Summary
The project's aim is to gain new insights at the scribal activities at the Benedictine
monastery of Mondsee during the Early Middle Ages. The monastery was an important
local centre for book production in Upper Austria already shortly after its foundation
in 748. Building upon the seminal works by B. Bischoff, K. Holter and C. Pfaff the
present study will conduct
- a detailed analysis of the codicological and palaeographical features presented in
the manuscripts combining classical and digital methods;
- scientific analysis of the pigments used.
The interdisciplinary methods will provide the means to reexamine the material and
detect new characteristics of the Mondsee book production. This will, on the one hand,
allow for written documents with till now uncertain origin to be recognised as products
of the Mondsee scriptorium; on the other hand, it will be possible to examine the
development of the written culture in a longue duree, accounting for the influences
of foreign monastic centres both in terms of writing materials as well as of transmission
of texts.
This project is planned as a case study within the major project Multimodale Manuskriptrepräsentationen (M3R). All data - both scholarly descriptions and scientific data - collected within the
project will be stored and represented within the newly designed platform.
In the meantime this website gives access to the scholarly descriptions of the pre-12th-century Mondsee manuscripts. This is a work-in-progress; we are constantly
working on improving and enhancing the information provided.
Research Aim and Questions
- The palaeographical and codicological examination of the manuscripts and fragments
from the Early Middle Ages (9th-10th c.) will, in the first place, try to reveal if
there were only ‘single’ scribes working in Mondsee or if we can indeed speak of a
scriptorium. Material analysis combined with methods of classical and digital palaeography
would facilitate scribal identification and thus provide important insight as to how
big the scriptorium was, how many scribes worked simultaneously on one book, how experienced
and novice scribes interacted by copying texts.
- Secondly, the study will show how communal conventions in the book production (attested
by codicological features such as quire structure, parchment type, quality and production,
inks and pigments used, book size and layout, pricking and ruling) and writing (indicated
by analysis of script, illumination and annotation symbols) changed over time. Of
particular interest for the project are documents attesting a change in the scripts
used at the scriptorium, material analysis of which might show if there was also a
change in the choice and preparation of the writing materials.
- Thirdly, the multi modal analysis of the manuscript material with uncertain origin
and its comparison with unambiguous Mondsee manuscripts (such as for instance the
Traditionsbuch) will allow for a more conclusive attribution of the former to the
Mondsee scriptorium. The questionable origin is particularly an issue for manuscripts
datable to the 10th and 11th centuries. In such cases where the palaeographical study
comes to its limits, material analysis might offer a way to establish connection between
the sources.
- Furthermore, the project will include a study of the texts available in the Mondsee library, which are either still preserved in manuscripts
and fragments or attested in the indirect tradition through textual quotations. This
will not only shed light to the extent of the collection but also to the specialised
interest and possible change thereof in the course of the 10th and 11th centuries.
The study and dating of marginal and interlinear annotations and corrections in fragmentary
preserved manuscripts (based on both palaeographical analysis and on their so-called
ink fingerprint) will allow us to establish how long the Mondsee community used the
early Carolingian books before it regarded them as “inutiles” and sent them to the
binder to serve as binding waste.
Manuscripts
The manuscript descriptions are encoded using the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), which
is an XML standard widely adopted in the digital humanities for the
representation of texts.
The practices from the Herzog August library
Wolfenbüttel were taken as an example for structuring and validating the manuscript
descriptions. People, places are texts (works within manuscripts) are tagged as
such and gathered in indices together with additional information as well as
links to further resources. The XML files are also available for download.
With the growing number of manuscript descriptions being added to the database we
are further working on different possibilities to search, filter and analyse the
data. Apart from full text search we plan to integrate faceted search to filter
the manuscripts according to certain criteria (shelfmark, origin place / time,
texts etc.) and possibly to combine different criteria.
Manuscript Descriptions
Licence
The material is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0), meaning you are
free to make use of it, share and adapt it to your need, as long as you give us
appropriate credit (mention the project website for instance), provide a link to
the license, and indicate if changes were made.