COLLOQUIUM: The Virtual Library of the Charterhouse of Gaming

COLLOQUIUM HISTORICO-CRITICUM
Location: Marietta-Blau-Saal, University of Vienna Main Building, Universitätsring 1, 1010 Vienna, Austria.
Time: November 9, 2015, 5:15 PM.

This year's Colloquium historico-criticum is organised jointly with the Austrian Institute of Historical Research and is simultaneously the 185th Seminar of the AIHR.

The topic of the event is the libray of the Lower Austrian Charterhouse of Gaming, suppressed in 1782. Gaming's manuscripts had played an important role in the correspondence of the brothers Pez some decades earlier, and numerous texts from those manuscripts had been published in the collections of medieval works edited by the brothers (Thesaurus anecdotorum novissimus, Bibliotheca ascetica antiquo-nova and Scriptores rerum Austriacarum). Gaming's librarian at the time, Fr. Leopold Wydemann (1668–1752), had made essential contributions in both cataloguing and transcribing the materials.

The research project "The Virtual Library of the Charterhouse of Gaming", financed by the Jubilee Fund of the Austrian National Bank, is working to reconstruct the holdings of this now dispersed, but once major library. The symposium will begin with a presentation of the project by its collaborators Patrick Fiska and Severin Matiasovits. They will give a demonstration of the database of manuscripts, which is to become available online in 2016. They will also discuss typical features of the Gaming manuscripts as well as the various types of sources used for the identification and description of lost and dispersed books.

This will be followed by three statements from the other panelists on various aspects of the investigation of historical libraries, after which an open discussion on this and related projects will conclude the event. Katharina Kaska's contribution will discuss, among other things, the acquisitions policies of the Imperial Court Library at the time of the Josephist suppressions of religious institutions: Why does the Austrian National Library today hold relatively few 15th-century Gaming manuscripts of the Fathers of the Church, but a substantial number containing High and Late Medieval collections of sermons? Thomas Stockinger will retrace the detective work which, in the course of the edition of the Pez letters, led to the identification of a hitherto ignored Gaming manuscript in the Austrian National Library (Cod. 1165) and to a near-total revision of its miscatalogued contents. Finally, Christoph Egger will characterise the Gaming collections in relation to other Late Medieval monastic libraries and their holdings.

More information can be found here:
http://www.univie.ac.at/monastische_aufklaerung/cms/upload/Institutssemi...