Reframing Old Contents for New Readers in Late-Medieval German One-Volume Libraries
2019–2023
FNT08
This sub-project focusses on the reframing and reshaping of traditional knowledge for newly-emerging circles of manuscript users in the later Middle Ages, a time of fundamental transformation for European manuscript cultures. Social and economic changes take place, with an educated and affluent urban elite who increasingly commission and buy books. Their education, however, differs fundamentally from the traditional clerical system, meaning, among other things, that they demand texts in the vernacular. Older, originally Latin texts are translated, retold or summarized, appearing alongside new ones. This process of reframing comprises not only language and literary genres, but also the visual organisation and illustration, as well as a (re-)contextualisation of individual units of content within multiple-text manuscripts (MTMs). Indeed, the later Middle Ages witness a rise of the vernacular (or sometimes bilingual) ‘one-volume library’: large, voluminous and often carefully and relatively lavishly produced MTMs that vary in their thematic focus from specific interests to encyclopaedic breadth. These developments essentially amount to an emergence of a new manuscript culture within a manuscript culture, with its specific settings, users and patterns. This new manuscript culture depends on, but also acts as a catalyst for fundamental changes in the production of manuscripts: paper, cheaper than parchment, has made manuscripts more affordable, though they remain expensive. Furthermore, manuscript producers, who are increasingly in competition with book printers, adopt more economical production techniques, script types and techniques of illustration.
Our goal is to investigate the reframing of traditional knowledge in vernacular and bilingual one-volume libraries during this period. We pay attention to processes of translation, re-textualisation and re-contextualisation of older transmitted contents on the levels of text (in the same language or in translations from Latin), image, visual organisation, as well as on the level of the MTM. For one highly promising group of manuscripts, the sub-project can draw on a number of one-volume libraries from Central and Southern German-speaking regions, dating from the 14th and 15th centuries. They have in common one particular content unit, the Biblia pauperum, a typological re-rendering of biblical contents which, first written in Latin, was soon also available in German and bilingual versions. Along with the Biblia pauperum, the manuscripts often contain collections of contents useful for religious education and spiritual edification, from basic catechetic contents to full German translations of entire books of the Bible; sometimes they contain historiographic compilations or are downright encyclopaedic in their thematic range; others have hitherto defied any generalising categorisation.
Since these manuscripts were produced during a period of major media changes in the European book culture, the project takes this process into account, resulting not simply in the replacement of manuscript by print but instead to a situation of reciprocal influence. Relating and comparing MTMs and composite codices that incorporate printed pages thus opens up a new perspective on the complex interactions between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ medium.
People
Project lead: Hanna Wimmer
Research Associate: Malena Ratzke