Wow. That's the only word I can think of to describe the Catalogue of Digitized Medieval Manuscripts website. You see, I'm on that borderline of generations. I can still remember when only the rich had computers. And those were some strange box you hooked up to your television and had this cartridge that looked like an 8-track to play games.
In college, technology advanced far enough that we had this fancy new thing called email on something called Kermit, and I'm not talking about that green frog. I'd call my neighbor and we'd play Doom over the phone lines. My computer called his and we were connected for a head to head deathmatch.
A few years passed and technology advanced again with the advent of the "internet" full of message boards and porn. Years continued to pass and we're now seeing books, entire books, online for free or nearly free reading.
And now we step back in time to pull up something written so far in the past that you probably can't trace your family that far back. And what do we do with that? We photograph it and put it online for the world to see. For free.
The only down side I can see is the rumors that the site has crashed periodically from heavy traffic. i wouldn't be surprised as the images are huge and high quality. And there's a lot to look at.
So enjoy your book porn from the days of yore.
Canterbury Tales (in Middle English) - http://image.ox.ac.uk/images/corpus/ms198/61v.jpg
And oh so much more.
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