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Binding It All Together – A Review of the 2025 Summer School in Digital Palaeography

Written by Phillip Landgrebe, PhD candidate at the University of Kassel.

From 10 to 22 August, the Summer School in Digital Palaeography took place at the University of Göttingen, bringing together postgraduate students from across the globe. The programme combined introductions to Latin book scripts, codicology, and manuscript description with the teaching of digital methods, tools, and approaches relevant to the study of medieval manuscripts. Some sessions were held in the Historical Building of the SUB Göttingen, where participants could work directly with manuscripts and gain insights into the application of multispectral imaging and digital microscopy.

 

Learning about multispectral imaging (Photo: Anastasia Zhiling Dong)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Summer School thus fills an important gap. Traditional courses in palaeography or codicology typically devote little attention to digital components, while digital humanities workshops often do not adequately cover the essential knowledge of the auxiliary sciences of history. The concept developed by Dr. Anna Dorofeeva and her team addresses this challenge effectively, as evidenced by the large number of applications for the sixteen available places.

The participants of the Summer School with Dr. Anna Dorofeeva and Anastasia Zhiling Dong (Photo: Yiyang Huang)

 

The sessions were characterised by the instructors’ high level of engagement, who encouraged participants to experiment and interact thoroughly with the material. Complex topics, such as working with TEI-XML or understanding an IIIF manifest, were presented in a clearly structured way with numerous practical recommendations. The programme repeatedly offered revealing insights, for example, into how the measurement of pixel scales in manuscript images can aid in the identification of forgeries. Additionally, the hands-on creation of different types of bookbindings proved both instructive and enjoyable.

The summer course was particularly productive when theoretical input was combined with independent work on the materials. For instance, after an introduction to fragmentology, participants catalogued Göttingen fragment holdings using Fragmentarium. A later excursion to the Herzog August Library in Wolfenbüttel built upon this work, enabling participants to analyse previously unstudied fragments in manuscript bindings and document them in Fragmentarium again.

Examination of manuscript fragments in the Herzog August Library reading room (Photo: Marie Ellen Smith)

 

I would like to express my gratitude to the entire Göttingen team for the excellent organisation and the conducive working environment during the Summer School, which, both within and beyond the sessions, was marked by great helpfulness and warmth, providing all participants with an extraordinarily enriching experience.

zhilingdong
zhilingdong

OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
zhilingdong (September 15, 2025). Binding It All Together – A Review of the 2025 Summer School in Digital Palaeography. Digital Palaeography. Retrieved June 13, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/14nz5


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