Foreword

Why a special issue devoted to medieval German studies and digital philology?¹ A first and very obvious reason is that the German-speaking countries have been pioneers of digital humanities projects in the area of medieval studies. Since at least the 1990s, publicly funded bodies (research councils, learned academies, universities, state and university libraries) have invested heavily in digital resources for medievalists, and continue to support their development; these resources span the range from online versions of printed reference works—dictionaries, manuscript catalogues, and so on—through digitized manuscripts to databanks and corpora that have been created specifically for online platforms. The sheer wealth of resources would suffice in itself to justify a tour d'horizon of the current digital landscape of medieval German philology, and four of the contributions to this issue offer just that.

Hannah Busch and Philipp Hegel in one essay, and Veit Probst in another, describe the work of two leading centers of digital philology in Germany: the Center for Digital Humanities at the University of Trier (Busch and Hegel), and Heidelberg University Library (Probst). In addition to presenting some of the major projects, which range from electronic editions, dictionaries, and databases through to reconstructions of historical library collections in cyberspace, the authors encourage us to reflect on the limits as well as the potential of machine-reading technologies for humanities research. Busch and Hegel in particular argue that the development of, for example, quantitative algorithms for encoding and comparing codicological features may help the researcher to identify more quickly where to look, but will not take all the work out of her hands. Two further contributions review the state of medieval digital humanities in the other German-speaking countries Austria and Switzerland. Astrid Breith surveys the uniquely rich holdings of medieval manuscripts in Austrian libraries, and the project of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, through its Department of Paleography and Codicology, to develop a single online portal, manuscripta.at, with access to manuscript metadata, library catalogues, and digital images of the manuscripts. Ramona Fritschi describes the Swiss counterpart, e-codices, which is housed at the Medieval Institute of the University of Fribourg and provides free access to all medieval and also a selection of modern manuscripts of Switzerland by means of a virtual library.

A second reason for this dedicated issue, which reaches out beyond the confines of the discipline, is that the digital media and the digital humanities have reinvigorated medievalist discussions of the nature and status of textuality in the Middle Ages. Medieval German philology has an especially long and rich tradition of contributions to both the theory of the text and the practice of text editing. This tradition is however not well known outside of Germanist circles. It has, moreover, developed from different presuppositions and followed a different trajectory than other national philologies, especially Romance studies, and these differences have shaped German medieval studies' encounter with digital philology in special and distinctive ways.

To understand this better, a little history is necessary. It is a common belief among medievalists that German textual scholars have tended to be Lachmannian in method, applying the stemmatological and reconstructive approach to text-editing pioneered by the great German scholar Karl Lachmann (1793–1851), whereas French philologists have followed the method of their own great national figure, Joseph Bédier (1864–1938), and made it their practice to edit medieval texts from a single base manuscript.² Although this characterization of the two national philologies may be accurate in very broad terms, it misses the fact that something approximating to the Bédier method had also been practiced in Germany from the early nineteenth century onwards: first, in editions of historical sources produced for the Monumenta Germaniae Historica (MGH), whose guidelines of 1824 laid down that each text should be edited from its best surviving manuscript;³ and then in editions of medieval vernacular texts in the series Deutsche Texte des Mittelalters (DTM), which was founded in 1904. Interestingly, the approach was not put forward as a polemical alternative to Lachmann's method: Gustav Roethe, the first general editor of DTM declared that the policy of presenting...