Once digitised, the Cambridge manuscripts will join the works of Charles Darwin, Isaac Newton, Stephen Hawking and Alfred Lord Tennyson on the Cambridge Digital Library.

Since its launch in 2010 – with the digitisation of Newton’s Principia Mathematica making headlines around the world – the treasures of Cambridge’s Digital Library have been accessed more than 17 million times.

Dr Veit Probst, Director of Heidelberg University Library, said: “Numerous discoveries await. We still lack detailed knowledge about the production and provenance of these books, about the identities and activities of their scribes, their artists and their owners – and have yet to uncover how they were studied and used, both during the medieval period and in the centuries beyond.

“The meanings of the annotations and marginalia in the original manuscripts have yet to be teased apart. From such threads, a rich tapestry of Greek scholarship will be woven.”

With more than 38,000 volumes digitised to date, Heidelberg’s Digital Library has been visited by scholars and members of the public in 169 countries, outlining the global appetite for digital access to collections which would be impossible for most to access directly.

The current status of these collections presents significant challenges to scholars both in terms of cataloguing and conservation, with the medieval bindings of many manuscripts in a fragile state.

The current catalogues for them date from the nineteenth century; many of those for the Cambridge manuscripts were written by the scholar M.R. James, Provost of King’s College, Cambridge, but best known for his ghost stories which remain popular to this day.

Of the Cambridge Greek manuscripts, around 210 are held at the University Library, 140 at Trinity College, and a further 60 spread across 11 other colleges and the Fitzwilliam Museum.

Of the Bibliotheca Palatina Greek manuscripts, 29 are in Heidelberg and 403 are in the Vatican Library, having been transferred there from Germany as a spoil of war in 1623.