CSMC Newsletter

In late January, a trial began at the Munich District Court that has been widely reported in the media and which, according to the Süddeutsche Zeitung, concerns ‘one of the biggest science thrillers of the post-war period’. The defendant is said to have initiated a plagiarism intrigue against the head of the Institute of Forensic Medicine at LMU Munich, Matthias Graw. In 2022, Graw was accused of plagiarising his doctoral thesis from a book – but this book turned out to be forgery that was produced later than Graw’s dissertation, supposedly with the intention of ruining him professionally. The CSMC’s Artefact Lab was involved in the analyses that ultimately led to Graw’s exoneration, investigating in particular the paper and binding of the book.

For decades, the Jerusalem home of Miryam and Moshe Ya’akov Ben-Gavriêl was a port of call for intellectuals, writers, artists, and many others. By 1966, a year after the death of Moshe Ya’akov Ben-Gavriêl, more than 600 people had written a total of 1,200 entries in the guestbook, including such well-known figures as Arnold Zweig, Gabriele Tergit, and Oskar Kokoschka. In his current research project, Sebastian Schirrmeister wants to use new digital techniques to explore this microcosm and link it to larger bodies of knowledge. On 23 January, he and other researchers from the CSMC and the Hub of Computing and Data Science presented their work on the Jerusalem guestbook at a public launch event. An article on our website introduces their research; and of course you can also find a link to explore the digital guestbook yourself. 

For our Mobile Lab, the turn of the year 2024/2025 was marked by a tour de force through northern Italy. In changing formations, the team spent several weeks in Venice and Verona. The first part of the trip took the lab team to the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice, where they analysed a Coronelli globe from the 17th century, a gilded Byzantine book cover, a 16th-century Japanese scroll, and more than a dozen manuscripts by the famous 15th-century Greek calligrapher Iohannes Rhosos. Another stop on the trip was the Biblioteca Capitolare in Verona, where they were involved in the final stages of the ‘Palimpsests in Danger’ project. Finally, some lab members returned to the Biblioteca Marciana to investigate one of the most famous world maps ever made: the Fra Mauro Map (more on this is coming up in an upcoming edition).

In the summer of 2023, a find in the University Library of Graz caused a sensation: During routine work on the Egyptian papyri in the special collection, paper conservator Theresa Zammit Lupi came across an object from the 3rd century BCE that exhibited various characteristics of a codex fragment. But is the ‘Graz Mummy Book’ – the object owes its catchy name to its use as cartonnage for a mummy – actually the remains of a codex or does it only coincidentally show some features that suggest this? To get closer to an answer to this question, researchers from Graz brought the Mummy Book to Hamburg in late summer 2024, where it was examined in detail using various analytical methods available at the CSMC’s Artefact Lab. The Austrian public broadcaster ORF recently aired a documentary about the Mummy Book, which also features the analyses in Hamburg.

Established in 1821, the École nationale des chartes is a distinguished higher education institution in France that focuses on training experts in archiving, palaeography, and historical research. Recently, the CSMC and the École nationale des chartes signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to serve as a basis for, for example, the exchange of researchers and students, joint research endeavours and training courses, and joint publications. Another MoU is currently in preparation, establishing an agreement with the Biblioteca Nacional del Perú in Lima to digitise the library’s collection of music manuscripts.

The doctoral thesis is the first long-term project for anyone pursuing an academic career. To get a sense of what it is like to do a PhD on written artefacts, and more particularly in Hamburg at the Graduate School of the CSMC, we have produced a testimonial video targeted at prospective PhD researchers. In this video, two of our current doctoral researchers, Malgorzata Grzelec and Daniel Kudo Tovar, give insights into their work on paper structures and Peruvian music archives, respectively, and talk about life in Hamburg and their future plans.

A research programme such as that of the CSMC and its Cluster of Excellence UWA – the study of written artefacts from all cultures and periods from antiquity to the present – can only be put into practice if researchers from a wide range of disciplines combine their respective expertise. In particular, UWA thrives on the diverse knowledge of its members in the so-called ‘small subjects’ in the humanities. Recently, four new professors have joined the cluster, each contributing to a significant expansion of the research expertise bundled in UWA: Barbara Henning in Turkish Studies, Cem Kara in Alevi Studies, Julia Schneider in Chinese Studies, and Agnes Weiß in Microbiology.

On the surface, paper looks like a very simple material. On closer inspection, however, it turns out to be one of the most complex writing supports. At the CSMC, Agnieszka Helman-Ważny and Malgorzata Grzelec want to promote our understanding of the different technologies used to make paper, particularly in Asia. Together with Gangolf Ulbricht, a Berlin-based papermaker, the researchers are reconstructing historical papermaking technologies. In our blog, you can read what they are trying to achieve with these experiments and what can be learned from them.