Project Description

Written testimonies - like works of art and buildings - are integral parts of the cultural heritage, of which the preservation, indexing and provision are central social tasks. Knowledge about the past is based primarily on texts that have escaped destruction more or less by chance. The records preserve people's knowledge, beliefs, narratives, visions and dreams. They bear witness to past conceptions of the order of life. They are a magazine of cultural memory.

In the Middle Ages, mainly Latin was written. But already in the Carolingian era, but with tremendous dynamics only in the High Middle Ages, lay people also discoverd the advantages of writing and books for themselves. One can fix knowledge, can transport messages, contracts, legal sentences, propaganda, but also 'beautiful stories' over long distances and read and hear them again and again.

The manuscript census has set itself the goal of recording, identifying and describing the many thousands of surviving vernacular books that are now scattered all over the world - often, of course, they are only meager remnants, snippets, scraps. It thus safeguards an essential part of our cultural heritage and at the same time provides an important foundation for understanding pre-modernity.

At the end of the project, all handwritten German-language textual witnesses of the Middle Ages will have been qualified and recorded using recognized methods. By the end of the project, these manuscripts, perhaps as many as 30,000, will be scattered in more than 1,500 libraries, collections, and archives, primarily in Europe and North America. For the majority of the manuscripts and works, basic data must first be collected.

In order to be able to cope with the enormous amount of material, the work is carried out in close consultation with national and international cooperation partners. The results are made available in a freely accessible online database. As a dynamic resource, continuous updating and design of the data and user interfaces is ensured, as well as diverse networking with other relevant information. All this is indispensable because the study of medieval texts and their manuscript carriers is in constant flux. The Handschriftencensus sees itself at the same time as a research instrument, research platform, standardization instance and clearing house.