The set Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts consists of two subsets:
The BYVANCK set describes each of the 400 manuscripts. There is information on the creator, materiaal, language, place of origin, number of folios, physical dimensions and date of each manuscript: the type of information you see on this page. This set represents about 15% of all the illuminated manuscripts currently preserved in the Netherlands. Overall descriptions of the KB’s part of this set are available here.
The ByvanckB set contains photographs of the 11,141 illuminations in these 400 manuscripts and descriptions explaining the images: the dimensions of the image, the type of illumination, the creator, subjects illustrated (according to the Iconclass classification) etc. See, for example, the information on these illustrations. The illuminations come in many forms: painted miniatures, drawings, historiated initials, marginalia, etc. The set contains illuminations from classics of Dutch cultural history such as:
The two sets are interlinked: the illuminations can be found for each manuscript and the manuscript can be found for each illumination.
The sets were prepared as a co-operative project between the KB (8,376 illustrations from 330 manuscripts) and Museum Meermanno-Westreenianum (2,765 illustrations from 70 manuscripts). The metadata field <dc:identifier xsi:type=”shelfmark”> can be used to find out which institution holds a given manuscript.
This material can be searched on manuscripts.kb.nl/, where you can also find more help and background information on the material.
The Koninklijke Bibliotheek and Museum Meermanno have waived their copyrights on the metadata for both sets, which, therefore, are available under a CC0-license
There is a Public Domain Mark for the objects (images) in the ByvanckB set, which means that there are no copyright restrictions on reproducing, publishing, processing or sharing these illustrations.
Although there is no requirement to credit the source when using the set, the KB and Museum Meermanno-Westreenianum would be grateful for this. Please use the following text:
Museum Meermanno-Westreenianum & National Library of the Netherlands, The Hague. Source: manuscripts.kb.nl – [link to object].
We are very interested in who uses the data and for what purpose, so please send an email to dataserviceskb.nl with your contact details and a brief description of what you use the data for. Feedback on our data and APIs is of course also very welcome. The information you provide also allows us to notify you of developments such as changes in the datasets or the release of new datasets.
