Take Me and Make It Happen! How-to-Books from the Ferguson Collection and Corresponding Holdings at the Herzog August Library Wolfenbüttel

• Applicant: Privatdozent Dr. Stefan Laube
• Subject Area: Early Modern History ; General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies ; Theatre and Media Studies ; History of Science
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 528032894

How to questions keep society going, allowing us to refine civilisation. Until the recent age of social media, printed guides, instructions and recipe compilations were the media of knowledge transfer that prevailed. The label 'Age of How to' has been given by scholars to the 16th century, when not only ephemeral printed products but also hardbound voluminous books with practical advice flooded the market. In this project, concrete-pragmatic knowledge as it found expression in How to formulas, is treated from a comparative, diachronic and cross-disciplinary perspective. The basis is a concrete selection of materials from the University of Glasgow Library (UoGL) and the Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel (HAB): notably treatises from the early modern period on distillation, medicine, dyeing, cosmetics, glassmaking, ceramics, metallurgy and much more quench our curiosity. A 'histoire totale' of practical knowledge can be gleaned from their pages, but these sources need to be contextualised typologically and examined with the help of innovative methods from the fields of cultural studies and digital humanities. A cooperative constellation between the HAB and the UoGL creates the conditions conducive to this goal. The HAB, with its holdings that have grown over centuries and which, as a princely collection, has tended to neglect ephemeral book formats, meets the UoGL, whose magnificent Ferguson Collection has always paid attention to even the most inconspicuous book. While the HAB has been pioneering (since the 1990s) in successively digitising its historical holdings and making them accessible, even in 2023 the Ferguson Collection remains largely absent from the scholarly digital universe. This cooperation project has set itself the goal of (partially) remedying this omission. The benefits are therefore twofold: two complementary national academic cultures meet so as to bring together both indexing and applied research. The project has three cultural studies foci at its core - 'Issues of Practicability', 'Intermediality between Text and Image' and 'Materiality and Traces of Use' - through which questions about the main features of How-to books unfold. The project‘s scaffolding stands on the foundation of indexing with its three approaches: 'Corpus Building', 'In-depth Indexing' and 'Digitization'. A bespoke multilingual digital indexing tool will be developed for the How to book genre with its instruction manuals and recipes. Many of these books are completely inadequately indexed and therefore hardly identifiable. Since research and cataloguing take place simultaneously in this project, mutual and ongoing insights and perspectives are to be expected. Overall, in Glasgow-Wolfenbüttel collaboration, we aim to gain new insights into the early modern codification, dissemination, and application of practical knowledge through a combination of systematic analysis and indexing.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Netherlands, United Kingdom
• Partner Organisation: Arts and Humanities Research Council
• Co-Investigator: Dr. Hartmut Beyer
• Cooperation Partners: Professor Laurence Grove, Ph.D.; Dr. Andrea van Leerdam