Transcending Boundaries. Jerusalem’s Codices and Communities 900-1500

• Applicant: Merav Mack, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Medieval History
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 522215652

This project is the first to systematically assemble and compare codices produced in medieval Jerusalem in all languages and by each of its religious communities. This scholarly undertaking will explore libraries worldwide to identify the dispersed codices, study them alongside each other, and unveil connections between them. Reassessing a wide spectrum of cross-cultural influences will allow us to decipher the dynamics of local book production, discern new layers in Jerusalem’s exceptionally rich and multifaceted cultural history, and write a multi-perspective history of the city. This transdisciplinary study of book production in a culturally heterogeneous and linguistically diverse environment aims to examine exchanges between individuals and communities across the city’s religious and linguistic boundaries. The inquiry will be guided by the following questions: What codices were produced in medieval Jerusalem, in what languages, and for whom? How did Jerusalemite authors, scribes, translators, and illuminators interact across the city’s religious and language divides? Preliminary research carried out at the Johannes-Gutenberg-University of Mainz has established, for the first time, a tentative corpus of more than 300 manuscripts. Primary research at libraries in Europe and the Middle East will supplement missing information and identify questions and issues that will be shared with experts and colleagues in related fields. For this purpose, cooperation agreements with scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds have been established. This transdisciplinary approach will draw on shared expertise to help overcome challenges, including barriers to access to some of the material. The results of this study will be published as a monograph (tentatively) entitled Transcending Boundaries: Jerusalem’s Codices and Communities, 900-1500. The impact of the proposed methodology, which highlights the circulation of knowledge within the boundaries of a single, dynamic locality, will offer portable tools for the study of other heterogeneous and multi-religious intellectual centres of book production in the medieval world.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants