Case Study France
Monica Brînzei (France, CNRS-IRHT) will team up with Christopher Schabel and Matteo Esu in exploring a sample of textual heritage, an ignored accumulation of texts fostered by surviving manuscripts composed or copied between 1382-1450 by a closed community of knowledge, the first generations of professors at the newly founded University of Vienna. This unexplored collection of manuscripts can be studied as a coherent corpus of connected texts because they were produced in the same milieu – on cheap materials and makeshift nature (no iconography, sloppy handwriting, convoluted mise en page), in fact expressions of material recycling and careful management of resources – by persons sharing an intellectual project (building a local university in reaction to the Parisian tradition), and they mirror specific societal situations (recurring outbreaks of plague, the Jewish pogrom, the Hussite dissent, the broader dissemination of knowledge). The creative examination proposed by the framework of RESTORY project will potentially produce high gains in casting light on how, when, why, and by whom these texts were composed, copied, circulated, read, and possessed as part of a marginal textual heritage.
The questions themselves are pioneering, and this investigation will provide answers by identifying unknown connections between surviving texts.
Based on the expertise, erudition, variety of skills of the team members (palaeography, codicology, textual criticism, intellectual history, hermeneutics, philosophy, open access abilities), and by means of a hybrid methodology, this case study will target the following inquiries:
(a) To what extent will a collection of unique manuscripts, produced by the first university rectors and deans and professors of the Faculties of Arts and Theology in Vienna and studied as a corpus, reveal the construction of an academic edifice and offer a new method to approach the history of medieval universities?
(b) How is the institutional interest in doctrinal variety in the promotion of science, from mathematics to theology, from astrology to ethics, from practical knowledge to purely abstract theories, compatible with the university’s attempt to control the propagation of superstition and conspiracy (explanation of the plague by astral influence, the curative power of stones, the abduction of crying babies by witches or UFOs who replace them with inferior infants, Hussite doctrines)?
(c) How did Vienna play such a crucial role in becoming a ‘production chain’ of educated people from peripheral areas, such as Transylvania?
(d) How did the continuous interaction between university and society bolster the institution’s decisive role in educating the populace about contemporary real or imagined crises and drama (schism, Jews, Hussites, epidemics, divorce, homosexuality)?
