Treasure quest: Researchers embark on a pre-modern manuscript mission

Thousands of stories have been written about the impact of COVID-19. One overlooked group is historians in Australia whose research efforts have been stymied by travel restrictions.

Medieval scholar Guy Geltner’s solution is to search for any “pre-modern” manuscripts that may be lurking in private collections in Victoria.

In his words, his goal is to “reach out to diverse communities, organisations and individuals who may be in possession of liturgical, literary, personal or other rare texts, and learn more about the stories of their legacy and heritage, how they got here from East Asia to Europe and the Americas, and, of course, how they can illuminate the past and present of such cultures”.

The call for hidden treasure “is coming hard on the heels of our enclosure here, where a lot of people just can’t go to do archival or manuscript work in libraries around the world,” he says. “It’s a great opportunity to learn about the wealth of cultural heritage that people brought with them, or gathered here.”

A “pre-modern” manuscript is a “text from an era where print was not yet a dominant, cheap and accessible medium”, he explains. “We’re cutting off our search at around 1600.”

Hidden treasures

Victoria houses hundreds of such manuscripts that are known to researchers, Professor Geltner says. They “were brought by European settlers, and later by passionate and wealthy collectors who purchased them on the market, and then maybe donated them to libraries and so on”.

But less is known about items that may be held by communities from elsewhere around the world communities.

They might be “manuscripts that are in the hands of people that have preserved them as family heirlooms, or in very private collections”, he says. “They don’t have to be very expensive items, but things that have travelled with them or were purchased at some point, and not only from Europe.”

Monash has awarded four researchers, a project coordinator and a database manager $112,000 to identify manuscripts in Greek, Arabic, Latin and Hebrew over the next six months. They hope to make contact with members of the Greek Orthodox, Islamic and Jewish communities in Melbourne and regional Victoria.

They’ll also reach out to organisations “that are sometimes below our radar as scholars, like schools or madrassas, or Jesuit colleges, convents, monasteries and synagogues that may have some interesting collections”, he says. “We’ll offer them an opportunity for experts to look at what they have, not from a financial perspective, but from a scholarly perspective.”

Aim to create a digital archive

Professor Geltner and his team hope to digitise any interesting items “without compromising their quality” (or revealing where the manuscript is held, if anonymity is requested). A longer-term ambition is to expand the research – funding permitting – to create a searchable national digital archive.

Two of the researchers working on the project have already been asked to evaluate items held by families curious to know more about them.

“That’s one of the exciting things,” he says. “Sometimes people actually don’t know what they have and what its cultural value may be.”

“Sometimes people actually don’t know what they have and what its cultural value may be.”

For example, they might have “a copy of the Koran, or a Passover Haggadah, or a marriage licence, that they think is super-typical. And maybe that is the case, but maybe it’s not.”

Or it might be a framed item that includes text, and that its owners don’t think of as a manuscript.

“Some people inherit stuff and don’t think about it too much,” he says. “Maybe it’s in a cupboard somewhere. Life goes on. You don’t necessarily bother interrogating your assumptions about a particular artefact.”

Casting the manuscripts net wider

The researchers also hope to prepare a fuller inventory of the pre-modern manuscripts held in public institutions such as Melbourne and Monash universities, the National Gallery of Victoria, and the State Library.

“We know mostly what’s there, but maybe we can improve that a little bit,” he says.

The search for manuscripts created in the centuries before Captain Cook sailed into Botany Bay in April 1770 coincides with “wonderful scholarship being done now about commercial and cultural relations between this part of the world and others”, before Endeavour’s voyage, he says.

That includes research by Professor Lynette Russell, who’s received a $2.94 million Australian Research Council Laureate Fellowship to explore the relationships forged between Indigenous Australians and outsider cultures in the millennium before Cook’s visit to the east coast.