History as a Visual Concept

This DFG-FWF-funded project, “History as a Visual Concept”, explores Peter of Poitiers’ twelfth-century diagrammatic work, the Compendium historiae in genealogia Christi. Ubiquitous throughout the mediaeval and early modern periods, the Compendium historiae’s graphic and pictorial elements gave it semantic and aesthetic power in the classroom, and beyond.

Researchers at the University of Tübingen, University of Wuppertal, and the University of Graz are creating the first digital edition of Peter of Poitiers’ Compendium historiae using the standard of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI/XML), the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) and Semantic Web technologies. This interdisciplinary and international research project brings together the fields of art history, mediaeval history, Latin philology, text editing, and digital humanities.

The aims are

• a comprehensive overview of the tradition of the Compendium historiae,
• an analysis of the graphic metastructure as well as the texts, diagrams and images embedded in it (recording variants),
• a critical scholarly edition,
• an investigation of socio-cultural context.

The project will result in

• a codicological database,
• a navigable visualisation of the graphic metastructure,
• a critical edition of the text,
• publications and lectures regarding individual case studies of manuscript witnesses, socio-cultural context, and other aspects of the tradition.

Digital and freely accessible, our digital edition will break new methodological ground with graphic and textual elements displayed in a navigable graph. In making accessible one of the most visually innovative and influential works of the Middle Ages, our project will shed new light on the history of the visualisation of knowledge.