Inventories as Keys to Exploring Castles as Cultural Heritage

1.1 Inventories as Historical Sources – State of Research

Inventories are doubtless a paradigmatic type of source for investigating objects. While early forms of inventorying can be traced back to the Ancient Near East and through the entire Middle Ages, inventories in greater numbers are only known from the fourteenth century onwards, with a considerable increase from the second half of the fifteenth century and a further peak from the sixteenth century (Antenhofer, 2021b). It remains unclear, however, if the holdings handed down to us reflect the real creation of inventories in the Middle Ages or rather the start of systematic archiving of inventories from the fourteenth century onwards (Antenhofer, 2022, pp. 887–913). Like other documents of the so-called Pragmatische Schriftlichkeit (pragmatic writing), i.e. administrative and economic writing, inventories were less likely to be handed down, as they were usually destroyed once they were no longer relevant. Similar to invoices, inventories are some of the most ephemeral types of sources with a bad chance of survival (Esch, 1985, pp. 529–570; Mersiowsky, 2000). If one examines inventories in combination with other sources, such as testaments or marriage contracts, it turns out that many more inventories were created than still exist today (see, for the Habsburgs, Lhotsky, 1941–1945).

Traditional introductions into the study of medieval sources neglect inventories or subsume them under administrative writings (briefly, in Lhotsky, 1963, pp. 96–104). Even though interest in inventories was considerable from even the late nineteenth century in older cultural history approaches, there are still hardly any systematic studies on inventories as sources. From the nineteenth century, inventories were mainly sought, explored, and edited with a view to certain social groups or regions and with a focus on the artefacts mentioned before (Ficker, 1881; Zingerle, 1909). Important editions of inventories date from that time often published in regional studies journals of regional or local history. With growing interest in social and economic history issues after the Second World War, inventories became important sources for these new historical approaches. With growing numbers of inventories and the enormous volume of archived items from the Late Middle Ages, they formed ideal sources for the new quantitative studies of economic and social history from the 1980s onwards (Van der Woude & Schuurman, 1980).

Newer approaches in the new cultural history and the history of consumption have led to increasing work on inventories in recent years (Fey, 2007; Friedhoff, 2006; Seelig, 2001; Rossetti, 2012). Some leading publications came about from the ongoing interest in inventories as sources of law (Löffler, 1977) and of castle research (Andermann, 1987; Ehmer, 1998; Herrmann, 1998). Vital impulses stem from studies in the context of the so-called pragmatic writing (Dartmann et al., 2011; Keller et al., 1992; Meier et al., 2002), work on treasures and courts (Fey, 2013; Stratford, 2012; Vavra et al., 2007; Wilson, 2018), and work on households and household goods (Ajmar-Wollheim et al., 2006; Kowaleski & Goldberg, 2008; Woolgar, 2018). Probate inventories have long been used as sources for reconstructing past rooms and living conditions, for example, in the Documentary Archaeology of Late Medieval Europe project (https://dalme.org/), also with regard to non-elite households (Briggs et al., 2019). Recent research has highlighted the quality of room-to-room inventories as performance (Wilson, 2021) or narrative (Hinds, 2021). Current studies take into account that inventories, like other texts, do not present an objective view of historical facts (Riello, 2013), rather they need to be read as narratives with a fictional character and a discursive function of their own (Jaritz, 2009; Orlin, 2002). Art historians have been among the first to ask for new methodological approaches to inventories as source types (Freddolini & Helmreich, 2014; Keating & Markey, 2011; Normore, 2011). New editions (Checa Cremades, 2010; Stapleford, 2013) and specific studies on individual types of inventories (Ertl & Karl, 2017; Hermand et al., 2012) contribute to a dynamic current research situation, as do innovative approaches from the Digital Humanities (raumordnungen.imareal.sbg.ac.at). They reflect the growing interest in this type of source in connection with the so-called material turn (Garloff & Krentz, 2022), i.e. the focus on objects and material foundations in a broad sense. Gaps in object records in small archaeological finds, as well as in administrative and literary texts, can be partially compensated for by the multi-perspective approach (Klug et al., 2010). In addition, the increased attention on inventories can also be seen in connection with the ongoing current interest in the history and orders of knowledge, as well as the history of collections (Adamowsky et al., 2011; Antenhofer, 2022; Garloff & Krentz, 2022).

Inventories could take on different forms, from mere lists recording single items in often very ephemeral situations, to systematic inventories with legal character linked to specific events, particularly post-mortem inventories, to whole catalogues, reflecting scientific interests in ordering and systematising various items (Antenhofer, 2020; Freddolini & Helmreich, 2014). In fact, there is no clear definition of what an inventory is and different types of sources can be subsumed under this notion, as becomes evident when we look at how it is used in the literature on the topic and also in the sources (Barbot, 2011). Literally, inventory means “Gesamtheit des Gefundenen” (an ensemble of what has been found) (Kluge, 1999, p. 405). In a very specific sense, inventory can be regarded as a legal term. It then means that the inventory is the description of things that have been found among the belongings after someone’s death (http://ducange.enc.sorbonne.fr/INVENTARIUM1). However, in practical use, as found in historical sources and respective terminologies, the term is applied in a far broader sense (Antenhofer, 2021b).

1.2 Tyrolean Castle Inventories as a Corpus of Sources

In this project, we use castle inventories as the source corpus for exploring the semantic worlds mapped by late medieval inventories. In the area of historical Tyrol (today’s North and East Tyrol, Austria, plus South Tyrol/Alto Adige, and Trentino, Italy), these have been better kept and from earlier times than in other regions and today are held in the TLA (TLA Innsbruck; holdings Inventare). Castle inventories are part of the space-related inventories (Ehmer, 1998; Herrmann, 1998; Riello, 2013). This means that their creators usually went room by room, capturing the objects contained therein. The central research question thus searches for the historical room structures of the castles, which can be deduced from the inventories, and how they relate to the objects in the rooms. Even though inventories are just snapshots, they provide important information on the relations between the listed objects. Combined with the terms for the rooms, they allow investigations into gender-specific use of objects and rooms, into the positioning of objects in a room, and into the lifecycle of objects (for instance, if an object is temporarily moved elsewhere). In this way, we create an image of castles as social spaces. Ideally, room-to-room inventories also map a path through the building, followed during inventorying in situ. This helps to reconstruct access to the rooms (Handzel & Kühtreiber, 2015; Matschinegg, 2019; Schmid, 2020). Inventories were usually created on the occasion of a change in the administration or ownership, which means that some castles have been inventoried several times so that we can observe changes over time.

While general holdings of inventories for the fifteenth century are scarce, as stated above, there is a substantial corpus of 237 archived inventories from between the years 1320 and 1600 for the historical area of Tyrol (Figure 1). In international research, these inventories are mostly just known because of the edition presented by Oswald von Zingerle in 1909 on the medieval inventories from Tyrol and Vorarlberg (Zingerle, 1909). Zingerle, however, concentrated on the fifteenth century and worked on just 82 inventories, including those of castles, but also from bequests, movables, and other sources, such as various offices, hospices, and churches (Zingerle, 1909, p. VIII). He limited his efforts to printing the text, without any information on the form of the archive records. In the present project, Zingerle’s edition serves as a starting point and basis for comparisons. We check the accuracy and completeness of his transcriptions and investigate which castle inventories he included and which he did not. The list of terms and objects that Zingerle included in the attachment to his edition (Zingerle, 1909, pp. 241–392) holds special relevance for the analysis of the objects captured in the inventories and the terms used for them.

Figure 1

Geographical identification of Tyrolean castle inventories by number of inventories per castle (© Inventaria 2023, Milena Peralta Friedburg; Basemap: Europe DEM; Copyright © 2017 European Environmental Agency).

By extending the period of research to the entire early phase of inventorying, from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, we gain further insights into the development of inventorying as a practice, as well as into the functional differentiation and growth of room furnishings in castles during this important transitional period (Handzel, 2011; Pfeiffer & Andermann, 2013, 2018; Schmid et al., 2015) and into castles as social spaces.

2.1 Inventories as Social Practice – Hypotheses and Methods

While inventories up to now had mainly been analysed selectively for specific issues – predominantly to identify exceptional artwork – this project focuses on the inventories themselves, as texts and artefacts. We start from the hypothesis that inventories are products of complex social practices that manifest themselves in the language of the lists as well as in their material presence.

The project analyses the arrangements of objects, rooms, and people and the practices created, reproduced, and changed by these arrangements. Using the capacities of ontological data modelling, we realise representations of the semantic and linguistic information stored in the inventories and visualise the relations between individuals, objects, and rooms.

In addition, one can gain insights into the kinds of objects and the relations and links connected with them, as well as into the places of inventory creation, here the Tyrolean castles of the Late Middle Ages. Our research is oriented on recent praxeological approaches to objects, starting from Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory (Latour, 2007, 2010) and Arjun Appadurai’s work on the social life of things (Appadurai, 2003). The practice-theoretical ideas of Theodore R. Schatzki inform the project in its effort to capture the significance of the relations between people, objects, and rooms mentioned above. In Schatzki’s social ontology, human coexistence and, with it, social phenomena always play out within the interdependence of social practices and material arrangements (Giddens, 1997; Reckwitz, 2012a, b, 2016; Schatzki, 2002, 2005, 2006, 2016a, b, c). The second starting hypothesis assumes that processes of inventory creation inscribe themselves into the lists themselves. Therefore, the material form of the sources deserves the greatest scrutiny.

In room-related inventory processes, the creators, sometimes different people, walked from room to room and produced the lists of inventories quasi on the move. The structure visible in the inventories is thus the result of this in situ inspection. It is this itinerant genesis in walking that explains the complex form of some lists, for instance, several double sheets inserted into each other, created by different individuals during different inspection operations (Molitor, 2008). A close scrutiny of the material form of the archive records thus allows us deductions on these inventorying processes, methodologically indispensable for the source-critical description of the inventories as a genre: they reveal their essential legal and social purpose in additional acts of inspection, combined with acts of viewing and assessment. The Digital Humanities methods applied in this project thus break new ground in the exploration of inventories, analysing them as texts, including all information stored in them, and at the same time map them in their material form (see, in this respect, Antenhofer, 2021a).

The selection of a representative corpus of around 130 castle inventories from the inventory holding of the TLA will provide insights into Tyrolean castles and their inventories. From the analyses of this corpus, we can also draw conclusions for the fundamental exploration of inventories as historical sources in general. Using various software tools, including the transcription software Transkribus (Kahle et al., 2017; Read Coop, 2023b), we apply a model of an ideal processing path, where, in a closed digital research environment, the transcription of the archive records is performed all the way to digital editing. Semantic modelling will be applied for dynamic visualization of the relations between rooms, objects, and people as well as of the act of inventory creation.

A digital platform will present online editions that can be searched for all object categories and other information provided by the inventories. For the ontological modelling, however, we needed to define specific research foci which can be represented in knowledge graphs. To operationalise our research plan, we selected three main questions that we use for the ontological modelling. Since the project focuses primarily on the practice of inventorying, our first focus for Comité international pour la documentation Conceptual Reference Model (CIDOC-CRM) modelling is to reconstruct each inventory as an event. For this purpose, we collect all available information about each inventory as a single document. We are particularly interested in the different structures of the inventories: while some inventories are quite complete, others record only partial stocks of items. Some inventories even have sub-inventories that may have been created by different people, or they may show signs of secondary revisions and subsequent additions. Where possible, we include related documents, such as letters, which sometimes provide further information about the inventorying process. We are aware that inventories always provide perspectives on the castles and their material culture. The ontological modelling allows us to highlight the characteristics of each single inventory including its gaps concerning rooms and objects.

A second focus is on the people involved in the inventorying process. In addition to recording all mentions of individuals in the inventories, we create brief historical profiles of them, collect available historical data, and define their roles in the creation of the inventories. Since some people were involved in different roles in the creation of various inventories, this focus provides valuable insights into the social history of Tyrolean castles and the associated Habsburg court, also concerning prosopographic questions and gender issues. Finally, we pay attention to the internal organisation of each inventory, which in most cases shows a room-to-room structure. Digital processing allows us to reconstruct these sequences and compare them along different inventories, focusing on how inventories produce space as a form of “textual castle” that does not directly correspond to the built castle (Antenhofer, 2025).

2.2 The Semantic World of Inventories

It is essential to acknowledge a fundamental difference between person-related and room-related inventories. The former usually capture the possessions of a person in a list that may be subdivided by type of object (e.g. silver tableware, wine stocks) and are largely unrelated to rooms (Antenhofer, 2019). In contrast, the latter focus on inventorying buildings, room by room. Bequest inventories blur the lines between the two and can sometimes turn into inventories of homesteads (Molitor, 2008).

In an earlier study of person-related inventories of princely movables, mainly bridal trousseaus and bequest inventories of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Antenhofer used inventories to systematically analyse the relationship between persons and objects (Antenhofer, 2022). Her results provide the key categories for the systematic mapping of the historical-semantic aspects of the listed objects in the castle inventories. In the first step, the historical part of the project annotated all semantically relevant information listed with each object. A comprehensive annotation manual has been developed for the project, using a modified form of the annotation categories developed by Antenhofer (2022, pp. 225–228). Annotation identifies objects, items, and entries in the inventories. It covers material aspects such as number, colour, quality, value, size, material, and processing technique; information on iconography and representation, such as heraldry, figurative aspects, inscriptions, and ornaments; social aspects, such as actions, individuals, and person-roles associated with objects and object biographies, as well as social object categories like bequest, gift, or pawn; and, last but not least, spatial information on places, rooms, and origins are of importance (Table 1). These annotations serve to answer the central research questions of historical analysis. They can reveal whether objects listed in the inventories actually relate to particular spaces. For example, do any objects relate to gender, suggesting that a particular room was primarily used by women or men? Furthermore, by linking objects and spaces within databases, we can gain information about the use of objects and their relationship to individuals and/or other objects. This will lead us to insights into castles as social spaces.

This semantic annotation is essential as it allows the rich corpus of inventories to be digitally explored. The second part of the project concerns the language of the inventories as important documents of historical vocabulary. We are capturing the extensive terminology of the objects and their linguistic context and creating a glossary that will clarify historical terms for objects and with them the relation of thing to word. This glossary is also connected to the thesaurus which is built on the basis of the captured historical text corpora of the inventories. The Inventaria thesaurus is based on the vocabulary extracted from the inventories. Concepts from existing thesauri like The Getty Research Institute, Art and Architecture Thesaurus Online (Getty AAT) are used and wider relations also exist with the Back Bone Thesaurus method, developed within the Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities infrastructure (Dariah Crete, 2016). The thesaurus will be implemented in a Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS), a data model of the Semantic Web Interfaces Community for sharing and linking knowledge organization systems, such as thesauri, taxonomies, classification schemes, and keyword systems (W3C, 2009).

For semantic mapping, we use CIDOC-CRM ontology, an International Organisation for Standardisation standard for modelling data in the Digital Humanities (Le Boeuf et al., 2019; Hiebel et al., 2017). This event-centred modelling approach is able to map the activity of creating an inventory and the relations between the inventory entries, the described objects and practices, and the respective rooms (Figure 2).

Figure 2

Semantic representation of the process of inventorying using classes of CIDOC-CRM © Inventaria 2023, Gerald Hiebel.

In the third part of the project, the information extracted from the inventories is linked with selected still-existing castles (Figure 3). The example of the Tyrolean castles is well suited as they are not only exceptionally well documented in written sources (Bünz, 2013), but many also still exist intact or as ruins in which a historical suite of rooms can be identified. The Tiroler Burgenbuch (Trapp et al., 1972–2020) holds the results of basic research on individual castles, mainly from a building, ownership, and art-historical perspective. In addition, the building history and the room inventory of Tirol Castle were presented recently (Hauser & Mittermair, 2017). We connect this information with that from the inventories and make it available via a website (https://www.inventaria.at) to the scientific community as well as to an interested public and in this way shed more light on the cultural heritage of Tyrolean castles. In particular, the project will question the predominantly male perspective on castles and progress towards researching the lived experience and “creating inclusive, gendered interpretations that account for differences in the past … in relation to gender” (Dempsey et al., 2019, p. 10).

Figure 3

Bruck Castle (Lienz) with room structures. External photograph. © Schloss Bruck, photo by Wolfgang Retter, adaptation by Gábor Tarcsay.

3.1 Visualising Knowledge of Objects for the Public

The Digital Humanities and Linguistics part of the project, based at the University of Innsbruck, is dedicated to issues of semantic technologies and linguistic standardization. The FAIR guidelines for research data management (Wilkinson et al., 2016) will be applied to the processing of data generated in the historical part of the project, based at the University of Salzburg. The use of persistent identifiers and the addition of comprehensive mark-ups and metadata guarantee that it will be possible to link these data with a range of tools. This will allow the creation of attractive, easy-to-use operations. The emerging tools and analysis options will appeal to a variety of audiences, for instance:

1. The research community of various subjects/disciplines can use the project findings to develop new insights and/or research questions from the data and create visualizations.

2. Education institutions like schools can create innovative teaching and learning materials for pupils to give them an understanding of the Middle Ages from a new perspective.

3. The wider, interested, “exploring” public can make use of the project findings in a range of spheres (e.g. authors, theatre/film/TV, local cultural associations, organisers of medieval markets, and live action role-playing associations).

To win over the public for the project findings, the digitalised records of the castle inventories described above, plus the related transcriptions, are made available on the online read&search platform Sites (Read Coop, 2023a). This platform is linked to the transcription tool Transkribus (Read Coop, 2023b), used in the project for transcriptions, corrections, and parts of the annotations. The Sites platform allows facetted full-text searches and fuzzy searches as well as displaying the transcribed texts as overlay or alongside the digitalised images of the sources and has been used successfully in interdisciplinary research projects in Innsbruck (Gruber-Tokić et al., 2021; Peralta Friedburg et al., 2021; Posch & Rampl, 2017; Posch et al., 2019; Rampl & Posch, 2021; Rampl et al., 2020). This web interface enables research groups and/or interested parties to look at the scanned original texts as facsimiles alongside the transcribed texts. Anyone, even without being familiar with the writing, can thus read the transcription, displayed on the same level in parallel to the image, and search in the text using tags of entities (e.g. objects, places/rooms, individuals). In the background, the platform offers a range of linking options to process the data further, for instance, linking them with knowledge graphs (Gruber-Tokić et al., 2023; Hiebel, 2022), thesauri, and digital maps.

An important factor for developing the Inventaria knowledge graphs is the application of and orientation on existing ontologies (for CIDOC-CRM, see Crofts et al., 2011, and extensions CRMtex, CRMarchaeo, CRMinf, CRMsci) and semantic web standards (for RDF, resource description framework, see W3C, 2014; for SKOS, see Miles & Bechhofer, 2009). The project team is creating a thesaurus based on existing international research infrastructures (The J. Paul Getty Trust, 2017; Thesaurus Maintenance Working Group, VCC3, 2016). The Inventaria thesaurus uses the SKOS standard (Miles & Bechhofer, 2009) and groups the inventoried objects onomasiologically. Each object entry must be abstracted and interpreted to some degree for work on the thesaurus. This eventually enables the implementation of an efficient search functionality and an intuitive exploration of the different objects: the search for a chest returns all objects called chest, irrespective of the spelling in various inventories. In the period in which the studied inventories were written, no standardised spelling existed. One and the same object could be spelled quite differently at different times and by different inventory creators. Anyone wanting to find all trunks in all castles can skip this problem easily due to the level of abstraction introduced in the data processing. In addition, the inclusion of a historical-descriptive glossary facilitates understanding and decoding specialist objects and those unknown today. We also add geographical information (coordinates) on the castles and places mentioned in the text, which provides access to the inventories and/or objects via interactive online map(s). In this way, it is possible to explore the historical life of Tyrolean castles intuitively and arrive at innovative questions exclusively via the digital work done on the sources. Below we want to sketch a few sample cases.

It could be interesting to find out if certain objects found in castles can be attributed to certain individuals or groups of people. Just as relevant is identifying which objects were part of the everyday life in a castle, to gain insights into castles as social spheres for a variety of people beyond knights and their weapons. If we want to find out more about the life of women in a castle, we can tackle it from various perspectives with the help of the inventoried objects and the available online tools. We can see which objects were there in the so-called apartments of the female court and also which objects in which other rooms were attributed to women. With the use of knowledge graphs, it is possible to look at the objects in female apartments on several castles simultaneously and to compare them. For instance, inventory A 203.1 (TLA, Innsbruck) from the year 1501 on Bruck Castle lists “etlich gleser zu der archomei” (several glass jars for alchemistic purposes), an “armbrost” (crossbow), a “plaber atlasser umbhang mit guldein stern genät” (blue cloak with golden stars), and much more “vor dem frawn zymer in der kamer” (in a chamber in front of the female apartment). Starting from this, you can use the knowledge graph to look for various additional jars or vessels related to alchemy. Linking the comprehensive thesaurus with the knowledge graph lets you visualise implicit semantic connections between objects. And answers the question in which rooms on castles alchemistic glass jars were kept at all: are they mainly found in spaces of women or, as in our example, just in one castle? Or you can explore the knowledge held in the inventories via a wider theme or thematic area, for example, kitchen/kitchen utensils/food. Here, too, the thesaurus offers a way to answer questions quickly and efficiently, for instance, which kitchen utensils or spices existed in the Late Middle Ages in which rooms in Tyrolean castles.

Hierarchical structuring through a thesaurus offers another advantage when looking for terminologically unknown objects: in the course of language development, many words that were common and well understood at the time the inventories were created have since disappeared (died out). With the help of the semantic data records created in the project, you can use modern meanings to explore old words/synonyms without having to know those in advance. The object category “(kleines) Fass” (small barrel) is listed by the term Fassl, still used today (spelled vässly, väsli, vassl, văsli, vãsl, vãsli, văssel, etc.), but also by the words Lägel (lãgln, lagelen, lagil) and Buttrich (buttrich) no longer used today. The categories and standardizations in the data models of Inventaria make it possible to “unearth” these historical and partly disappeared word forms.

The same is true for specific historical objects no longer used today and therefore no longer part of active language usage. Via the hierarchical structure, they can be rediscovered and semantically located. A nice example would be Bisamapfel (pomander), a spherical vessel of fragrant substances, which served medicinal purposes and at the same time as ornament. It could be explored in the AAT category containers for personal grooming and hygiene. In addition, the object names are linked to the historical-descriptive glossary, providing easy access to explanations.

3.2 The Digital Room Book as Knowledge Store for Museum Castles

A central task of this research project is connecting the information gained from the inventories on the relations of object-person-practice-room with selected still-existing castles. In recent years, not least due to the pandemic, new technologies of 360-degree photography and virtual reality (VR) applications have found their way into several castles in an effort to provide a new, immersive experience for visitors (Kerres et al., 2022). Historical rooms may be entered by smartphone, VR headset, or internet browser without setting foot on the former drawbridge. The list of castles using these new media techniques is growing rapidly. Within our project, the question arises how we may use the historical places and room experiences prepared with the latest technologies – in part with laser scanners and drone photography – to gain a better understanding of the practice of creating inventories and how we can contribute by our historical research into historical inventories to a substantive enhancement of 3D-modelled rooms and buildings. Below we sketch such a possible mutual enhancement, taking Runkelstein Castle (Figure 4) near Bozen/Bolzano as a case in point.

Figure 4

Photo of the “real” Runkelstein Castle, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Schloss_Runkelstein_2009.jpg.

In November 2022, Runkelstein Castle launched a “digital twin” of the castle (Figure 5) to be used with a VR headset or two-dimensionally on a screen. This step towards a new, virtual experience aims to give the visitors a highly realistic feel of the rooms on their virtual tour through the castle. Integrated digital information points allow visitors to open up the virtual room interactively (Figure 6).

Figure 5

Digital twin of Runkelstein in dollhouse view, which can make the outer wall invisible. Screenshot, https://www.runkelstein.info/. © Runkelstein Castle.

Figure 6

You can move through the rooms along points. View of the Garel room (north wall) in the summer house. Screenshot, https://www.runkelstein.info/. © Runkelstein Castle.

A company specialising in digital surveys and 3D modelling (www.visim.eu) implemented the tour based on software and services by Matterport (https://matterport.com/), already used successfully in several digital cultural heritage projects, including the VR tour through the rooms at Hohensalzburg Castle (https://www.salzburg-burgen.at/de/festung-hohensalzburg/angebote/virtuelle-rundgaenge/).

The “real” Runkelstein Castle is open to the public as a museum. Its unique profane murals, started in the year 1388 after the castle had been bought by Nikolaus Vintler, a citizen of Bozen/Bolzano, have given Runkelstein the name “picture castle.” The building has been used in a variety of ways throughout its long history and has been modified repeatedly, the last time around the year 2000 when the museum was refurbished. Then, as with earlier modifications, access to rooms and connecting rooms had to be adapted for the operation of the museum. The building history is documented in research for the Tiroler Burgenbuch (Rasmo, 1978) and in numerous contributions to the chapter Das Auf und Ab im Wechselspiel der Geschichte (The ups and downs of history) in the exhibition catalogue (Schloss Runkelstein. Die Bilderburg, 2000, pp. 445–625), as well as in further publications on archaeology, building, and art history (Grebe et al., 2018; Großmann, 2018; Kieß, 1961, pp. 163–170; Zeune, 2000). The late medieval murals attract the most attention and cover large parts of the interior (Grebe, 2018; Vavra, 2000). The archived three inventories from the Late Middle Ages, which also exist in edited form (Großmann et al., 2018, pp. 181–196; Zingerle, 1909, pp. 88–90), are particularly relevant for issues of how the rooms were used. Names of rooms in the inventories enable us to relate them directly to the visualised literary material on the walls and so clearly identify the rooms. Efforts have already started to fit the rooms mentioned in the inventories to the layout plans of individual floors and parts of the buildings (Großmann et al., 2018; Kieß, 1961, pp. 163–170). The sequence of rooms in the inventories, however, does not suggest a predefined route through the interior of the castle, unlike that which could be reconstructed for the creation of the inventory of Bruck Castle from 1501 (Antenhofer & Matschinegg, 2021, p. 174). Today’s museum tour follows a path newly designed for the exhibition.

With the digital exploration of the inventories with the Inventaria project and the digital 3D model by Matterport, new options open up for the digital room book of Runkelstein that is being implemented in work package 3 (Institute for Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture/Krems/Salzburg University):

• Enhancing interactive content by new text and image information in VR or on screen,

• Link to the planned digital edition (read&search platform), and

• Developing the virtual reconstruction of the route within the inventories – comparable to its implementation in the Virtual Interiors Project (Piccoli, 2019; https://www.virtualinteriorsproject.nl/).

The Inventaria project can thus greatly enhance and expand existing science-to-public strategies of Runkelstein Museum Castle.

3.3 Exploring Past Lives in the Castles

If we want to gain even more detailed insights into life in medieval castles and the people there, it is essential to forge links to further historical information on the inhabitants of the castles. We want to sketch the potential of the example of the two castles of the counts of Görz in today’s East Tyrol, Austria: Bruck Castle in Lienz and Heinfels Castle. Both castles are today open as museums, Heinfels Castle in particular has been renovated at great expense recently. Very active associations, for instance, the museum association Museum Burg Heinfels (https://www.burg-heinfels.com/) and the educational association Bildungshaus Osttirol (https://bho.dibk.at/bildungshaus2), fill the castles with life as cultural heritage and meeting places through a range of events. It should be noted that both castles are predominantly linked to women. For Bruck Castle, it is Paula Gonzaga (1464–1496), margravine of Mantua, who had married Leonhard, the last count of Görz (1444–1500), in 1478 and lived in the castle until her death (Antenhofer, 2005). In the case of Paula Gonzaga, we have the inventory of her trousseau which she brought with her to Bruck Castle. The inventory of Bruck Castle from 1501, mentioned above, allows us to trace objects that belonged to Paula through the castle and to locate her rooms. Of particular interest in terms of gender issues are the spurs in Paula’s luggage. They suggest that spurs in castles may not only be linked to men but also to women (Antenhofer & Matschinegg, 2021).

Another woman is connected with both castles. She gained tragic fame because of her conflicts with her husband: Katharina of Gara(i) (ca. 1418–ca. 1472), wife of Heinrich IV. of Görz (1376–1454). In Bruck Castle to this day, there is a trace of dirt on the outside of the castle attributed to her in connection with a rumour that she had wanted to poison her husband. The trace of dirt is supposed to come from the poison that Heinrich vomited over the castle wall. What is certain is that in 1443 Katharina had Heinrich arrested at Bruck Castle (Thomas, 1972, pp. 20–45). She also often spent some time in Heinfels Castle, especially once she had taken over the reign, together with her son Johann, in 1455.

In 2022, the Heinfels museum association, in cooperation with the Bildungshaus Osttirol, organised a cultural dialogue at Heinfels Castle (https://www.burg-heinfels.com/aktuelles/kulturdialoge-2022-2-die-wahrheit-ueber-eva.html), dedicated to “The truth about Eve.” The organisers’ declared aim was to unfold “exciting topics of our times with head, hand and heart … giving past, present, and future equal weight, because on Heinfels Castle you can feel the permeability of all periods” (Monika Reindl). The museum association used the theme to offer tours, workshops, and plays with a view on the relationships between women and men and gendered role attributions. We were asked to give a talk dedicated to Katharina of Gara(i), because she is the best-known woman at Heinfels and is still presented in a negative image without newer research on her. In the light of recent studies, Katharina’s conflicts with her husband can be explained by the fact that he had not provided the promised financial and material means of her marital estate (contrados [dower] as recompense for her dowry) and the promised court of her own at another East Tyrolean castle, Grünburg in Gitschtal (presumably as a morning gift). In the end, it is the interest of the local population that has triggered this re-assessment of Katharina by initiating new research in cooperation with our project team (Antenhofer, 2023).

No inventory has been archived that can be directly attributed to Katharina of Gara(i). However, there is an inventory from 1456 (TLA Inventare A 202.5), a time when her son, Count Johann, took over the reign on his own. An initial analysis of this inventory reveals several medicines that are of particular interest in terms of the considerations described in Section 3.1. These include theriac (triagk), pills, and, as mentioned above, one Bisamapfel (pomander). Other historical sources passed down, i.e. letters around Katharina of Gara(i), allow glimpses of her living conditions and the castles associated with her. An undated letter from an unnamed doctor is of interest, as he sends Katharina a number of medicines (Tyrolean Regional Archives, Innsbruck, Austria, holding Sigmundiana [TLA Sigm] 16.39.11). It includes an explicit recipe for “Triges,” a medicine for Katharina to take in the morning and at night against headache. Triges can be linked to the Triagk of the inventory mentioned above. Another letter offers important insights into Katharina’s living conditions at Grünburg Castle, the castle provided for her as her own court even during the lifetime of her husband: On 4 July 1448, Katharina writes to her husband that she has no money or other provisions left at her castle, because he has not sent any for a long time. She asks Heinrich to supply her with two barrels of wine, and, through the bailiff at Villach, two oxen, six Mut (almud) of rye, and 200 or 300 cheeses, so that she would have enough to eat and drink until he would send for her again (TLA Sigm 16.38.01). This letter clearly documents that Katharina’s actions against her husband were mainly to do with the lack of financial and material provision, which was barely enough to survive on the castle for her, her entourage, and servants. Here, we gain existential insights into a hardly glamourous or romantic image of living conditions in the castles.

The platforms and digital tools created within the Inventaria project make it possible to link information to specific castles and to connect them with information from other records. With new research findings, these castles gain at least some new lease of life.