Handwritten Arithmetic Treatises in German (1400-1550). A First Assessment of the Sources Based on the Exemplary Corpus Held by the Austrian National Library

The ERC Starting Grant project ARITHMETIC focuses on editing, describing, and analyzing handwritten arithmetic treatises in German from the 15th and 16th centuries. This paper is the result of a first preliminary study on the material that was conducted at the Austrian National Library, where an exemplary corpus of seven manuscripts was analyzed in detail. The results of this short study on a selective but representative corpus will serve as a basis for the upcoming work on the almost 140 manuscripts that form the complete research corpus of the ERC project. This article focuses on two main aspects in detail: On the one hand, the methodological approaches concerning the description of the manuscripts and the transcription of the arithmetic texts will be reviewed. In addition, the transcription software Transkribus, which serves as a support tool for the project, is used to generate a suitable model for handwritten text recognition (HTR) that will be used on large parts of the corpus. On the other hand, first hypotheses on the material will be tested and result in short analyses of the sources concerning questions on the process of translation from Latin to German, the relevance of the context handed down with arithmetic texts in miscellanies, the dichotomy of theoretical texts and practical teachings, and the importance of mnemotechnical tools in pragmatic texts of the Late Middle Ages.