Codex Emilianense 60 manuscript

Factum Foundation worked with the Fundación San Millán de la Cogolla on the digitisation of the Glosas Emilianenses, in Madrid’s Real Academia de la Historia. The glossa (annotations) in the Codex Emilianense 60 manuscript are considered to be the earliest surviving Castilian-language text. Factum Foundation recorded several pages of the Glosas Emilianenses in high-resolution, accurately photographing the colour and using Lucida 3D Scanner for the surface. The aim of the project was to enable further philological investigation into the parts that, until then, had been proving more difficult to read.

Teresa Casado photographing the colour in high resolution © Gabriel Scarpa for Factum Foundation

Teresa Casado photographing the colour in high resolution © Gabriel Scarpa for Factum Foundation

Since the creation of Factum Foundation, the preservation of manuscripts has played an important part of our digitisation initiatives, from the recording of the Beato de Liébana at the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid to the world-class archive of more than 3000 Islamic manuscripts in Dagestan. This area of activity has also led Factum Arte’s technical and software engineering departments to develop several recording systems exclusively focussed on the recording of manuscripts, such as the photographic manuscript scanner or the portable manuscript scanner.

After recording the whole manuscript in high-resolution, Factum Foundation worked with paper conservators and bookbinder Pedro Barbachano on the production of a facsimile of the Codex Emilianense 60 (Real Academia de la Historia) for the Fundación San Millán de la Cogolla. The color information on the pages was printed with Factum's scanner, and each page was hand-finished and varnished in Factum's workshop before being stitched into a custom-made facsimile of the book's wooden cover.