Mandragore

Mandragore is the iconographic database of illuminated manuscripts held by the Département des Manuscritst of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Users search the database using the various indexes that accompany most of the searchable fields, and descriptors that enable contextual searches. The most direct way to start querying the database is to know the call number of the manuscript. There is both a simple search bar and an advanced search functionality which allows users to restrict by date, place, etc.

To find a manuscript on Mandragore, several selection fields are available. If you don't know the call number of the manuscript, you can search by author. For example, in the author index, under the letter B, there are several entries for Boccacio, and by selecting Boccacio, decameron, all five available copies are proposed.

In the case of images, you can search by the associated keyword, as many folios are annotated by subject: each folio has one or more descriptors associated with it, which enable you to search for all folios containing the same keyword. When a folio contains several miniatures, each miniature is indexed.