Inventorying “pre-modern” manuscripts in victorian public and private collections: Expanding the cultural archive

Aided by advances in the digital humanities, efforts have multiplied over the past decades to map cultural heritage and to inventory the manuscript sources for historical and cultural research that are scattered through collections around the world. Within Australia there have been several projects addressing early printed books, art objects and manuscripts, some of which will be detailed below. The small pilot project we are reporting on here- Inventorying "Pre-modern" Manuscripts in Victorian Public and Private Collections (IMVC)-has been an attempt to continue this work, focusing on manuscript material within the geographic limits of the Australian state of Victoria. While most work to date has been concerned with Western European material in institutional holdings, whether in Latin or pre-modern vernaculars, this project also looked to the substantial communities of Mediterranean origin that have taken root in Victoria since the widening of migration catchments in the 1960s, whose cultural heritage includes texts written in Greek, Hebrew and Arabic, and in other languages that use those writing systems. These cultural groups are much less represented in public collections, and a chief focus of the project was to identify and engage with private owners of manuscripts in these communities.