This page was created by Elizabeth Hadley.  The last update was by The Dartmouth College Digital Scriptorium.

Rauner 003103: A Fifteenth-Century Book of Hours

The Dartmouth Digital Scriptorium and the Beginnings of this Project

The Dartmouth Digital Scriptorium began in 2018, when Jenny Lynn and a group of students began transcribing the massive 16th-century antiphoner, Rauner 003203, that sits in the main reading room of the Rauner Special Collections Library. It started as a chance to practice a bit of reading with a group of eager Latin students; in the end, it turned into a much larger digital humanities project, and, with generous support from the Leslie Center for Humanities, Dartmouth Research Computing, and the librarians at Rauner, an ever-evolving group of interested students ended up digitizing the manuscript, transcribing the text and music, and publishing all the images and transcriptions, as well as the music (including sound files) and some essays, online using Scalar; that project can be found at https://scalar.dartmouth.edu/scalar/rauner-003203/index.

During the summer of 2020, as that project was winding down, the group wanted to choose a new manuscript to work with, and decided to choose a book of hours. As it was the height of Covid restrictions, we made our choice just on the basis of the short description and the images of folios 1v and 2r available on the library’s old Script to Pixels handlist of Western manuscripts in the collection.  We chose Rauner 003103 not least because Saint Roch, the patron saint of plague, had a special appeal during that summer, as he did in the beginning of the 16th century.

When classes began that fall, they were still online, though the first-year students were on campus, and Professor Lynn chose a likely-seeming first-year student in her Latin 1 class from among all the faces on her screen, and talked her into going to Rauner and photographing the entire codex with her iphone. Photographs taken, google drive set up, the Scriptorium was back in business: at first online, and then finally in person, we transcribed the entire book, and proofread our transcriptions, and learned how books of hours work. Many students have contributed to the transcription or proofreading, several did really stellar and significant work on the project, including Carson Riggs ‘23, who did amazing work on the antiphoner project, did a great deal of work on the initial transcriptions for this project, and is now a graduate student in Classical Archeology at Cornell; Meg Burkhart ‘24, the freshman whom we talked into taking those photos in the fall of 2020, and then invited to join the group; Izzy Lust ‘25, who worked in summer and fall '23 on the final round of proofreading and on figuring out how to encode the text in .xml, and Elizabeth Hadley ‘23, who has been involved throughout this project, both as an undergraduate and, in the year after her graduation, as Dartmouth’s Edward Connery Lathem '51 Special Collections Fellowship Special Collections Fellow.

Members of the Dartmouth Digital Scriptorium who have worked on this publication:

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