Finding Propertius: Access to European Medieval Manuscripts

This paper examines the analog and digital methods of medieval manuscript description and cataloging in several European repositories, focusing on a single Latin author, Propertius, whose Monobiblos continues to provide an exercise in textual transmission for Classical scholars. One hundred forty-six manuscripts, dating from the late twelfth century to the early sixteenth century CE, survive to this day. They are held solely at European repositories, in Italy, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, France, Austria, Poland, Switzerland, Belgium, Ireland, and Russia. Each country has different access points and metadata standards, and this paper examines many of them in an attempt to find a viable standard for future manuscript catalogue digitization