Until recently, it was virtually impossible to review the written cultural heritage of important regions of Europe, to evaluate it scientifically, and to structure and visualize it in its historical dimension and dynamics within a reasonable time frame. The worldwide advance in digitization of manuscripts and all research literature now not only gives us the opportunity to quickly access an almost unmanageable amount of new visual and content data, but also allows us to process this in databases in such a way that entire medieval manuscript landscapes can be reconstructed. This opportunity, which has so far been little explored, represents a major challenge in the case of the highly disturbed and fragmented landscape of medieval libraries in Catalonia and is being tackled for the first time with the text and manuscript database Carolingian Catalonia (CarCat).

Matthias M. Tischler, born 1968 in Münchberg (Germany), studied Medieval and Modern History, Applied Historical Sciences, Latin and Romance Philology, Philosophy, Theology and Islamic Studies at Heidelberg, Munich and Frankfurt. He obtained his PhD in Heidelberg (1998). He was an Assistant Professor at Frankfurt (2001–2009). After his habilitation at Dresden (2008/2009), he was Associate Professor (2009/2012), Senior Research Fellow at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) (2013/2014) and Research Group Leader at the IMAFO (ÖAW) in Vienna (2015/2016). He was a Visiting Professor of the ÉPHÉ in Paris (2015) and a Senior Research Fellow at the Medieval Institute of Notre Dame, USA (2016), the IAS, Princeton, USA (2019), the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, Germany (2020) and Tübingen University (2024/2025). In 2016 he accepted a position at ICREA at the Department of Ancient and Medieval Studies of the UAB, which he has held since January 1, 2017. Since 2020 he is member of the Academia Europaea.

Research interests: My studies are raising the question about the geographical, linguistic, religious, cultural and mental borders of the multi-layered legacy in the centres and peripheries of the Medieval Worlds. In the last two decades, I have broadened my panorama to reconstruct European religious and intellectual identities by conducting extensive research on texts of Christian-Muslim encounters and perceptions in Europe, specializing on early Christian polemics against Islam, the linguistic and religious borders between Christians, Jews and Muslims, processes of religious and cultural passages, entanglement and dis/integration among the members of the three monotheisms in the Carolingian and Iberian Worlds.