In Principio: Incipit Index of Latin texts online [1]

In Principio: Incipit Index of Latin Texts continues its year-on-year expansion. Soon, the database will surpass one million records.  The data incorporated during 2001 marks a significant expansion in sources for this unrivalled catalogue of manuscript incipits:

The Hill Monastic Manuscript Library (HMML) has continued to enrich the database by adding tens of thousands of new records. Not only has HMML continued to add new incipits from manuscript catalogues but HMML has been inputting incipits from repertories of  sources on canonical history and on the history of science and medicine.

The Institut de Recherche et d’Histoire des Textes (IRHT), for its part, has added incipits drawn from the indexes of the Bibliographie Annuelle du Moyen Âge Tardif and has been responsible for acquiring and formatting for In Principio’s purposes several indexes of incipits: the Latin Aristotle Commentaries by Charles H. Lohr, the Initia operum iuris canonici medii aeui  by Giovanna Murano, the incipit index of manuscripts from Santa Cruz, Coimbra held in Oporto’s Biblioteca Publica Municipal under the supervision of A.A. Nascimento and J.F. Meirinhos, and some uncatalogued material gathered by Sr Wilma Fitzgerald.

IRHT, HMML and Brepols are proud to welcome a third major institutional partner to the project, namely the Département des Manuscrits of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Inputting of the 180,000 records started in January 2002 and already several thousand records are incorporated into this release of In Principio. This file-catalogue has been built up over the past fifty years both from in-house research on the Latin manuscripts themselves and from the tracking of bibliographical references in secondary literature and studies.