The Project

With the manuscripts from the Carthusian monastery in Mainz, founded in 1320, one of the largest surviving book collections of the Middle Ages is currently being made accessible online as part of a project funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). The approximately 850 volumes still preserved in libraries in Mainz, London, Oxford and at least 16 other places form an ensemble rarely preserved in this completeness. It is made even more valuable by the fact that a late medieval and an early modern catalogue still exist. The "Bibliotheca Cartusiana Moguntina - digital" will thus in the future not only offer a comprehensive insight into the history of the oldest Charterhouse on German soil, but also into the spirituality and book culture of this extraordinary order of hermits.

Most of the former library of the Charterhouse on the Michaelsberg is now kept by the Wissenschaftliche Stadtbibliothek Mainz, the former university library. The books of the monastery, which was dissolved in 1781, make up over 10,000 volumes, a good fifth of the old holdings. In the case of manuscripts, the proportion is even larger, with 624 of about 1,000 medieval and early modern manuscripts. Only about 200 manuscripts are in other libraries, most of them in the Bodleian Library in Oxford and the British Library in London. If one disregards the Mainz University Fund, the City Library is the only true descendant of the Carthusian monastery. Accordingly, it tries to do justice to this valuable heritage with the best available means. For this reason, in 2020 it launched a collaborative project with Heidelberg University Library, scheduled to run for several years, to digitize and virtually reunite the Carthusian manuscripts. At the Heidelberg Digitization Center, the manuscripts will be digitized and placed online in a "virtual library" via a dedicated web portal in a sustainable and permanently citable manner. The project is largely financed by the German Research Foundation (DFG), but transport and insurance are provided by Heidelberg itself.

Off-site digitization became necessary because the city library itself has neither a suitable scanner nor the necessary technical infrastructure. The Digitization Center of the Heidelberg University Library, on the other hand, is extremely experienced in the field of manuscript digitization and, with four top-of-the-line book cradles, i.e. "Grazer Buchtisch," has the optimal equipment for digitizing valuable and sensitive materials.

The project schedule stipulates that the manuscripts will be transported to Heidelberg in tranches of 50 pieces, every six months. Overall, the project is scheduled for two phases of three years each. In each phase, slightly more than 300 manuscripts are to be digitized. Heidelberg University Library is responsible for digitizing the manuscripts and placing them online in accordance with DFG guidelines. The digitized manuscripts will be processed and presented using the DWork workflow program developed in Heidelberg.

A total of around 138,000 images are expected to be generated in Heidelberg during the first phase of the project. The metadata on the individual manuscripts required for the digitized images comes from the projects on cataloguing the Mainz manuscript holdings by Gerhardt Powitz, Gerhard List and Christoph Winterer, which are also funded by the DFG. All the data generated in the project is intended to be made available in open access.

In cooperation with the Mainz City Library, Heidelberg is responsible for setting up an online portal that will provide access to the digitized codices as well as extensive content-related information on the history and significance of the library and on individual manuscripts. Even those manuscripts that have survived, which are now in around 20 other institutions scattered around the world and in many cases have already been digitized, are to be brought together virtually in the planned portal as far as possible. This also includes those manuscripts of Mainz provenance that are now part of the Bodleian Libraries' holdings and are being digitized in a separate project.