Reading in the Alps. Book ownership in Tyrol 1750-1800

This project aims at investigating private book ownership in the Catholically dominated rural areas of the Central Alps, or, putting it more precisely, in historic Tyrol in the 18 th century. Referring to comparable existing studies mainly focusing on protestant-pietistic regions, this study investigates inventories, which were most commonly drawn up after a persons demise or as part of a lease arrangement, listing all of the individuals belongings. Books mentioned in such inventories from the Pustertal/Val di Pusteria, today belonging to South-Tyrol (Südtirol/Alto Adige), Italy, will be gathered in order to describe and systematically analyse private book ownership in the respective administrative districts. The main research questions are: -Who owned books and which patterns can be observed regarding the book-owners? (gender, age, socioeconomic background, profession) -Which and how many books were in circulation/popular in the region? (religious or profane content, authors, origin, value/price, effects of state/church censorship) -Which differences and/or parallels come to light in comparison with the findings of existing studies? A study like this would be pioneering work, not only for the area of historic Tyrol, but also for Austria, and even for the mainly Catholically oriented South of the German language area. The proposed project therefore would also make a significant contribution to the European history of books and reading, hence, the cultural and social history of the 18th century, at the dawn of the age of modernity. In cooperation with the Austrian Center for Digital Humanities of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ACDH-ÖAW), the inventories that have been systematically examined in this project will subsequently be published in an XML-encoded online-database. Thus, substantial value is added by creating easy access to source material that can be relevant for many aspects of further scientific research as well as for an interested public. The project term is 36 months. In this period, a total of about 4,400 inventories from the administrative districts of Bruneck, Michaelsburg, (Alt)Rasen, Schöneck, Sonnenburg, Ehrenburg, Kehlburg und St. Lamprechtsburg will be analysed.

Who read which books 250 years ago? Studies are already available, especially for Protestant-Pietist regions, which attempt to answer this question. Representative studies with a broad source base have been lacking for the Catholic-dominated Alpine region though, and for southern Germany in general. The present project was able to close this gap to some extent and create a valuable basis for further research. Looking at methodology, this project was determined by the problem that 18th century readers generally did not leave clues about their reading. Their books, in which reception such as underlining or marginalia would be recognisable, have not survived or have survived only scattered. In most cases, no texts have survived that were produced by these readers and in which traces of reading would be visible. Therefore, Reading in the Alps focused on the reconstruction of private book ownership. Using inventories from the South Tyrolean Provincial Archives, books were searched for. About 2000 legal transactions from 1750 to 1800 from the Pustertal formed the data basis. From them, information was extracted on named persons, on the context of origin of the respective source, on assets and on the recorded household effects. These data were compiled into two openly accessible online databases, which represent important results of the present project. Further interpretations and statistical evaluations of this source material were also published in several publications and presented to the scientific community in the context of lectures and poster sessions, in the form of media coverage and in other formats to the general public. The potentials and limitations of the source material - for example, the question of the completeness of inventories or the informative value of the assets mentioned - were thoroughly debated in the course of this. In an international workshop organised by the project team, Reading in the Alps was also discussed together with the latest approaches of other proponents of research in the field of the history of books and readers. On the basis of the data collected from the sources, two further third-party funded projects in the field of Digital Humanities could be acquired. Book ownership was found in about 17 percent of the inventories examined. This figure could be further differentiated. It became apparent, among other things, that books tended to be owned more by men and were mentioned significantly more often in urban areas and that socio-economic position correlated significantly with the probability of book ownership. As expected, it could not be reconstructed with certainty which books were read, but which books were available in people's households: the majority were books with religious content. Prayer books and Catholic devotional literature were the most widespread. Medical and legal literature dominated among secular content.