Talking animals with morals

To this day, Aesop's work is not only a standard in school lessons; comic genres also depict animals, for example, as actors with human characteristics. The first complete collection of Aesopian fables in Middle High German by the Bernese Dominican Bonerius was written around 1350. Its title, "Der Edelstein” (the Gemstone), goes back to the first fable in the volume. As a first step towards a new digital edition, the "Bonerius’s Gemstone - digital" project is now documenting the entire extensive heritage of the collection in digital facsimiles. The Research Center for Medieval Religious Literature at the KU and Heidelberg University Library are collaborating on this project. The KU research center contributes the philological foundations and the concept of the edition project, the University Library an innovative digital data modeling.

Just over one hundred years after its creation, Bonerius’s collection was apparently still so popular that the Bamberg printer Albrecht Pfister published a print in 1461, which is not only considered to be the first German book printed with type, but also the first ever to be decorated with woodcuts. "Today, 36 manuscripts and two cradle prints of Bonerius’s work are known. But the 'Edelstein' was last edited in 1844 using the methods of the time and only 17 textual witnesses", explains Prof. Dr. Gerd Dicke. The first studies of prominent literary figures such as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing led to three early complete editions in the 18th and 19th centuries, on which German studies, as an emerging subject at the time, developed its editorial and lexicographical tools. "For the founding fathers of the subject, the 'Edelstein' became the object of discussion and testing of various editorial methodological approaches", says Dicke. For the Bonerius edition published by Franz Pfeiffer in 1844, he was certain that only four of the 17 textual witnesses known at the time reproduced the original version. Pfeiffer has weeded out a lot of so-called "patchwork" and helped the "Edelstein" to a polish that cannot be found in any textual witnesses. "But to this day, this edition has been the basis of all textual treatment of Bonerius’s work for almost 180 years", says Dicke.

This is reason enough for Professor Dicke and those involved in the project to bring the findings on the "Edelstein" up to date – both in terms of content and the form in which they are presented. Not in printed form, but via an online portal, "Bonerius’s Gemstone - digital" will make the more than doubled basis of textual witnesses since 1844 accessible. In the spirit of open access, the platform brings together a further 14 digital facsimiles of the remaining manuscripts that are still available, in addition to 19 digital copies that were already linked before the project began. In addition, there are modern copies and partial copies of textual witnesses that have since been destroyed or lost. The surviving Bonerius legacy comprises around 2,400 individual texts on approximately 4,800 pages as well as almost 1,350 illustrations. It is visualized using the Heidelberg digitization management system DWork together with its metadata in a uniform presentation mode and using newly developed digital tools. This allows researchers a flexible synoptic presentation of different text versions with a wealth of additional information. The portal not only provides a textual basis for further investigations. "There is hardly any other Middle High German work for which such a wealth of visual material has survived, which can be comparatively explored from an art-historical perspective via the portal", explains Professor Dicke.

However, the actual aim of the research team is not only to provide a virtual library of Bonerius’s work, but also to create a new digital edition of the "gemstone" on this basis. To this end, the project is currently seeking funding from the German Research Foundation. This edition – as well as the entire portal – will also be freely accessible.