Abstrakt
In the old days we sat in special collection's reading rooms of libraries, that is: if we managed to get in, armed with our professor's recommendation letters. We consulted manuscripts on the basis of catalogue descriptions and made notes or transcriptions with pencil and paper.
Now, this has completely changed: we have, from our laptops, access to thousands of manuscripts and their descriptions. We can see and compare them with a click on the mouse.
How has this changed the life of a medieval Latinist? Do we pay more attention to the materiality of the text when we teach our students? Can we envisage new paths of research because of the existence of virtual manuscript libraries? The virtual manuscript library, moreover, is conceptually mirroring the old disciplinary tools: catalogues that contain information about the tried and tested pieces of information (date, place of origin, content, provenance). But could we imagine new, virtual ways to think of accessing the material, searching and filtering it in new ways, or attracting new kinds of audiences towards it?