All Fragments Digitised and Published through the Collaboration between MeMo and MAGIC

All the fragments contained in the Compactiones of the Archives of the Abbey of Montecassino have now been digitised and are available for consultation online on the website of the MAGIC project at the University of Naples Federico II (https://www.magic.unina.it/collections/montecassino/compactiones). This marks the successful completion of the collaboration between MeMo – Memory of Montecassino and MAGIC, established with the aim of digitally capturing, describing and making these valuable manuscript materials accessible. To facilitate consultation, the digitised materials can also be accessed through a new item in the main menu of the MeMo website, which links directly to the collection hosted on the MAGIC platform.

The online publication is the tangible outcome of a collaborative effort that brought together expertise from the humanities and the sciences, making the entire digital corpus of fragments available to the scholarly community. It represents an important achievement in promoting the collection, expanding opportunities for consultation and research, and encouraging the study and understanding of significant evidence from Montecassino’s manuscript heritage.

The digital images were captured by Ylenia Nardone and Giuseppina Civitillo, members of the MeMo team, using a Zeutschel OS 15000 scanner provided by the Department of Physics “Ettore Pancini” at the University of Naples Federico II. This equipment made it possible to obtain high-quality images while respecting the conservation requirements of the fragile materials.

The fragments written in Beneventan script preserved in the Compactiones are of particular scholarly interest, as comprehensively demonstrated for the first time in Chiara De Angelis’s doctoral thesis entitled I frammenti in minuscola beneventana: censimento, catalogazione e studio delle testimonianze conservate a Montecassino.. The study, which includes case studies and analyses aimed at reconstructing the original manuscripts, constitutes an indispensable source for the study of the collection and a fundamental reference for further research. The online availability of the digital images now offers new opportunities to revisit and develop research on these materials, making them accessible to a wider scholarly audience.

The completion of the collaboration with MAGIC does not, however, mark the end of research activities on the fragments. MeMo is continuing its work by cataloguing the materials in MANUS Online, in collaboration with Chiara De Angelis, with the aim of enriching the digital documentation with structured scholarly descriptions and further improving access to and understanding of the collection.

The online publication of the entire corpus therefore represents a lasting achievement of the collaboration between MeMo and MAGIC: a fragile and valuable heritage, until now accessible primarily through direct consultation, is now also available in digital form. This is an important step towards the preservation, sharing and promotion of Montecassino’s manuscript heritage.

To access the digitised fragments, select “Compactiones” from the main menu.