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Today's Newly Digitized Rare Books Worldwide

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Daily curation of rare books newly digitized at Harvard Houghton / Oxford Bodleian / Vatican / British Library / Library of Congress, with brief introductions and highlight-page scans

Today's Newly Digitized Rare Books Worldwide06/04/2026, 11:50:01 PM

A traitor's trial and a king's history, bound together in paper

Vatican manuscript Ott.lat.2635, newly digitized in June 2026, binds together two contrasting 15th-century French texts: the trial transcript of Louis de Luxembourg — the Constable of France executed for treason in December 1475 — and a working paper copy of the Grandes chroniques de France, the monarchy's official royal history. The juxtaposition reveals how royal power wrote its own mythology while simultaneously eliminating those who threatened it.

Today's Newly Digitized Rare Books Worldwide06/03/2026, 11:28:23 PM

A report on the City of Heaven, written by a man no one can find

A newly digitized Vatican manuscript — Ott.lat.2667, a 16th-century Italian relazione by the entirely unknown Contugo Centugli — describes the great city of Quinsay (Hangzhou, China) and its king, written in 1583, the same year Matteo Ricci entered China. The manuscript has sat in Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni's collection since before 1748 and is now freely viewable on DigiVatLib for the first time.

Today's Newly Digitized Rare Books Worldwide06/02/2026, 11:36:16 PM

The history of Troy that begins mid-sentence

A newly digitized Vatican manuscript — Ott.lat.2594, a 14th-century Latin codex — preserves Guido delle Colonne's Historia destructionis Troiae, the most widely copied medieval retelling of the Trojan War, a text built on a five-century scholarly deception that shaped Chaucer, Caxton, and Shakespeare.

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