Does that help?

We can't expect the library staff to do this research for us; they won't usually have the skills or time to identify what we want. They expect something like:

"Please supply a colour photograph in digital form for an incredible amount of money of folio 23r of ms. Palatin. Gr. 456".

And they will. Particularly the charging bit.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

tanya

Thank you Roger, well written. Much appreciated...

Roger Pearse

Glad to help!