Even in the early stages, we have made observations which go well beyond the state of the art.We can for the first time analyze the recycling of medieval books in the early-modern Swedish kingdom in quantitative terms (how many books, over which time period, where geographically etc.). While the systematic analysis is far from over, this work has already allowed us to reach some of the main goals of the project partially. That is, we can already connect a large number of previously anonymous books to specific geographical districts. At the end of the project, this part of the project is expected to provide a complete mapping of this kind for the fragments preserved in Finland and a substantial part of the fragments preserved in Sweden.
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.
