Blog

Most of the recently digitised manuscripts from the National Library of the CR are medieval codices containing Czech texts. In terms of their content, these are predominantly theological, ascetic and morally instructive works translated or adapted from Latin originals, whose authors include e.g. Thomas à Kempis, Albertanus of Brescia, Henry Suso and others. The manuscripts further comprise sets of prayers, legends, dictionaries and medical compilations. Texts in Latin are only represented by a set philosophical treatises written in Prague at the beginning of the 15th century (XIV.F.20) and two codices from the Prague Lobkowicz Library, whose previous owner was the Premonstratensian monastery of Weissenau.

The National Library has recently provided access to 19 codices from between the 14th century and the beginning of the 16th century. Most of them are placed under the shelf mark XVII and thus contain texts in Czech. The manuscripts include i.a. probably the oldest extant version of the collection Ráj duše (/The Paradise of the Soul / from 1383, XVII A 19; the same text has also been preserved in the codex XVII D 32 from the turn of the 15th century), several volumes containing a Czech version of Lives of the Holy Fathers (XVII C 16, XVII C 17, XVII C 28) and Czech translations of Historia scholastica, the narrative Biblical history by Peter Comestor (XVII D 18), and of the moral-educational work Quadripartitus apologeticus (XVII E 12, in Czech Čtverohranáč). A unique notation of the song Našě sestra Jana [Our Site Jane] forms part of the collection of poems and other texts XIV G 45; several of the newly digitised codices are written in German (shelf mark XVI and a collection of theological texts from the Prague Lobkowicz Library XXIII D 178).

The National Library of Medicine in Prague digitised four volumes of medical and veterinary printed books in 2016. They all come from the last quarter of the 18th century and were mostly printed in Vienna, some also in Bratislava and Lübeck. The binder’s volume of individual parts of the work Anfangsgründe der chirurgischen Vorbereitungswissenschaften für angehende Wundärzte (F 184) by J. J. von Plenck is also interesting for its ownership marks.

The Museum of the Brno Region provided access to another five medieval manuscripts from the library of the Benedictine monastery in Rajhrad in 2016. The earliest of them is the collection of sermons from the first half of the 14th century (R 424). Sermonic literature is also represented by codex R 370 with texts of Johannes Hieronymus (Silvanus) of Prague. The main part of another two manuscripts is formed by the Vocabularius Ex quo (a Latin-German dictionary); its inscription in the manuscript R 391 states the year 1447, R 586 comes from 1481. Codex R 392 with moral-educational writings originated in 1417.