Carmina Burana Manuscript, Reordered

This is a IIIF demo project, about the manuscript of the Carmina Burana. The manuscript was rebound in the 18th century, and the contents were reordered to bring the famous illumination of the Wheel of Fortune to the front. In his book Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts, Christopher de Hamel remarked: "it is not easy to form a mental picture of the original manuscript and its content while it is in the present order" (p.338).

To make it easier to form that mental picture, this project is simply a IIIF manifest with the images restored to their original order (as listed by de Hamel in a footnote). The reordered version is displayed alongside the current version. In the reordered version I've also inserted placeholders to indicate where pages of the original are now missing.

To do this I've modified and republished the manifest published by the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek under the CC-by-nc-sa license. I've also converted it to Presentation API version 3, which seemed to solve some problems with Mirador's rendering.

The result is that it is possible to view the illumination page (f.1r) opposite its original partner page (f.48v).

By Peter Binkley