Periodic Reporting for period 2 - BOMPAC (Books of the Medieval Parish Church)
Reporting period: 2022-07-01 to 2023-12-31
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. It will achieve these goals by making innovative use of a little-used group of sources: fragments of medieval books surviving as covers of early-modern accounts from the kingdom of Sweden.
The preliminary results from this data have been discussed in several seminar presentations, and the first article on them is currently being written. The preliminary results indicate that we will indeed be able to connect a large proportion of the fragments to their medieval home churches. We will be able to understand the different ways in which the manuscript recycling operated and thus provide new information also on the sixteenth-century Swedish administration. This suggests that the original main goals of WP 1, as set out in the research plan, are realistic and will be achieved.
The second work package (WP 2) considers the origin of the medieval books used in the parish churches of the medieval kingdom of Sweden. This relies on palaeographical analysis of the fragment material. This part of the project started with background work by the PI in 2021 and gathered pace at the beginning of 2022 when the postdoctoral researcher responsible (together with the PI) for this part of the project joined the project team. By palaeographical analysis, new connections between the fragments have been observed, allowing us to reconstruct the medieval books out of the fragments more accurately. The first publication of WP 2 is currently being prepared on these findings. In addition, the project team has made research trips to study and document material for palaeographical comparison in the National Library of Sweden. This work has given rise to promising observations on medieval Swedish handwriting and manuscript culture, to be discussed in several presentations over the next six months.
We have also made initial progress with the analysis of the origin of the books. By analyzing the handwriting seen in complete manuscripts produced in Sweden, we have promising hypotheses on the characteristics of Swedish 13th- and 14-th century handwriting. These still need to be validated, but if our preliminary observations are correct they will present a real breakthrough in the palaeographical analysis of the fragments.
Furthermore, bringing together the results of the recycling analysis with palaeographical analysis is yielding very promising preliminary results. It seems that, using these two approaches together, we can, for instance, connect a books brought from England to Sweden to a books that were copied using them as models (i.e exemplar). This opens avenues for invaluable case studies for palaeographical analysis, as we can then see how the local scribes reflect the style of the exemplar.
By the end of the project we are expecting a substantial number of published case studies on the production contexts of the medieval books, as planned in the research plan. In this respect as well, the early results suggest that the project's goals are well achievable.