Digital Lunch Seminar Series: Liturgica and Chronica from the Former Library of the St. Katharinenkirchen

Digital Lunch Seminar Series: Lecture 3/4

Liturgica and Chronica from the Former Library of the St. Katharinenkirchen in Hamburg in the Context of their Transmission

Ira Rabin and Katrin Janz-Wenig

Chair: Marina Creydt

The Katharinen project is dedicated to cataloguing 21 and digitizing 52 liturgical and chronical manuscripts dated to the 13th-17th centuries that are inherently connected with medieval Hamburg and Northern Germany. Some of them have been kept since the early days of the Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg (SUB), then called the Stadtbibliothek or bibliotheca publica. The manuscripts from the Hamburg Stadtkirche St. Katharinen were moved to the SUB in 1923. Many liturgical manuscripts from this corpus were produced or used in Hamburg, while others have so far been only vaguely attributed to Northern Germany. One of the questions plaguing the modern cataloguing effort concerns the provenance of the manuscripts. Here, we added ink characterization as one of the criteria for provenance.

The most popular European medieval ink, iron-gall ink is usually rich in various metals such as copper and zinc. Together with iron, the main metal of the ink, the metallic components of the ink composition produce specific characteristic patterns, so-called fingerprints. We will discuss the possibility of using ink fingerprints as an indication of a specific place or region or sometimes time of production.

We will report our strategy, based on paleographic, codicological and material analysis, used to identify Hamburg as a place of production of one of the manuscripts of unknown provenance.

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