The Vatican Library Goes Online and Digitizes Tens of Thousands of Manuscripts, Books, Coins, and More

If any one of us ran our own coun­try, we’d sure­ly dri­ve no small amount of resources toward build­ing an impres­sive nation­al library. That would be true even if we ran a coun­try the size of the Vat­i­can, the small­est sov­er­eign state in the world — but one that, unsur­pris­ing­ly, punch­es well above its weight in terms of the size and his­tor­i­cal val­ue of its hold­ings. “It was in 1451 when Pope Nicholas V, a renowned bib­lio­phile him­self, attempt­ed to re-estab­lish Rome as an aca­d­e­m­ic cen­ter of glob­al impor­tance,” writes Aleteia’s Daniel Esparza. That for­mi­da­ble task involved first “build­ing a rel­a­tive­ly mod­est library of over 1,200 vol­umes, includ­ing his per­son­al col­lec­tion of Greek and Roman clas­sics and a series of texts brought from Con­stan­tino­ple.”

The Vat­i­can Apos­tolic Library, known as “VAT,” has grown a bit over the past five and a half cen­turies. Today it con­tains around 75,000 codices and 85,000 incunab­u­la (which Esparza defines as “edi­tions made between the inven­tion of the print­ing press and the 16th cen­tu­ry”) amid a total of over one mil­lion vol­umes.

And in the case of increas­ing­ly many of these doc­u­ments, you no longer have to make the jour­ney to Vat­i­can City to see them. Thanks to an ongo­ing dig­i­ti­za­tion project launched a decade ago, increas­ing­ly many have become search­able and down­load­able on Digi­VatLib, a data­base of the Vat­i­can Library’s dig­i­tized col­lec­tions includ­ing not just the afore­men­tioned codices and incunab­u­la but “archival mate­ri­als and inven­to­ries as well as graph­ic mate­ri­als, coins and medals.”

Back in 2016 we fea­tured a dig­i­tal col­lec­tion of 5,300 rare man­u­scripts dig­i­tized by the col­lec­tion, includ­ing the Ili­ad and Aeneid as well as Japan­ese and Aztec illus­tra­tions. The VAT’s scan­ning, upload­ing, and orga­niz­ing has con­tin­ued apace since, and though it pri­or­i­tizes man­u­scripts “from the Mid­dle Age and Human­is­tic peri­od,” its mate­ri­als tak­en togeth­er have a wider his­tor­i­cal and indeed cul­tur­al sweep, one that only gets wider with each page added. You can get start­ed explor­ing this wealth of doc­u­ments by scrolling down a lit­tle on Digi­VatLib’s front page, in the mid­dle of which you’ll find the lat­est dig­i­tized mate­ri­als as well as a host of select­ed man­u­scripts, a few of whose pages you see above. The VAT has enjoyed its sta­tus as one of the chief repos­i­to­ries of West­ern civ­i­liza­tion longer than any of us has been alive, but we can count our­selves in the first gen­er­a­tion of human­i­ty to see it open up to the world.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Take a 3D Vir­tu­al Tour of the Sis­tine Chapel, St. Peter’s Basil­i­ca and Oth­er Art-Adorned Vat­i­can Spaces

1,600-Year-Old Illu­mi­nat­ed Man­u­script of the Aeneid Dig­i­tized & Put Online by The Vat­i­can

How the Mys­ter­ies of the Vat­i­can Secret Archives Are Being Revealed by Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence

Explore 5,300 Rare Man­u­scripts Dig­i­tized by the Vat­i­can: From The Ili­ad & Aeneid, to Japan­ese & Aztec Illus­tra­tions

Behold 3,000 Dig­i­tized Man­u­scripts from the Bib­lio­the­ca Palati­na: The Moth­er of All Medieval Libraries Is Get­ting Recon­struct­ed Online

3,500 Occult Man­u­scripts Will Be Dig­i­tized & Made Freely Avail­able Online, Thanks to Da Vin­ci Code Author Dan Brown

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.