Texts related to the university of Vienna from 1365 to 1500

The actual teaching at the university (founded in 1365) has hardly been studied yet. Apart from a few select and very limited surveys only the lecturing and publication of some well-known masters (e.g. Nicolas of Dinkelsbühl, Henry Totting of Oyta, Thomas Ebendorfer, Henry of Langenstein) have attracted scholarly attention, whereas the majority of texts transmitted in manuscripts connected with and related to the university have never been sorted out, let alone taken account of in a systematic way. Many of these manuscripts moreover give very little or no indication to the origin of the texts and to the date when they were copied. It is the aim of this project to list all relevant manuscripts preserved in the library of Klosterneuburg. Furthermore these texts, the authors of which have not been studied before in any depth, will be placed in the larger context of transmission, thereby elucidating the date they were written down and yielding parallel copies. This allows to focus on the process of lectures being turned into written word: autographs of masters, the immediate copies of lectures (reportata, pronunciaciones), later copies and book bequests constitute the chief material. The great bulk of university-related books preserved in Klosterneuburg belong to the class of later copies. In case of multiple copies in other libraries it will be possible by careful analysis of the paleographical features and make up of the manuscripts as well as the paper used to differentiate between copies that originated in Klosterneuburg from those belonging to urban scriptoria. The analysis of a group of university-related texts as preserved in Klosterneuburg is an essential contribution to understand the working of the late medieval university and an important step to achieve a new history of the university planned for 2015.

The medieval manuscripts of Austria`s convent libraries contain many texts connected with and related to Vienna`s university (founded in 1365). These manuscripts got into the convents either directly by their members, who taught or studied at the university, or they were bequeathed to the convents quite a while after their production, or purchased by themselves. So these manuscripts are not only excellent sources for the history of the medieval university of Vienna, but also for the so-called "Wissenschaftspflege", that means the scientific preoccupation with these texts beyond the university. The majority of these texts has never been sorted out (at the most they are registered incidentally in the manuscript-catalogues of the Kommission für Schrift- und Buchwesen des Mittelalters of the Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften), let alone taken account of in a systematic way. The project supported by the FWF is the first step to a systematic registration of the relevant texts in Austrian libraries, which aims at an essential contribution to understand the working of the late medieval university. Because of the consuetudinarily close connections between the Augustinian canons of Klosterneuburg and the University of Vienna, also resulting from the geographical vicinity, the project started with the registration of the pertinent manuscripts of this monastery. For all the watermarks of the monastery`s paper manuscripts, recorded by means of betaradiography, are implemented in the online-database "Wasserzeichen des Mittelalters" (WZMA) of the Commission (http://www.ksbm.oeaw.ac.at/wz/wzma.htm) and watermarks normally allow a more exact chronological classification than other criteria like palaeography, also many manuscripts related to the university could be dated rather precisely. Furthermore, comprising parallel transmissions in other Austrian libraries (like the Austrian National Library, the library of the Viennese "Schottenstift" or of the monastery of St. Florian, Upper Austria), numerous texts, that in the manuscripts of Klosterneuburg are transmitted only anonymously, could be assigned to certain authors or students. Starting from this bulk of manuscripts, another bulk of about 50 manuscripts in the Benedictine monastery of Seitenstetten (Lower Austria) were analyzed, which the monastery had acquired from the former university library in the middle of the 18th century. Exact descriptions of the manuscripts both from Klosterneuburg as from Seitenstetten containing texts related to the medieval Viennese university are available online (http://www.ksbm.oeaw.ac.at/kln/mssuniv.htm). It is intended to go on with the registration of relevant manuscripts, for example those of the Augustinian canons of St. Florian, and to publish the results on the internet.