Revisiting the Ars Moriendi
Mirador screencap
Article: 

Mirador screencap

 

Back in 2015, Simon Thomas wrote a post for this blog about the Ars moriendi, an immensely popular 15th-century tract on dying (and grieving) well. At the time, the Bodleian and the Vatican had each digitized two copies of the text. Since then, the Bodleian has digitized an additional four copies, including one in Spanish, with woodcuts, and another in Italian. Overall, the eight copies digitized for the Polonsky Project represent eight different editions of the text, spanning four languages (Latin, English, Spanish and Italian) and three different versions of the text's accompanying woodcuts. The copies are:

 

Auct. 1Q 6.23: Paris, 1494, Italian

Auct. 1Q 6.29: [Zaragoza, 1488-91], Spanish, woodcuts

Douce 75: [Leipzig, after 1500?], Latin, coloured woodcuts

Inc. e. I9.1487.2: Florence, 1487, Italian

Inc. f. I22.1498.1: Brescia, 1498, Latin

S. Seld. d.11: [Westminster, after 15 June 1490], English

Stamp.Ross.1809: [Strassburg, about 1475], Latin

Stamp.Ross.7128: [Nuremberg, 1492-1500?], Latin, woodcuts

 

We've loaded all eight editions into Mirador, where you can view them side-by-side. By default, we've set up Mirador to show how the three different woodcut editions' artists represented the temptation of avarice:

 

 

By using the drop-down menus to add and remove slots, however, you can create different grids, even viewing all eight editions at the same time. View the full Mirador instance at http://iiif.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/examples/polonsky/moriendi.html.