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)
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