Two Million Free Texts Now Available

The Internet Archive is pleased to announce an important manuscript, Homiliary on Gospels from Easter to first Sunday of Advent, as the 2,000,000th free digital text. Internet Archive has been scanning books and making them available for researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public for free on archive.org since 2005.

“This 1,000 year old book which has only been seen by a select few people, can, with the technology of today, be shared with millions tomorrow,” said Robert Miller, Director of Books of the Internet Archive. “Selecting this title for the 2 millionth text is a fitting tribute to the team of scanners who have been carefully working for the past 5 years.”

The Homiliary manuscript was copied on parchment by at least three different scribes at the important medieval Abbey of St. Martin in Tours less than 100 years after having been composed by Heiric of Auxerre and is the oldest known copy of Heiric’s original text.

“Handwritten in Latin by a number of scribes in a script inspired by the court of Charlemagne, this rare and beautiful treasure from the first millennium of Christianity, is one of the gems in the renowned collection of the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies. The Institute is dedicated to transmitting the inheritance of the Middle Ages to new generations; to deepening our understanding of the life and ideals of Western culture in the time of its first youth,” said Jonathan Bengtson, Director of Library and Archives, University of St. Michael’s College in the University of Toronto & Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies.

About the Internet Archive:

The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit digital library based in San Francisco that specializes in offering broad public access to digitized and born-digital books, music, movies and Web pages.

Internet Archive partners with the University of Toronto and over 150 libraries and universities around the world to create a freely accessible archive of texts representing a wide range texts which include non-fiction and fiction books, research and academic texts, popular books, children’s books and historical texts.