Descripción del proyecto
¿Cómo adquirieron las iglesias parroquiales sus libros en la Edad Media?
Los libros han evolucionado notablemente a lo largo de los siglos, desde las tablillas de arcilla y los rollos de papiro hasta el moderno libro de bolsillo y los libros electrónicos actuales. El proyecto BOMPAC, financiado con fondos europeos, ayudará a entender cómo la producción de libros manuscritos se convirtió en una actividad comercial durante la Edad Media, un desarrollo que finalmente culminó con la invención de la imprenta. Más concretamente, el proyecto estudiará el papel que desempeñó la iglesia parroquial en la cultura y la economía del libro manuscrito entre los años 1150 y 1500. Se centrará en la Suecia medieval, donde muchos de los libros se importaron del extranjero. El reciclaje sueco de los libros de pergamino como cubiertas para los balances fiscales en los siglos XVI y XVII creó la mayor colección de material manuscrito de las iglesias parroquiales medievales en todo el mundo, lo que posibilita este estudio.
Objetivo
Book production became a market-orientated craft long before the invention of printing. In the late-medieval manuscript economy, the parish churches formed one of the biggest entities on the demand side. However, at present we know next to nothing about how they were provisioned with books. BOMPAC is a response to this gap in scholarly understanding. It offers the first substantial study of the place of the parish church in the culture and economy of the manuscript book, c. 1150–c.1500.
BOMPACs contribution to the topic will be twofold. It will, firstly, provide an extensive case study concering one medieval kingdom – Sweden – comprising more or less two modern countries (Sweden, Finland). Secondly, preliminary research indicates that many of the books used in the parishes of medieval Sweden were imported from abroad. Thus, the project will directly break new ground in the study of the international book economy of the later middle ages.
Parish church book provision remains poorly known because such books very rarely survive as complete physical items. BOMPAC will go around this limitation by innovative use of a hitherto understudied corpus of manuscript fragments. In Sweden, the parchment books of the parishes were recycled as covers for tax accounts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This operation was systematic and resulted in a massive collection of c. 50 000 leaves from c. 12 500 books, probably the biggest collection of material from medieval parish church books anywhere in the world.
Only recent cataloguing and digitizing efforts have made this material accessible for research. In BOMPAC, it will be studied with both statistical and palaeographical methods. A database-driven approach is used to produce a reliable big picture of how the books were distributed in the medieval period. Palaeographical and codicological case studies will show us the modes and routes by which parish churches acquired their books.
Ámbito científico
Programa(s)
Régimen de financiación
ERC-STG - Starting GrantInstitución de acogida
00014 Helsingin Yliopisto
Finlandia