This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. Without cookies your experience may not be seamless. The Beauvais Missal is a late-thirteenth-century manuscript originally created in France.
After changing owners multiple times, it was finally dismembered by a New York dealer, Philip Duschnes, in the s.
Single leaves were then later sold by Duschnes and Otto Ege to numerous individuals and institutions. This study traces the fate of those fragments as well as the attempts at a digital reconstruction of the Missal. This overview allows for a reflection of the nature of digital remediation. T here is a real irony in writing a progress report for a digital project. The digital can be updated at any time; a published report is a record of that project at a given time only and is out of date as soon as it sees print.
And yet, even such snapshots have a certain value, as they reveal patterns of discovery and developments in programming and best practices. Since publishing the initial results of my resequencing of the Beauvais Missal in Florilegium in , the infrastructure of the project has changed dramatically. The publication of this volume, interrogating developments in the field of fragmentology, provides an opportunity to revisit the virtual resequencing of the Beauvais Missal as a case study in twentieth-century biblioclasm and twenty-first century digital sustainability.
The story of the Beauvais Missal has been told in other venues, but it is worth repeating. Archival documents record that the manuscript was given in , the year Hangest died. The missal disappeared at that time but surfaced again several decades later as part of the collection of Didier Petit de Meurville. British scholar Peter Kidd recently discovered that Permain was acting as an agent for none other than William Randolph Hearst, who brought the manuscript to the United States.
