The publication by Abbé Victor Leroquais, Les Bréviaires manuscrits des bibliothèques publiques de France (5 vols. Paris 1934) has long constituted one of the largest collections of comprehensive descriptions of liturgical books ever made. Although the books are to be found in many important national libraries and research institutions, they are not universally available and their physical size is not suited to quick and easy consultation. The books have now been scanned and coupled to a database. The scanning was carried out by student assistants at the Institut für Musikwissenschaft of Regensburg University. The index was copied by Elisabeth Wäspi, and checked, supplemented and formatted as a database by Robert Klugseder, who also devised the search facilities and created the links from the index to the descriptions.
| Library | |
|---|---|
| Provenance | |
| Date | |
| Ordo or rite | |
| Library and provenance | |
| Date and provenance | |
| Date and library |
The index can be searched for sources according to holding library, provenance and date, or a combination of these. An additional search category is "Ordo", which signifies Roman cursus "romain" or one of the religious orders ("franciscain", "dominicain", etc.).
The link (far right in a search result) brings up a PDF file with the relevant page. There are four PDF files in all, one for each volume of Leroquais. (Leroquais' Vol. 5 contains illustrations from the manuscripts and has not been included in the present project.)
Leroquais' French terminology has been retained. The file "Libraries" contains a list of the locations of the sources, the file "Abbreviations" an overview of the used abbreviations and conventions. Each of the PDF files (separately) can be searched for individual words, using the usual "search" command in Adobe Acrobat Reader.
The work on this facility was carried out as part of the project "Antiphonaria", supported by the TransCoop programme of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.