Previously seen as a ‘Celtic backwater’ during the expansion of the Carolingian empire, early medieval Brittany flourished as a hybrid region, blending cultural and intellectual traditions from Ireland, Britain, and Carolingian Europe. Annexed into the Carolingian empire in c. 792, early medieval Brittany continued to seek independence throughout the ninth century, ultimately establishing itself as an independent region in c. 840, while maintaining important connections with Britain and Ireland. Brittany was, thus, a thoroughfare for ideas and cross- cultural exchanges between the ‘Insular’ world (i.e. Britain and Ireland) and Carolingian Europe. These cultural exchanges are most visible in the surviving written evidence attributed to Brittany, which remains largely understudied. Most manuscripts attributed to this region display a hybrid script, which has been labelled Breton Caroline minuscule but has not yet been systematically defined. This script reflects the region’s cultural hybridity, since it displays characteristics of both the Insular script system and Caroline minuscule, the supranational script developed in late-eighth century Francia and adopted beyond the Carolingian empire. A focused study of BCM will define what this script is, initiate a corpus of manuscripts written in this script, and advance our understanding of what can be identified as ‘Breton’. This will yield a much deeper understanding of the cultural expressions of identity within the political and cultural landscape of early medieval western Europe.
The Breton Palaeography project (BretPal) will provide the first palaeographic study of the early medieval manuscripts attributed to Brittany (c. 780‒1100). With its cross-cultural, interdisciplinary approach, BretPal is a unique project designed to address the questions of what is BCM, who wrote it, and where? The answers to these questions will determine future identification of Breton manuscripts and resituate early medieval Brittany within the wider scribal and intellectual traditions of early medieval western Europe, upon which Brittany drew and to which it greatly contributed.
The overall research objective of BretPal is to establish an evidence-based set of scientific criteria for the identification and analysis of the hybrid script (BCM) that was used in Brittany or by Breton scribes c. 780‒ 1100. This project will provide the first-ever focused study to reach conclusions about surviving written evidence from early medieval Brittany. Core innovation objectives will guide this ultimate aim:
• O1: To establish, for the first time, definitive criteria for what constitutes BCM according to palaeographic features, so that materials of Breton origin can be defined.
• O2: To initiate further analysis of other manuscripts with an attributed but not certain Breton origin with the intent to define more precisely the corpus of what can be considered ‘Breton’.
• O3: To facilitate this research through a new, unique, open-access database with an accompanying Descriptive Handbook of manuscripts that can be definitively identified as Breton.
So far, definitions of what constitutes ‘Breton’ have tended to be restricted; acute palaeographic analysis of key case studies will establish strict criteria against which future analyses of manuscripts can be made. These combined objectives will therefore initiate new investigations into the wider impact of Breton intellectual and material culture throughout early medieval western Europe.
