The Case of Freising and Salzburg (9^th–12^th c.)

The project aims to challenge the current understanding of the cultural history of historiography in the Carolingian and post-Carolingian world (9^th–12^th centuries) with an innovative and precisely focussed investigation of two major centres of historical writing during this period, Salzburg and Freising. We want to explore how in the course of the transformation of the Carolingian World, the ways of thinking about, organising, compiling and writing history changed between the 9th and 12th centuries. The project is divided into case studies. The German part of the project (Freising) is being conducted by Ksenia Borisova under the supervision of Steffen Patzold (University of Tübingen). The case study of Salzburg is being carried out by Leon Pürstinger under the supervision of Maximilian Diesenberger (Institute for Medieval Research, ÖAW). The project examines how texts about history were written and combined with other texts in manuscripts, and determines the consequences of choices relating to scripts, mise-en-page, annotations, and contextual associations with other texts for the production of historical meaning. In what way did historical thinking become tangible – and did it change between the 9^th and the early 12^th century?

At the same time, this project serves as a pilot study for a larger international collaborative undertaking. On the basis of more than 35 manuscripts, we define the standards for an international project, not only with regard to the aspects mentioned above, but also to the digital representation of the collected material. In this framework, a comprehensive relational database is being developed that enables future users to analyse the connections between scriptoria, associated historiographical manuscripts, their textual elements and scribes, as well as possible stratigraphic layers, going beyond the standard data of a manuscript catalogue.