The mediality of Ptolemy's Latin 'Geography'. Manuscript tradition between knowledge and ignorance

• Applicant: Dr. Gerda Brunnlechner
• Subject Area: Medieval History
• Term: since 2026
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 580388887

The project uses a seemingly fixed body of knowledge from the 15th century to examine the factors that could influence the evaluation of knowledge. The focus is on the time immediately before the printing press with movable type changed the way books were produced. The project examines the generation of knowledge using the example of the Latin manuscripts of Ptolemy's 'Geography'. The focus is on the tradition of the work, stemming from antiquity and originally written in Greek, in Latin Europe, in particular the production and reception of the individual manuscripts with supposedly unchanged content. My initial analysis shows that the manuscripts differ according to the preparation and use of the texts and coordinates, something that has hardly been taken into account so far. In order to put the focus on processes of knowledge generation, the individual manuscripts are understood as individual products of a dynamic interplay of knowledge and ignorance. The first objective of the project is to provide a comprehensive overview of the surviving Latin manuscripts of Ptolemy’s Geography and the people involved with them from the translation at the beginning of the 15th century to the first printing in 1475, and to make it available to researchers via a repository, flanked by reports in a blog. The second objective is to provide a foundation of research data that makes it possible to examine social and media relationships using network analysis. For this purpose, relevant contextual data of the persons concerned with the manuscripts are researched and recorded. To gather information about the manuscripts, data from literature is compiled, checked against the sources and supplemented, and the digital copies of the manuscripts are analysed for questions of materiality. The data obtained is visualized in a web-based, dynamic research environment in such a way that spatial, temporal, personnel and factual relationships can be queried variably. Thus, the research on the reception of geography is extended to include the focus on the diversity of the manuscripts and on the processes of production and use. This makes it possible to look at a spectrum of actors that is not determined based on social spheres, but rather based on manuscript-related functions, and to include also social, philosophical and practical knowledge beyond learned and technical knowledge. The research data will be published via the repository and a report on the evaluation process will be published via the blog. The third objective is to use network analysis to develop exemplary research questions in the history of knowledge from a historical-mediological perspective in order to demonstrate the performance of the database and network obtained. In an open access article, accompanied by a blog article, the research questions developed will be presented and the possibilities for further work with the database will be examined.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants