Mediaeval Manuscripts: Catalogue of illuminated manuscripts and printed books of the 15th and early 16th century in the Staatsbibliothek Bamberg

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Bettina Wagner
• Subject Area: Art History
• Term: since 2012
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 222130037

The Staatsbibliothek Bamberg owns rich holdings in the area of illuminated manuscripts and printed books of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Numerous late mediaeval and early modern manuscripts and incunabula in the collection contain painted decoration, mainly of South German origin; a few examples originated in other regions of Germany as well as Italy, France, the Netherlands and Bohemia. Even though the illumination is in many cases of high artistic quality and manifold meaning, the holdings are as yet largely unknown to scholars. Only in recent years have art historians begun to analyse the painted decoration of manuscripts from this period of transition on a larger scale;however, connections across the traditional boundaries of media and processes of change have so far been only examined selectively, as a systematic documentation of illuminated printed books has not yet been undertaken. Scholarly work on the important and varied Bamberg holdings of c. 200 manuscripts (including fragments) and c. 600 printed books with painted decoration fulfills a long-standing desideratum. The project aims at describing the illuminated manuscripts and printed books according to the current standards of scholarly cataloguing and thus to make them accessible to further research. It is expected that the enterprise will generate manifold insights into the organisation of book production around the year 1500 in general and into the relationship between monastic scriptoria and secular painters in particular. The results of the project will be published in a printed catalogue and online via the German union database for manuscripts (https://handschriftenportal.de/) and the incunabula databases INKA (www.inka.uni-tuebingen.de/) and „Material Evidence in Incunabula“ (MEI: https://data.cerl.org/mei/_search).

• DFG Programme: Cataloguing and Digitisation (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)
• Participating Institution: Staatsbibliothek Bamberg