Roman de la Rose Digital Library
The Roman de la Rose Digital Library (Rose DL) is a joint project of Johns Hopkins University’s Sheridan Libraries and the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Its goal is to create an online library of all manuscripts that contain the 13th-century poem Roman de la Rose. The collection is free for the public to use for research and personal study, and it already features digital copies of more than 140 manuscripts, with more added over time.
The project began in 1996 when Johns Hopkins professor Stephen G. Nichols suggested digitizing the manuscripts for teaching. With funding from Ameritech Library Services, the Getty Grant Program, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, and the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, the Eisenhower Library built a prototype called Roman de la Rose: Digital Surrogates of Medieval Manuscripts. The prototype included six manuscripts from libraries in the U.S. and U.K., including the Walters Art Museum, the Morgan Library, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Bodleian Library.
In 2007, the Bibliothèque nationale de France and Rose DL began a partnership to digitize all Rose manuscripts held in Paris and in libraries across France. With support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the project now makes about half of the roughly 300 surviving Rose manuscripts available online.
All page images can be viewed in a page-turner or an image-browsing format, and users can pan across a page or zoom in for detail.
Beyond images, Rose DL provides metadata to support research. Many manuscripts have detailed descriptions of their history and physical features such as binding, quire structure, material, and decoration. Full transcriptions exist for a few manuscripts, and illustration descriptions are available for many. Since different manuscripts vary in layout, the site includes a narrative sections tool that roughly marks the start and end of each section, usually accurate within two columns.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 14:29 (CET).