'European Illustrated Books and Manuscripts, c.1400-1700'

　

<Content of this Website>

This web-based catalogue deals with European illustrated books and manuscripts mainly from fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, together with some additions from earlier and later periods. All items are in the possession of Keio University Library, unless otherwise noted. It deals with paratextual (e.g. illustration, layout, binding, provenance etc.) as well as textual data, to highlight the individuality of each item. It aims to provide the following information on each item described:

  1. bibliographical description
  2. digitized images of sample pages
  3. comments on the content of the item, its author and publisher, as well as on the subject of illustration of the sample pages
  4. recent literature on the item, together with references in standard bibliographies
  5. links to relevant information on the web
    6.

This is essentially a bilingual site with Japanese pages providing comments of somewhat more introductory nature, while English pages carry full bibliographical information on each item for researchers.

　

<The Web as a research environment>

The whole website is structured as the image/text data collection reflecting the particular research interest of the web organizer, rather than as an archive aiming to include all the items relevant to the subject. Although this website grew out of the catalogue of the exhibition, 'Reflections in Allegory: European Illustrated Books, 1500-1700'　(January 25-30, 1999, Maruzen Gallery, Tokyo) written by Takami Matsuda and published by Keio University Library, its purpose is not to provide the on-line version of a traditional library catalogue recording static bibliographical data; rather, it is intended to function as a 'contextual database' which responds to the constantly changing cultural and academic context in which a book is found. This context will be provided by updated comments and hyperlinks to related websites as well as by a collection of classified text and graphic data that underlie the catalogue itself. The internal and external links will lead to a variety of related topics .

　

<Technical details, Copyright>

'European Illustrated Books and Manuscripts, c.1400-1700' website is written and compiled by Takami Matsuda, with assistance of Emiko Yamagishi.

Images used in this site, uploaded here in considerably reduced size for Internet, have been photographed by SHD View-2 one-shot digital camera (2048 x 2048 pixels), jointly manufactured by NTT of Japan and Olympus Co., or scanned from analogue films (4x5 or 6x7) using Kodak PhotoCD system. Analogue photography is by photographer, Katsuhiro Nishimatsu. Assistance for digital conversion has been provided by Akemi Kobori. 

All copyright for photographs is with HUMI Project, unless otherwise noted.

© 1999 Takami Matsuda / HUMI Project / Keio Univeristy Library

Takami Matsuda, Professor, Faculty of Letters, Keio University

e-mail: matsuda@humi.keio.ac.jp