Periodic Reporting for period 1 - VAN MANEN (Locating Literature, Lived Religion, and Lives in the Himalayas: The Van Manen Collection)
Période du rapport: 2023-08-01 au 2026-01-31
This five-year project (2023-2028), entitled The Van Manen Collection: Locating Literature, Lived Religion, and Lives in the Himalayas (acronym: VAN MANEN), has been made possible with an ERC Starting Grant. It aims to (digitally) reunite all parts of the Van Manen Collection. This enables us to study it as a whole, helping us to understand the process of collection formation. More importantly, perhaps, it will also shed light on printing culture, knowledge dissemination, and religious and ritual practices in Central Tibet and the Eastern Himalayas in the first half of the 20th century.
The Van Manen collection is a collection held in the Leiden University Library that contains a large number of Tibetan and Himalayan texts. These started arriving in Leiden in the 1920s and 1930s, when the texts were sent from India, along with Sanskrit and other Indic materials, by Johan Van Manen (1877-1943). Van Manen also collected artefacts, and these are housed in the Wereldmuseum in Leiden.
The Van Manen collection as a whole consists of nearly 1000 blockprints, over 600 manuscripts, around 450 artworks and objects of use. It also contains mostly uncatalogued notebooks, pictures, maps, letters, drafts of articles, drawings, scraps of paper, a personal archive and a variety of ephemera. This ERC-funded project aims to organize and bring together all these different aspects of the collection, facilitating the study of the collecting activity of Van Manen as an integrated process.
Some of the project’s key objectives are:
1) To extensively catalogue and study the mostly unstudied, unique, and rare manuscripts in the collection
2) To gain an understanding of the “collection formation” process beyond the colonial narrative
3) To learn how to “read,” and engage with, a multi-media collection curated by a single collector
4) To contribute to the analysis and methodology of multi-media collections of non-Western literature and material culture
The Van Manen collection is a collection held in the Leiden University Library that contains a large number of Tibetan and Himalayan texts. These started arriving in Leiden in the 1920s and 1930s, when the texts were sent from India, along with Sanskrit and other Indic materials, by Johan Van Manen (1877-1943). Van Manen also collected artefacts, and these are housed in the Wereldmuseum in Leiden.
The Van Manen collection as a whole consists of nearly 1000 blockprints, over 600 manuscripts, around 450 artworks and objects of use. It also contains mostly uncatalogued notebooks, pictures, maps, letters, drafts of articles, drawings, scraps of paper, a personal archive and a variety of ephemera. This ERC-funded project aims to organize and bring together all these different aspects of the collection, facilitating the study of the collecting activity of Van Manen as an integrated process.
Some of the project’s key objectives are:
1) To extensively catalogue and study the mostly unstudied, unique, and rare manuscripts in the collection
2) To gain an understanding of the “collection formation” process beyond the colonial narrative
3) To learn how to “read,” and engage with, a multi-media collection curated by a single collector
4) To contribute to the analysis and methodology of multi-media collections of non-Western literature and material culture
All work packages are well on track. No technological achievements have been made so far, since we expect the integrated database to be finished toward the end of the project.
Nils Martin (PD) has fully digititzed and analyzed all scroll paintings in the collection and has been able to establish, where possible, their provenance and acquisition history (WP4).
Samten Yeshi (PhD) has selected a number of rare ritual texts from the collection, which all have to do with death or dying, to write his dissertation on. His first peer-reviewed article is currently about to go to press (WP1).
Tenzin Tsepak (PD) is in the process of finishing his first annotated translation of the largest of the autobiographies. He has written two articles that deal with these autobiographies, which are forthcoming. He is working with the Tibetan language editor to create a digital (and in the end, published in print) Tibetan language version of the autobiographies. The first one of the set is due to be published in 2026 (WP3).
Nils Martin (PD) has fully digititzed and analyzed all scroll paintings in the collection and has been able to establish, where possible, their provenance and acquisition history (WP4).
Samten Yeshi (PhD) has selected a number of rare ritual texts from the collection, which all have to do with death or dying, to write his dissertation on. His first peer-reviewed article is currently about to go to press (WP1).
Tenzin Tsepak (PD) is in the process of finishing his first annotated translation of the largest of the autobiographies. He has written two articles that deal with these autobiographies, which are forthcoming. He is working with the Tibetan language editor to create a digital (and in the end, published in print) Tibetan language version of the autobiographies. The first one of the set is due to be published in 2026 (WP3).
The team has been working closely with Leiden University library and the Wereldmuseum, two institutions that combined house a large part of the van Manen collection. Through these cooperations the team has been able to locate a number of previously unknown works that originally belonged to the Van Manen Collection. The team has been successful in tracing a variety of texts and objects that can be connected to Van Manen in different places around the globe, including, but not limited to London and Calcutta. Most notably, during archival research at the Wereldmuseum in Leiden, the PI discovered a set of documents that belie an early dictionary prototype, which was used to produce the earliest Tibetan-English dictionary ever published (1828). It is, as of yet, unclear how this work connects with the Van Manen Collection's materials. This find is truly significant, but meant some time had to be allocated to study this manuscript and disseminate the findings in two different presentations. The manuscript was part of a larger cache of dictionary materials, located in India. As of now, since working on these materials – a large amount of data – was not scheduled, there has been no time allotted to studying them in any detail.