Two publications of the network & its members are in preparation
In the context of the topics discussed at the last VIRMA-conferences and research undertaken by its members these publications are currently being edited:
Virtuality and Materiality. Entanglements of Material and Virtual Worlds in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period (Interdisziplinäre Beiträge zu Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit), ed. by Christina Antenhofer, Elisabeth Gruber and Alexander Zerfaß (papers from the first VIRMA conference)
Digital Approaches to Cultural Heritage. Perspectives and Challenges, ed. by Christina Antenhofer, Gerald Hiebl, Ingrid Matschinegg, Claudia Posch and Gerhard Rampl (papers from the joint third VIRMA conference/first INVENTARIA conference)
Network members discussed their work on Late Medieval & Early Modern inventories at the international INVENTARIA conference (Sep 19th–20th 2024)
Over the last weeks Karoline Döring summarized the contributions of the network members Christina Antenhofer (Salzburg), Elisabeth Gruber (Salzburg/Krems) and Chiara Zuanni (Graz) at the INVENTARIA conference on this blog. The contributions of the associated members Thomas Pickles (Chester), Daniel Smail (Harvard) and Katherine Wilson (Chester) broadened this perspective on the work with Late Medieval and Early Modern inventories:
Karoline Döring: Digital Approaches to Cultural Heritage. Perspectives and Challenges. Projekttagung über den Einsatz digitaler Methoden zur Erschließung von europäischem Kulturerbe, 19.–20. September 2024 in Innsbruck, in: Mittelalter. Interdisziplinäre Forschung und Rezeptionsgeschichte, https://doi.org/10.58079/13fn7 (general review).
In the Lower Austrian part of the Danube region, known as the Wachau, viticulture as an agrarian form of economy was established to a large extent by monastic estates. From the ninth century onwards at the latest, numerous monasteries in Austria, Salzburg, Bavaria, and Bohemia came into possession of vineyards in the Wachau by donation or purchase. Charters, urbaria, and tax lists document the importance of these mostly far-off properties from the beginning of the thirteenth century. Viticulture played a special role in this process. This is even more remarkable because the distances between the monastery and the estates – the so-called “Lesehöfe” – were sometimes considerable, for example, in the case of the Augustinian canons’ monasteries of Herrenchiemsee (Traunstein, Bavaria) and Höglwörth (Berchtesgaden, Bavaria) or the Benedictine monasteries of Prüfening (Regensburg, Bavaria) and Tegernsee (Miesbach, Bavaria) and the Hochstift Freising. These far-off estates served as an interface for the interests of both local and foreign actors, still visible today in the form of surviving buildings and historical documents and objects. As part of a project, the monastery estates and their historical documents were catalogued to establish a basis for an interdisciplinary analysis of the phenomenon. The essential goal of the project was to record the monastic estates as broadly as possible to create a basis for an interdisciplinary analysis of the phenomenon. Basic groundwork was laid to make the various estates available for the interests of cultural tourism within the Wachau World Heritage region.
Gruber, Elisabeth and Kühtreiber, Thomas. “Monastic Estates in the Wachau Region: Nodes of Exchange in Past and Present Days” Open Archaeology, vol. 11, no. 1, 2025, pp. 20240031. https://doi.org/10.1515/opar-2024-0031
Christina Antenhofer has published an article together with Ingrid Matschinegg, Walter Brandstätter and Stefan Zedlacher in the latest special issue of Open Archaeology. This issue was co-edited by her, Katherine Wilson and Thomas Pickles under the topic ofEngaging the Public, Heritage and Educators through Material Culture Research.
Abstract
Hohensalzburg Digital is a Digital Humanities project realized at Salzburg University and dedicated to digitally process and connect room- and object-related information taken from written sources and from building history data on Hohensalzburg Castle. Via digital interfaces, we create the basis for an Austrian Local Time Machine Project on the castle, a popular landmark. In three steps, the project opens up cultural heritage digitally for scientific community and international public alike: (1) The first part is dedicated to digital processing and exploring historical sources on rooms of the castle, their furnishings and function, from the earliest sources dating back to the sixteenth century until 1816 when Salzburg became part of the Habsburg Empire. (2) The second part connects the historical information deduced from the written sources with the results of building research and other work on realia, for example, on the famous tiled stove in the Goldene Stube (Golden Chamber). The digital room book created in this way allows a new comprehensive view on the development, furnishings, and use of the rooms and the whole building as a social space for the people who lived there. (3) The final part prepares the data for incorporation in the Europe Time Machine.
Antenhofer, Christina, Matschinegg, Ingrid, Brandstätter, Walter and Zedlacher, Stefan. “Hohensalzburg Digital: Engaging the Public via a Local Time Machine Project” Open Archaeology, vol. 11, no. 1, 2025, pp. 20240027. https://doi.org/10.1515/opar-2024-0027
Christina Antenhofer has published an article together with Elisabeth Gruber-Tokić, Gerald Hiebl, Ingrid Matschinegg, Claudia Posch & Gerhard Rampl in the latest special issue of Open Archaeology. This issue was co-edited by her, Katherine Wilson and Thomas Pickles under the topic ofEngaging the Public, Heritage and Educators through Material Culture Research.
Abstract
This article explores the potential of engaging the public in an ongoing interdisciplinary research project on castle inventories at the universities of Salzburg and Innsbruck. Our aim is to create a digital platform that uses inventories as a key to explore the living conditions in late medieval and early modern castles. In this article, we want to give an initial insight into the research project in terms of the theme of this volume: how the digital platform we are creating will contribute to engaging the public with material culture projects. We start from the hypothesis that inventories are neither objective nor simple lists of things, but products of an inventory practice, with traces of this activity, found both in the texts and in the materiality of the archival records. They contain a wealth of information on relations between things, people, activities, rooms, and the words used for them. We use digital methods of text recognition to interpret a corpus of 130 castle inventories from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries in the historical region of Tyrol (Austria/Italy) as historical sources and on castles as social spaces. With ontological modelling and deduction from the archival records, we want to make the historical practice of creating inventories visible and use the information to explore everyday life at the castles. For selected castles, we will combine historical data with results from building history to create virtual room books. Digital tools will allow presenting the relations of objects, spaces, individuals, actions, and social practices and provide results for the scientific community as well as for the interested public.
Antenhofer, Christina, Gruber-Tokić, Elisabeth, Hiebel, Gerald, Matschinegg, Ingrid, Posch, Claudia and Rampl, Gerhard. “Inventories as Keys to Exploring Castles as Cultural Heritage” Open Archaeology, vol. 11, no. 1, 2025, pp. 20240026. https://doi.org/10.1515/opar-2024-0026
From 19th to 21st September 2023 the Interdisciplinary Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies (IZMF) and the Institute for Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture (IMAREAL) at the University of Salzburg held the first conference dedicated to VIRMA. It was organized by the network members Christina Antenhofer, Elisabeth Gruber, and Alexander Zerfaß and aimed to understand the “Entanglements of Material and Virtual Worlds in Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture.”
Elisabeth Gruber outlined in her introduction the framework for further discussions, taken from the network’s mission statement which formed the basis for the call for papers of the conference: Materiality and virtuality do not form an irreconcilable binary opposition. Rather is it their productive interaction that produces the texture of meanings from which ‘realities’ are made. Based on the assumption that people generate culture in ever new processes of negotiation in the interplay of virtuality and materiality, the contributions to the conference explored how people generate virtuality, and how far they need sensual points of reference and a connection in and with the material world. In this context, the speakers also reflected on the potential associated with the virtualization of research data and the various stages of modeling and analysis, in particular the challenges associated with the digital transformation of material objects.
Entanglements of Material and Virtual Worlds in Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture
Congress of the Interdisciplinary Research Center for the Medieval and Early Modern Period (IZMF) and the Institute for Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture (IMAREAL)
