Monday, January 14, 2013

Next Stop Alexandria


Digital reconstruction of medieval libraries

One of the coolest trends in digital humanities is the reconstruction of lost network, libraries, collections, and reading groups.  When cloisters were broken up during the Reformation, their libraries were often transferred to secular authorities who may or may not have kept them intact.  

Not every monastic library was passed on to an aristocratic family who then incorporated them into their own library.  Germany has aristocratic libraries that include large holdings from old monasteries such as the well researched Corvey library (itself the subject of a UNESCO digitalization project) or the collection at Schloß Anholt, but there are lots of collections that have been scattered to the winds.  It might take a while before UNESCO gets around to reconstructing the lost library of Alexandria, but here is a conference listing off several high quality projects trying to reconstruct the textual networks of medieval church members, particularly in manuscript form.  

There’s the Mendingen project which collects the devotional writings of nuns in a Lüneburger cloister.  The many prayer books written by nuns for the surrounding area were based on a single corpus of manuscripts in the cloister.  This project accounts for the flow of writing between the cloister and the laity.  Another project details the reconstruction of the St. Matthew’s Abbey in Trier where hand-written manuscripts were produced well after the introduction of the printing press. 

The whole conference is listed on this German digital humanities blog http://dhd-blog.org

Digitale Rekonstruktionen mittelalterlicher Bibliotheken, Trier (18.01.2013 - 19.01.2013)