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

Projektbeschreibung

Entschlüsselung mittelalterlicher Handschriften von Laien

Die meisten erhaltenen mittelalterlichen Handschriften waren für die Mächtigen von Interesse, es gibt jedoch auch Manuskripte, die die Zeit überlebt haben und eine andere Seite der mittelalterlichen Gesellschaft offenbaren. Das EU-finanzierte Projekt PeopleAndWriting hat sich vorgenommen, diese Schriften der einfachen Leute zu erforschen, um herauszufinden, welche Bedeutung das Schreiben für Laiengemeinschaften hatte und wie es ihren Alltag formte. Die interdisziplinäre Studie wird eine neuartige Methode anwenden. Dabei werden Ansätze von der Handschriftenforschung bis hin zur Anthropologie eingesetzt, um die verborgene Geschichte der Menschen zu entschlüsseln, die dieses Material schrieben, signierten, lasen und aufbewahrten. Das Projekt konzentriert sich auf einen unerforschten Korpus aus Handschriften von der Iberischen Halbinsel. Die Ergebnisse werden der Öffentlichkeit zur Verfügung gestellt.

Ziel

As a rule, only those medieval manuscripts that were of interest for the powerful have been preserved. Extant codices were cherished throughout centuries as tangible signs of cultural pre-eminence and carriers of the sacred word; charters were kept as custodians of patrimony and witness to the history of institutions, proclaiming the reasons why monasteries and cathedrals should be revered. But against this rule, other manuscripts that did not directly serve the purposes of high-status minorities were created and are still around. Codices that, belonging to an ecclesiastical rite that was suppressed, should not survive today, but were kept as guardians of tradition. Charters that, intermingled with royal diplomas, have survived without an apparent reason for they do not relate to privileges granted. These sources show us a different side of medieval society in which non-powerful individuals outside central institutions played a crucial role in understanding the implications of written communication, shaping their social memory and that of their past by fully integrating writing in their lives. PeopleAndWriting aims at exploring this common people-writing pairing to uncover what writing meant for lay communities, how it modelled their daily life, and how the use of writing individualised people within their group. From the interdisciplinary study of theses sources that defy the rule, the project proposes a novel method combining approaches from Manuscript Studies to Anthropology to, based upon the graphical, textual, and historical analysis of the sources, reveal the hidden history of the people who wrote, signed, read, and kept handwritten material. Moreover, by focusing on a hitherto unmapped corpus of manuscripts from the Iberian Peninsula, which will be made openly available to the general public, the project aims to integrate Iberia in the recently opened general debate on Medieval Communication, exploring new avenues of research on Written Culture.

Finanzierungsplan

ERC-STG - Starting Grant

Koordinator

UNIVERSIDAD DE SALAMANCA
Netto-EU-Beitrag
€ 995 040,00
Adresse
Calle patio de escuelas 1
37008 Salamanca
Spanien

Auf der Karte ansehen

Region
Centro (ES) Castilla y León Salamanca
Aktivitätstyp
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Links
Weitere Finanzmittel
€ 0,00

Begünstigte (1)