On 26 April 2016 Bernd-Christian Otto is presenting his paper in the MWK, Erfurt.
This is not a finalized article, but rather a ‘Werkstattbericht’, or even a ‘Steinbruch’ of a project I am currently working on together with a colleague (Daniel Bellingradt, Jun. Prof. for book history at the university of Erlangen-Nuremburg). It is an attempt to provide a historical contextualization as well as an in-depth content analysis of a collection of 142 manuscripts of ‘learned magic’ that have been copied/translated/compiled some time between the late 17th and early 18th centuries. The collection is today hosted at the university library of Leipzig (Cod. mag. 1-142), and has so far avoided scholarly attention (only one of the 142 manuscripts has recently been edited). We believe that this is likely the largest corpus of manuscripts of ‘learned magic’ in eighteenth century German speaking Europe, and moreover the earliest collection of German translations of such texts (113 codices of the collection comprise German texts, the remaining texts are written in Latin or Italian). The article will be submitted to the Journal Book History later this year (deadline is 31 August), together with two appendices: an edition of a selling catalogue that dates to the year 1710 (Appendix A: at that time, the collection included 140 manuscripts; there is a minor discrepancy of 9 manuscripts between the 1710 and the contemporary collection), and a content analysis of the surviving manuscripts hosted in the university library of Leipzig (Appendix B). These two appendices are provided for the colloquium, but note that the edition of the selling catalogue (Appendix A) is currently in German (it remains to be translated into English), and that the content analysis (Appendix B) only covers some 25 manuscripts (of 142) so far. Apologies, also, for inconsistent or incomplete citations and footnotes – these will be re-worked before submission. For the colloquium I would be most interested in remarks concerning the general structure of the article. We struggled with assembling the different angles and narrative sections in a logical, coherent, or at least systematic order. The current analytical framework of three sections entitled ‘uniqueness’, ‘scarcity’, and ‘illegality’ is disputed. Do other possibilities of arranging the material come to your mind?
This is not a finalized article, but rather a ‘Werkstattbericht’, or even a ‘Steinbruch’ of a project I am currently working on together with a colleague (Daniel Bellingradt, Jun. Prof. for book history at the university of Erlangen-Nuremburg). It is an attempt to provide a historical contextualization as well as an in-depth content analysis of a collection of 142 manuscripts of ‘learned magic’ that have been copied/translated/compiled some time between the late 17th and early 18th centuries. The collection is today hosted at the university library of Leipzig (Cod. mag. 1-142), and has so far avoided scholarly attention (only one of the 142 manuscripts has recently been edited). We believe that this is likely the largest corpus of manuscripts of ‘learned magic’ in eighteenth century German speaking Europe, and moreover the earliest collection of German translations of such texts (113 codices of the collection comprise German texts, the remaining texts are written in Latin or Italian). The article will be submitted to the Journal Book History later this year (deadline is 31 August), together with two appendices: an edition of a selling catalogue that dates to the year 1710 (Appendix A: at that time, the collection included 140 manuscripts; there is a minor discrepancy of 9 manuscripts between the 1710 and the contemporary collection), and a content analysis of the surviving manuscripts hosted in the university library of Leipzig (Appendix B). These two appendices are provided for the colloquium, but note that the edition of the selling catalogue (Appendix A) is currently in German (it remains to be translated into English), and that the content analysis (Appendix B) only covers some 25 manuscripts (of 142) so far. Apologies, also, for inconsistent or incomplete citations and footnotes – these will be re-worked before submission. For the colloquium I would be most interested in remarks concerning the general structure of the article. We struggled with assembling the different angles and narrative sections in a logical, coherent, or at least systematic order. The current analytical framework of three sections entitled ‘uniqueness’, ‘scarcity’, and ‘illegality’ is disputed. Do other possibilities of arranging the material come to your mind?
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