The aim of the visit, which was financially supported by HMML’s Hickman Stipend and the Peshitta Institute, was to expand an already existing database built for the Linking Syriac Liturgies-project, funded by DANS (Data Archiving and Networked Services). In the period of my visit (March/ April 2023) the staff of HMML proved to be gracious hosts in allowing me to study digitized Syriac manuscripts on site and to use its archives and library. Among the manuscripts available, are thousands of Syriac manuscripts ranging from illustrated Evangelaries, to philosophical treatises, from dictionaries to -for instance- translations of De imitatio Christi of my fellow townsman Thomas à Kempis. Lots of these imaged manuscripts are visible in superb quality in the “reading room” of the virtual Hill Manuscript Museum and Library ( vHMML). By now a huge repository of more than 300,000 imaged manuscripts is created, these manuscripts are available to study in one of the study rooms of the library. During the years this endeavour extended to manuscripts from as diverse places as Ethiopia, Indonesia, or Mali (Timbuktu). From 1964 onwards the Benedictine monks decided to preserve “at-risk manuscripts,” and they started with photographing manuscripts from Austrian monasteries. HMML is situated in the Alcuin Library of St John’s University, a Roman Catholic liberal arts college of which the campus is on the site of the Benedictine Abbey of St John in Collegeville. But to an enthusiast of manuscripts, the Hill Manuscript Museum and Library (HMML) in Collegeville Minnesota has to be reason enough to visit this state (even though last winter was one of the snowiest ever recorded – it ranked second all-time in nearby St. It happened often in conversations in the more southern parts of the United States of America, that a conversation partner asked me something like “Why on earth you want to visit one of the coldest parts of mainland USA?”, when I mentioned that I had spent time in the northern state of Minnesota, and that I fully enjoyed it.
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