| Universitätsbibliothek, Forschung, Veranstaltungen

"News about rather old books. Explorations and discoveries in the Bibliotheca Amploniana"

Another lecture in the series "Amploniana Bildungsgeschichten" (Amploniana education stories) at the University of Erfurt will take place on Wednesday, 4 May. In it, Dr Marek Wejwoda will talk about "News about rather old books. Explorations and discoveries in the Bibliotheca Amploniana". The public event begins at 6.30 p.m. in the City Library on Domplatz in Erfurt.

The Bibliotheca Amploniana preserved in the Erfurt University Library is a superlative of the educational history of the Middle Ages. The 633 books on all fields of knowledge of the time, which Amplonius Rating from Rheinberg collected and donated to the Erfurter Kolleg zur Himmelspforte in 1412, form the largest closed private book collection of the Middle Ages ever. The Amploniana is therefore rightly considered a unique treasure. However, if one wants to know more precisely what this treasure contains and what it can tell us about education and knowledge culture of the Middle Ages, this superlative also poses a problem. The handwritten books with Latin texts are a brittle and difficult material. Each piece is unique, with numerous traces of an individual history that must be reconstructed at great expense, and their sheer number makes indexing difficult. Wilhelm Schum took up this challenge in the 19th century and published a catalogue of manuscript descriptions in 1887 that was a masterpiece for its time and is still authoritative today.

With the methods and possibilities of modern manuscript research, however, one quickly realises that the Amploniana is an even more fruitful treasure trove than Schum's catalogue suggests. This is where the current DFG project on the digitisation and in-depth indexing of the Amploniana's medical manuscripts comes in. How manuscript indexers work today, how medieval manuscripts can be made to speak, what they can tell us and what else can be discovered in the Bibliotheca Amploniana – this is the subject of the lecture by project member Dr Marek Wejwoda.

Registration for the event is possible via e-mail to: veranstaltungen.bibliothek@erfurt.de or by telephone at 0361 655-1590.