Bringing Missing Links Together

How Fragmentology and Digital Humanities Can Restore Catalonia’s Disturbed Cultural Memory

Abstract

This essay opens up a panorama for the systematic exploration of the numerous manuscript fragments of medieval Catalonia. To this end, the current state of research and its structural shortcomings are first described. The development and use of the novel text and manuscript database Carolingian Catalonia (CarCat) now make it possible, for the first time, to compensate these shortcomings through the consistent electronic cataloguing of manuscripts and fragments not yet recorded by regional, national, and international research. This new technical setting of Catalan manuscript research enables numerous multidisciplinary research perspectives for the reconstruction of the medieval scriptoria and libraries, and ultimately, of the disturbed cultural memory of medieval Catalonia. The essay concludes with an initial orienting overview of the scope and profile of Catalonia’s medieval fragments, using the particularly extensive and complex collection of the Cathedral and Diocese of Vic as a representative showcase.