Fragmentarium: Laboratory for Medieval Manuscript Fragments

Inspired by the Council’s Choice for January 2025 (Digital Scriptorium), I would like to highlight another online resource for the study of medieval manuscript culture. Fragmentarium, begun as a trial project in 2015, is a consortial portal and database that ‘enables libraries, collectors, researchers and students to publish images of medieval manuscript fragments, allowing them to catalogue, describe, transcribe, assemble and re-use them’. The database now includes over 7000 fragments and is growing all the time.

I will highlight three aspects of Fragmentarium that I find particularly useful:

  1. The interface for searching the digital images available through the portal enables search results to be sorted by the date of posting online. If you are returning to the database with a particular search, you can see the most recent additions first (at the time of writing, this was a fragment posted less than a week ago).
  2. The portal provides information and links to many related projects that are contributing to the database, for example, fragments from bindings in early printed books from libraries in the Jesuit province of Southern Brazil.
    https://unisinos.br/biblioteca/memorial-jesuita
  3. Links to Fragmentology: A Journal for the Study of Medieval Manuscript Fragments.
    https://www.fragmentology.ms/index

In short, Fragmentarium is a fascinating website to browse and a great research platform.

Julia Walworth, Vice-President