CSMC Newsletter

The second issue of the series Written Artefacts as Cultural Heritage provides French, Spanish, and Arabic (coming soon) translations of the much-acclaimed manual ‘Be prepared: Guidelines for small museums for writing a disaster preparedness plan’, which was first published in 2000 by the Australian Heritage Collections Council. Every volume of Written Artefacts as Cultural Heritage is peer-reviewed and available open access. You can also request hard copies of each issue for free from the editorial office.

The new volume of the series Studies in Manuscript Cultures is out now. Andronikos Kallistos: A Byzantine Scholar and His Manuscripts in Italian Humanism by Luigi Orlandi provides the first in-depth account of the life and the vast scholarly activities of an erudite personality. To date, nearly 130 manuscripts have been found bearing evidence of his work as a copyist and philologist. Like all previous volumes in the series, the book is available open access and can be downloaded from our website.

A recently launched project by Marco Heiles (CSMC) and Katharina Zeppezauer-Wachauer (Universität Salzburg) takes advantage of the benefits of open, digital publishing: their text series typology creates a controlled vocabulary for designating text series in Middle High German and Early High German literature up to around 1520. Designed as a Linked Open Data resource (LOD), the text series typology is intended to be used and developed collaboratively by the scientific community. A beta version has recently been published online. The two founders describe the background, goals, and methodology of their approach in a freely accessible essay in which they solicit input from the community to improve the tool collectively.

The first international handbook on a region in the southern Caucasus, which in Antiquity was called ‘Albania’ (with no relation to the eponymous region in the Balkans), has appeared in the series ‘De Gruyter Reference’ (with open access). It was edited by Jasmine Dum-Tragut (Universität Salzburg) and Jost Gippert, senior professor at CSMC, and is a first result of his fellowship (2020–2022) and the ERC project DeLiCaTe he is running at present. The two editors will discuss the book during a public book presentation on 13 July, 4:15 pm at CSMC.

Since its release in 2020, the documentary ‘Thus Speaks Tarām-Kūbi, which tells the story of a woman’s everyday life in ancient Mesopotamia based on 4000-year-old cuneiform letters, has won many awards. Among others, it received the first prize at the International Archaeological Film Festival in Split last year. Following the release of an English version in 2022, the film is now also available in German and can be viewed in full on the CSMC website.

On the evening of 4 July, the exhibition ‘Written Treasures of Hamburg: New Questions on Old Manuscripts’ (‘Hamburgs Schriftschätze: Neue Fragen an alte Manuskripte’) was officially opened at the Hamburg State and University Library (SUB). The exhibition is open every day until 2 October 2023 from 9:00 am to midnight (10:00 am to midnight at weekends), and admission is free. For those who want to learn more about the stories behind the artefacts after their visit (or who cannot come to Hamburg to see it), a bilingual catalogue offers much more background on both the artefacts and the research on them at the Cluster.