Mittelalterliche Bibliotheken und (digitale) Wissensordnung – Zur Aktualität einer alten Forschungsfrage

The transformation of knowledge and research in the humanities into the digital space is already well advanced in everyday work. With this transformation, which is taking place as a revolutionary technical revolution, at the same time a new digital knowledge order is developing successively. Culturally, our systems of the ordering of knowledge go back many centuries, far into the Middle Ages and Antiquity. The ordering is fundamental, because only order turns knowledge into knowledge by separating what is worth knowing from what is not. Knowledge orderings are always hierarchizing, which is why they continuously and intensively have been challenged in all times. The ordering of knowledge has to change with new educational systems, new social groups, and just as it changes with newly opened fields of knowledge or new demands within society. This article deals with methodological approaches in reassessing pre-modern religious institutions and book collections as specific knowledge spaces, in order to reflect the long term dynamics and the fundamental differences between the analog and the digital knowledge environment.