The Codex Manesse. Collection Structure, Contextualisation

Named to the UNESCO World Documentary Heritage list in 2019, the Codex Manesse is a manuscript created around 1300 that, with 140 author corpora and 137 miniatures, represents the most extensive collection of Middle High German poetry. The aim of this project is to investigate the organizational structure of the manuscript. Questions will be asked regarding how the ordering of the author corpora came about from the standpoint of transmission history in order to make statements on the principles of collection and organization that are effective in the manuscript, as well as on the literary historical knowledge that is reflected in it. Although there are codicological and art historical investigations that have provided information on the genesis of the Codex, the content of the text collection has not been sufficiently investigated. Until now, literary research has focused mainly on specific authors, considering them apart from the context of the collection. The transmission history has been researched (if at all) in isolation with regard to individual authors or texts; the palaeographic and codicological findings have mostly been ignored in literary studies. The planned project aims to address these desiderata and bring together the aforementioned disciplines. The starting point for this project is the recent codicological finding that social status is not the sole organizing principle of the collection. In the course of the production of the book, the parchment layers were rearranged, partly disassembled and reassembled; a number of double leaves were cut and sewn together again in a different arrangement. The reconstruction of these manufacturing techniques reveals a creative will that has yet to be explored substantively. In the planned project, individual manuscript segments will be singled out and questions regarding the groupings will be asked. For this purpose, different perspectives of interpretation will be used to examine the author corpora with regard to its transmission and reception history, as well as its historical and poetological relations. This contextualization will produce fundamental insights into the organizational structure of the collection as well as the literary historical knowledge that is reflected therein. Furthermore, evidence of patterns in this manuscript is expected to be found. The project will therefore make a significant contribution to the origin history of the codex. The findings will be encoded in the TEI-XML file format, which lays the foundation for a complete digital commentary of the Codex Manesse. They will also be published in a monograph written by the applicants together with the project staff, which will encompass a philological and literary examination of the selected manuscript segments with regard to the question of the organizational structure of the Codex Manesse.

The Codex Manesse, which was designated a UNESCO World Documentary Heritage site in May 2023, is a manuscript created around 1300 that contains the works of 140 authors and 137 author portraits, making it the most comprehensive collection of Middle High German poetry. The project pursued two objectives in its first funding phase (3/2021-10/2025): Firstly, it addressed a question of literary and philological history by examining the structure of the Codex Manesse collection on the basis of manuscript findings. The reconstruction of the technical processes involved in its production reveals a creative intent that was previously largely unexplored in terms of content. The project examined the arrangement of the song texts and author's work using individual manuscript segments as examples. To this end, various interpretative perspectives were adopted by examining the authors and their texts contained in these segments with regard to their historical, historiographical, poetological and reception-historical relationships. On the other hand, the project had a digital focus: transcriptions were created for the texts of the segments examined (= approx. a quarter of the total holdings of the Codex Manesse) on the Transkribus transcription platform and exported as TEI/XML. The codicological, palaeographic and historical findings developed in the project were annotated using a specially adapted annotation workflow (Oxygen+ediarum). This made the transcription of the included text segments searchable and analysable for the annotated data. On this basis, the content and technical concept for a research database on the Codex Manesse was developed and elaborated. At the end of the DACH project, the following results were available, which form the basis for the completion of the research database (second funding phase, DFG): Findings on the collection structure and layout of the manuscript, the arrangement of the works, the scribes, illuminators and painters, the transmission history of the texts, and a variety of other codicological, palaeographic and transmission history aspects. Transcription and annotation of the codicological, palaeographic and transmission history findings of approximately a quarter of the total holdings of the Codex Manesse Development of the technical and content-related concept for the research database as well as hosting and long-term archiving The results of the project work were discussed at regular intervals at project workshops with the cooperation partners. They were also presented to a wider specialist audience at numerous conferences and in guest lectures and workshops, and published in various formats and series. On the basis of this extensive preparatory work, the research database will be completed in the second funding phase currently being applied for by the DFG.