Exact sciences in manuscript research (manuSciences ’15)

Abstract

The article contains an extended report from the summer school “manuSciences’15. Manuscripts: From Fragments to Books – From Identifi cation to Interpretation” organised by the Freie Universitat Berlin and Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, and held at Fraueninsel in Bavaria, on 6–12 September, 2015. The main aim of the gathering was to provide an opportunity for exchange of ideas and knowledge between researchers working on historical written sources, who belong to the fi eld of the humanities, and specialists, who represent exact sciences, and who are capable of furnishing new technical potential for manuscript research. P. Pludra-Żuk, herself a representative of the humanities, describes the new technical tools, which can be utilised in primary source research, and which allow for the acquisition of hitherto undisclosed information concerning the medieval scribal workshop (numerous types of materials research), non-invasive methods of reaching text fragments diffi cult to get to, or unreadable (Refl ectance Transformation Imaging, hyperspectral imaging, XRF), or partial automation of the reading and analytic process.