A Catalogue of Medieval Manuscripts from the Special Collections of the University of Warsaw Library

The Special Collections of the University of Warsaw Library (BUW) contain over 50 medieval manuscripts and fragments, the vast majority of which are in Latin. Nineteen of these, a remnant of the pre-war collection saved from destruction in 1944, were described in the first volume of The Catalogue of Manuscripts of the University of Warsaw Library (ed. by H. Kozerska and W. Stummer, Warsaw, 1963). The remaining manuscripts have yet to undergo a detailed cataloguing process.

These manuscripts originate from secured collections, donations, and acquisitions made from 1945 to the present. The catalogue provides an overview of the history of BUW’s medieval manuscript collection from the library’s founding in 1817 (based primarily on archival sources), as well as the results of provenance research into surviving manuscripts and those that used to be part of the collection but were lost or destroyed due to 19th-century post-uprising repressions and 20th-century warfare.

Project supervisor: Agnieszka Fabiańska