The Hebrew Bible Manuscripts in Western Europe (England, France, Germany, Northern Italy) in the 12th and 13th Century: a Material, Cultural and Social Approach
The database dedicated to medieval hebrew bible manuscripts
There are as yet no precise statistics on the total number of Hebrew Bibles presently conserved. The MBH Project should improve our knowledge of the corpus. At the current state of research, of the 40,000 manuscripts known to be medieval, 3,200 are precisely dated, representing just under 10 % of the total (Sirat 1994, 10-11). There seem to be around 5,000 biblical manuscripts (Schlanger 2012, 21), the vast majority of which are undated. The MBH Project has so far identified 150 undated Bibles which were produced in Ashkenaz probably before 1300. Of the 1,435 fragments of undated mediaeval manuscripts published on the BwB database, 94 fragments of biblical codices and 2 scrolls are estimated to be Ashkenazic items dating from before 1300 (according to the data available as of 12 March 2018). Of the dated manuscripts identified on the Sfardata codicological database, less than forty Ashkenazic Bibles are dated before 1300.
The MS Mode is a brief description of a manuscript as an entire object, generally found in catalogues. It is the main common approach of manuscripts.
The PU Mode (Production Unit Mode) is a codicological description mode inspired by the publication of Patrick Andrist, Paul Canart, and Marilena Maniaci, La Syntaxe Du Codex, vol. 34, Bibliologia (Brepols Pub, 2013). This mode of description offers the possibility to describe the inner structure of the manuscripts, their material features as well as social and textual aspects.
The MBH Database is a scientific database that will be soon interoperable with the Biblissima Portal.
General data will be openly accessible to users. Members will have to create an account in order to see the extensive data.
(Coming soon)
The MBH webportal offers, in collaboration with Viktor Golinets (HFJS, Heidelberg), bibliographical references on Hebrew biblical manuscripts first edited on the sembi.de website (see "Bibliography on the Bible / Hebrew Biblical Manuscripts").
The references are imported into the MBH Database via the Drupal Bibliography Module. They can be downloaded in RIS or BibText format which is compatible with the Zotero Bibliographical system.