What Are the Codices Electronici Sangallenses (CESG) and How Do You Access the St. Gall Manuscripts Online?
CESG (Codices Electronici Sangallenses) refers to the digitized manuscripts of the Abbey Library of St. Gall, made available as part of e-codices, the Virtual Manuscript Library of Switzerland. You can access them free of charge through e-codices: browse or search the collection, open a manuscript's digital facsimile, and read its scholarly description alongside the images. The shelfmark prefix Cod. Sang. identifies St. Gall manuscripts within the library.
What CESG Is and Where It Fits
e-codices is a virtual library whose stated goal is to provide free access to all medieval and a selection of modern manuscripts of Switzerland, linking complete digital reproductions with corresponding scholarly descriptions. At the time of the site content shown, the virtual library contained 3,107 manuscripts from 100 different collections, and it is continuously updated and extended.
CESG is the St. Gall component of that larger whole — the digitized codices of the Abbey Library of St. Gall, one of the collections represented in e-codices. In practice, "CESG" and "Cod. Sang." function as the same pointer: the collection and its shelfmarks.
Finding the St. Gall Manuscripts
The site offers Browse & Search as the main entry point, with interface languages in German, English, French, and Italian.
- By shelfmark: St. Gall manuscripts carry the prefix Cod. Sang. (for example, a manuscript cited as Cod. Sang. 1). Searching or browsing by this prefix narrows results to the St. Gall holdings.
- By collection: e-codices organizes content by collection, so the Abbey Library of St. Gall appears as one of the 100 collections in the library.
- By person or annotation: the site also provides a Person Index and an Annotations section for finding manuscripts through names or annotations rather than shelfmarks.
Opening a Manuscript: Facsimile and Description
Once you locate a manuscript record, the standard e-codices structure applies:
- Digital facsimile — complete digital reproductions of the manuscript pages.
- Scholarly description — the cataloguing information linked to that reproduction.
The site's documentation describes its approach to content, metadata encoding, scholarly manuscript descriptions, and manuscript summaries, so descriptions are intended to accompany the images rather than stand alone.
Access Conditions and Languages
- Cost: e-codices states that its goal is to provide free access to the manuscripts. No pricing signals or payment requirements appear in the site content shown.
- Languages: the interface is available in de, en, fr, it.
- Rights and terms: the site publishes Terms of Use and a Privacy Policy, and lists Rights information — worth checking before reusing images, since free access to view is not the same as unrestricted reuse.
Practical Notes
- The site is maintained with a service provider (text & bytes LLC) and guided by published principles covering selection criteria, reproduction guidelines, conservation guidelines, and data security.
- If a St. Gall manuscript you expect is not yet online, the library is described as continuously updated and extended, so coverage grows over time.
- For questions about the project itself, the site lists separate contacts for e-codices and for libraries and collections.