Research

Histories in Transition

In this project, which was developed within the framework of the “Transformation of the Carolingian World”-network, we would like to explore the cultural history of the Carolingian and post-Carolingian world. The Carolingian reforms of language, script and education before and after 800 have been studied intensively as an important period for the formation of the social, political and cultural horizons of Latin Europe in the Middle Ages. This is, however, much less true for the period after the first two Carolingian emperors from the mid-ninth century to the beginning of the twelfth which is still often regarded as a time of cultural decline, political fragmentation: a new Dark Age after the short ‘renaissance’ of learning, education and cultivation of knowledge in the time of Charlemagne and Louis the Pious (768 – 840 CE).

It is, however, precisely this later and post-Carolingian period after the 840s, from which the main bulk of the manuscripts attesting to and reinforcing the intensified efforts to establish new standards in Latin Europe have come down to us. What we observe is not only a new cultural base line in the Carolingian world, but also new standards to organize knowledge in books and libraries and the formation of a cultural convergence that held together the increasingly diverse and politically fragmented world of Latin Europe.

The project intends to use the writing and rewriting of history as a window into this process. We want to explore if, and if so, how new approaches to the codification of knowledge changed the conceptualization of history, its generic boundaries, meaning and its place in (real or imagined) libraries. While we expect to find and explore a wide spectrum of possibilities, we also aim at sounding out the limits of these possibilities by a comparative approach between different regions, places, cultural backgrounds, and textual traditions.
 


The project has started with series of seminars at which members of this group will present their approaches, ongoing work, or future projects. This should help us to establish a common base line, and develop a more focused project design and a shared data-base for a more comprehensive comparison of different texts, contexts and trajectories, various cultural topographies and degrees of convergence in the late and post-Carolingian world – from the Atlantic, to Central and Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean world.

 

Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek (ÖNB), Cod. 387, fol. 90v.

The project aims to challenge the current understanding of the cultural history of historiography in the Carolingian and post-Carolingian world (9th–12th centuries) with an innovative and precisely focussed investigation of two major centres of historical writing during this period, Salzburg and Freising. We want to explore how in the course of the transformation of the Carolingian World, the ways of thinking about, organising, compiling and writing history changed between the 9th and 12th centuries. The project will explore how new approaches to the codification of historical knowledge changed the conceptualisation and meaning of history, its generic boundaries, and its place in (real or “imagined”) libraries in these two centres. The project will use the writing and rewriting of history at these two important Bavarian centres of learning (Salzburg and Freising) as a window into these processes. Taking advantage of the recent advances in the study of the materiality of manuscript production, we shall analyse how medieval historiographers worked with parchment, pen and knife. We shall examine the different ways that texts about history were written down and combined with other texts in manuscripts; and determine the consequences of choice of scripts, mise-en-page, annotation and the contextual associations drawn with other texts in multiple text manuscripts (MTMs) had for the production of historical meaning. Secondly, we shall investigate the social context and the intellectual horizons of these forms of production: What interests were involved? Can the impact of these codices on society be identified? In what way did historical thinking become tangible – and did it change between the 9th and the early 12th century? Our guiding questions aim at:

(a) Contextualisation

(b) Libraries and scriptoria as arsenals of historical knowledge and

(c) the Meaning of the form.


At the same time, this project is a pilot study for a larger international collaborative undertaking: On the basis of ca. 35 manuscripts, we define the standards for an international project, not only with regard to the content aspects mentioned above, but also to the digital representation of the collected material.

Histories in Transition – Online Seminars

Project Leader Vienna:
Maximilian Diesenberger


in Cooperation with

funded by