For my PhD thesis, I worked on the Hebraist library of Johann Albrecht Widmanstetter (1506–1557). He was a humanist and privy councillor to popes and kings whose views were little understood since he published comparatively little. My study leverages Widmanstetter’s remarkable collection consisting of hundreds of Jewish manuscripts and printed books, most of which survive to this day in Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München.
For my study, I combined several perspectives like history of the book, art history, and Kabbalah. I devoted much of my time to the history of Jewish book production and collecting in sixteenth-century Europe through Widmanstetter’s book acquisitions, librarianship, and correspondence. As an aid to my work, I compiled my own catalog of his library to analyze patterns of his book collecting vis-à -vis his contemporaries.
I also delved into his unique perspective on Jewish literature and Kabbalah as the latter half of the study contextualizes the marginal notes in his library with his published works. Widmanstetter developed highly original views on the origin of Islam from kabbalistic sources which can be traced in his marginal notes. He was also a prolific collector and creator of kabbalistic diagrams, which he also applied to his editio princeps of the Syriac New Testament.
