de Molière, Maximilian

In 2021, I completed my dissertation on the library of the 15th-century Christian Hebraist Johann Albrecht Widmanstetter. The goal of this project was to contribute to the history of the Jewish book in the hands of Christian Hebraists. This investigation involved describing and cataloguing the codicological and paleographical features of Widmanstetter’s entire library (195 volumes of manuscripts and printed books) and feeding this information into a TEI-XML database to serve as the basis for analysis. Using this large dataset, I was able to reconstruct the chronology of his acquisitions, the booksellers from whom he sourced new printed books, and how Widmanstetter maintained his library over three decades of his life. Moreover, I was interested in the notes he left in the margins of his books. These marginalia throw new light on why he assessed the relevance of kabbalistic texts to Christianity differently than contemporary Christian kabbalists like Guillaume Postel or Egidio da Viterbo.

Since 2018, I have also been working on a DFG-funded project on R. Moses Zacuto at the universities of Halle-Wittenberg and Beer Sheva, which has sparked my interest in Early Modern Jewish correspondence. In my research on Zacuto’s letters, I focus on multiple aspects. First and foremost, I am creating a new edition of this corpus of letters, including many letters that are still unknown. This edition will be published both as a printed book with an apparatus and on a web platform that will present different versions of the letters in a synoptical view. Related to the edition is my research on the history of transmission among Zacuto’s disciples. Other topics concern the materiality of this medium, the social function of letter writing for Zacuto, and his transmission of magical knowledge through his missives.

For the ERC-funded research project “MAJLIS: The Transformation of Jewish Literature in Arabic in the Islamicate World” at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU), Munich, I draw on my previous experience with codicological and paleographical methods of analysis and digital humanities methods. Among other roles, I am part of a team developing a platform that will allow our researchers to enter, store, and present codicological and paleographical data on the internet. Part of my time is devoted to investigating the history of the Hebraist library of the 19th-century biblical scholar Konstantin von Tischendorf, which partly belongs to the corpus of the MAJLIS project.

Areas of Interest

book history, epistolography, digital humanities, Kabbalah, Christian Hebraism

Historical Periods of Interest

10th through 18th centuries

Positions

Education