Getting started on the Janauschek Portal
This wiki is designed to make the work of Leopold Janauschek publicly accessible and invite and allow scholars to contribute to the understanding of Cistercian history and geography.
Published in 1877, Leopold Janauschek’s Originum Cisterciensium Liber Primus (Vienna) remains the most important work on the geographical spread of the Cistercian order during its 900 year history. Januaschek’s work is described by the Catholic Encyclopedia as a seminal work “in which he describes the foundation of the Order of Cîteaux, its organization and extension, and mentions many of those who, under various titles, had honoured it. He gives a lengthy account of 742 ancient abbeys of monks, founded between the end of the eleventh and the end of the seventeenth centuries. Each of the genealogical and chronological tables, as well as the entire work itself, supposes colossal labour of research and compilation. He was unable to publish the second volume, which was to have been devoted to the monasteries of Cistercian nuns, and for which he had collected a great deal of material; but it will be utilized by the continuator of his work.” In addition to this subsequent volume on houses for women, Janauschek uncovered additional foundations for men in his ongoing archival research.
At the annual Cistercian Studies Conference at Western Michigan University in May 2013, the community of scholars learned that Janauschek’s original notes were digitized for Cistopedia by Stift Zwettl (Austria) where the original notes are held. Cornelia Oefelin (Verein zur Gründung und Förderung der ‘Europäischen Akademie für Cisterciensurforschung’ im ehemaligen Kloster Lehnin, had been asked to lead an effort to transcribe and contextualize the 14,000 notecards in the monastic archive to make the materials available to an audience which cannot read the Suetterlin handwriting of the original notes and enlisted the Center for Cistercian and Monastic Studies as a partner and organizer of this effort. Scholarly contributors are invited to help transcribe Janauschek's original notes and add scholarly information about the places he identified.
In 2016, WMU signed a memorandum of understanding with the Transkribus project at the University of Innsbruck in Austria (https://transkribus.eu/Transkribus/). Transkribus is an open research infrastructure funded by the European Union to support humanities research. The open and freely accessible platform includes methods and tools for transcribing, recognizing, searching and extracting information from historical documents. Users can also request dedicated services where the Transkribus team acts as "service providers." Essentially, Transkribus is a project which can be “taught” to read handwriting and transcribe it, and because it is a grant-funded project, the project leaders enthused to collaborate on the Janauschek project under their current funding from the EU.
Those interested in participating should contact the organizers via email at <mdvl_ccms@wmich.edu> to be issued a login.
