The History of the Project

In 1977 Menso Folkerts began a project at the University of Oldenburg, supported by a grant from the Volkswagen Foundation, with the title "Materials for the history of Western European Mathematics in the Middle Ages and Renaissance." The Foundation financed this project for about six years, up to 1980 in Oldenburg, and then in Munich. The objective was to gather in a single place descriptions - and, if possible, copies - of all mathematical texts written in Western European languages (Latin and vernacular) between 500 and 1500. For practical reasons the word "mathematics" was used at that time in a relatively strict sense that excluded all texts which, according to modern criteria, belong to astronomy, physics, philosophy or other disciplines. Also excluded were texts written in Greek, Arabic or Hebrew.

The main source for locating these texts were the manuscript catalogues of the different libraries and collections. Everyone working with manuscript sources knows about the difficulties stemming from inadequate printed catalogues, in particular those of the most important manuscript collections. To solve this problem at least partially, Folkerts visited more than a hundred libraries and checked the hand- or typewritten inventories. In total, more than 1300 books, articles, pamphlets and card indexes were consulted, describing about half a million manuscripts, about 150,000 of which are from the Middle Ages. Altogether 2300 of those contain "mathematical" texts in the restricted meaning of the word; some of them contain up to 30 works, while others have only short mathematical notes. Additional information was obtained partly from articles and books in history of science - especially from periodicals such as Zeitschrift für Mathematik und Physik, Abhandlungen zur Geschichte der Mathematik, Bibliotheca Mathematica, Bullettino Boncompagni, Isis, Osiris - and partly by using unpublished catalogues of historians of science describing sources all over the world (A. A. Björnbo, D. W. Singer, M. Clagett) or special collections (M. S. Mahoney: Munich, B. Hughes: Basel). In general, information from these sources is more reliable than that from the library catalogues, because they are from distinguished historians of science familiar with the contents of the manuscripts.

At the same time as descriptions of manuscripts were collected, copies of these manuscripts were acquired, thus building an archive of mathematical texts in mediaeval Western manuscripts. Most libraries generously provided the project with microfilms or paper copies. The general intention was to order microfilms of the complete manuscript, and accordingly copies not only of mathematical, but also of astronomical and other scientific texts are available in the archive. The collection was enlarged by microfilms given by the historians of science Busard, Kunitzsch and Hughes, and there are also about 100 copies of Arabic mathematical codices. At present the archive is part of the Institute for History of Science at the University of Munich. It has copies of more than 5000 manuscripts and is an important source for historians of the mathematical sciences of the Middle Ages. In the future, it will be possible to check and, if necessary, correct the information given by the manuscript catalogues.

When the grant from the Volkswagen Foundation came to an end, Menso Folkerts obtained another grant from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (1985-1989) for establishing a database of mathematical and scientific texts in mediaeval Western manuscripts at the Institute for the History of Science in Munich. At this time, work for compiling a database with the name International Computer Catalogue of Mediaeval Scientific Manuscripts (ICCMSM) which was recently renamed JORDANUS began; it was directed in the first years by Warren Van Egmond and later by Andreas Kühne.

The collection of microfilms and paper copies was gradually expanded to about 5000 reproductions, and the cataloguing of the sources has been extended in order to include all mediaeval mathematical manuscripts and many related texts as well. Information from different sources was compared and verified as far as possible. The project also collaborated with the Benjamin Data Bank of Mediaeval Scientific Manuscripts , run by N. Hahn in Dunellen, New Jersey.