The Secret Life of Writing: People, Script and Ideas in the Iberian Peninsula (c. 900-1200)

Most medieval manuscripts preserved were those that were of interest to the powerful but there are other manuscripts that have also survived and show a different side of medieval society. The EU-funded PeopleAndWriting project aims to explore this common people-writing pairing to uncover what writing meant for lay communities and how it modelled their daily life. As an interdisciplinary study, it will apply a novel method combining approaches from manuscript studies to anthropology to uncover the hidden history of the people who wrote, signed, read and kept this material. The project will focus on the unmapped corpus of manuscripts from the Iberian Peninsula. It will be made available to the general public.