The Harvard Library holds a collection of over 300 full-color facsimiles of pictorial and illuminated manuscripts including European medieval examples as well those from the Islamic, Byzantine, Jewish, Precolumbian and Mesoamerican traditions. These lavish works provide students with an opportunity to study a version of the original manuscript very close to that found in the original repository. They also allow close comparison of manuscripts held in different collections and potentially re-assemble manuscripts which have been dispersed.