Professor Simon Gaunt, The Values of French Language and Literature in the European Middle Ages

The Values of French Language and Literature in the European Middle Ages is a five-year research project running from 2015 to 2020 in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, funded by the European Research Council within the framework of an Advanced Grant.The Values of French examines the nature and value of the use of French in Europe during a crucial period, 1100-1450, less in terms of its cultural prestige (the traditional focus of scholarship) than of its role as a supralocal, transnational language, particularly in Western Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean. The project fosters collaboration between, and cuts across, different intellectual and national scholarly traditions, drawing on expertise in codicology, critical theory, linguistics, literature, and philology; it involves scholars from a range of European countries and North America, entailing empirical research around a complex and widely disseminated textual tradition vital to medieval understandings of European history and identity, the Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César. This case study grounds and stimulates broader speculative reflection on two questions concerning linguistic identity. What is the relation historically between language and identity in Europe? How are cognate languages demarcated from each other? Indeed, its final aim, through and beyond its consideration of French as a lingua franca, is to interrogate that language’s role in the emergence of a European identity in the Middle Ages.

The Values of French

Dr Alice Taylor, Models of Authority: Scottish Charters and the Emergence of Government 1100-1250

Models of Authority: Scottish Charters and the Emergence of Government is a resource for the study of the contents, script and physical appearance of the corpus of Scottish charters which survives from 1100–1250. Through close examination of the diplomatic and palaeographic features of the charters, the project will explore the evidence for developments in the perception of royal government during a crucial period in Scottish history. The project is funded by the AHRC (2014-2017) and is a collaboration between scholars from the Universities of Glasgow, Cambridge and King's College London.

Models of Authority

Professor Julia Crick and Dr Peter Stokes, The Conqueror's Commissioners: Unlocking the Domesday Survey of South-Western England.

The project is funded by the AHRC (2014-17). Domesday Book (DB) is one of England's most important historical documents: arguably the nation's single most significant record. In 1086 William I's commissioners set out to record the taxable assets of the newly acquired kingdom, settlement by settlement and county by county. Without the account of the survey preserved in DB we would know almost nothing of the social fabric of rural England in the eleventh century, of its landscape and resources and their monetary value; we could not map secular and ecclesiastical lordship, and neither could we estimate the scale of resources available to the ruling elite. DB in itself it constitutes remarkable testimony to the reach of central government. However DB is a much truncated version of other records generated by the Domesday survey of 1086 which served as its source. Only one collection of such records is extant: Exon Domesday (EDB), which survives in its original form, and contains vital evidence relating to the way the survey was conducted and recorded. The aim of this project is to publish the contents of EDB for the first time and to unlock the evidence which the book contains for the conduct of the survey at both local and central level.

The Conqueror's Commissioners: Unlocking The Domesday Survey of South-Western England.

Dr Alice Rio, The Making of Charlemagne's Europe (768-814).

The project is funded by the AHRC (2012-2015): Charlemagne’s reign corresponds to an exceptionally high peak in the documentary record: some 4,500 documents survive from this period, more than for any other early medieval ruler. Though their distribution is patchy, charters have been preserved from all the main regions of Charlemagne’s empire. Besides the sheer volume of material they contain, they constitute a major source for other reasons. They are the most useful available source for social and economic history; further, whereas narrative sources hardly ever mention anyone outside the immediate entourage of the king, charters allow access, often of a very direct and personal kind, to broader sections of the population from regional elites to local peasant landowners. These characteristics make charters by far the richest source of prosopographical data for the Carolingian empire.

Professor Simon Gaunt, Medieval Francophone Literary Culture Outside of France.

Medieval Francophone Literary Culture Outside France was an AHRC-funded research project that ran from April 2011 to early 2015. It set out to investigate the movement across Europe and beyond of Francophone literature c.1200-c.1450. The project involved collaboration between King’s College, London (KCL), University College London (UCL), and the University of Cambridge. The project team included specialists on the relations between the langue d’oïl (or medieval Northern French) and major European languages (Dutch, Catalan, English, German, Italian, Latin, Spanish). Our aim was to explore how key literary texts travelled along two main axes: a northern route that stretches from England across the Low Countries to Burgundy and the Rhineland; a southern route across the Alps to Northern Italy and out into the Mediterranean and Adriatic seas, to the Middle East. The database of manuscripts of six key textual traditions that is made available through this website is intended to facilitate research on cultural and linguistic identity, on medieval textuality, and on the literary history of Europe.

Medieval Francophone Literary Culture Outside of France

Professor David Carpenter, The Magna Carta Project (2010-2015).

A landmark investigation of Magna Carta 1215 to mark the Charter's 800th anniversary. Providing resources and commentary on Magna Carter and King John for scholars, schools, and the general public.

The Magna Carta Project

Dr Peter Stokes, DigiPal (2010-2014).

DigiPal is a new resource for the study of medieval handwriting, particularly that produced in England during the years 1000–1100, the time of Æthelred, Cnut and William the Conqueror. It is designed to allow you to see samples of handwriting from the period and to compare them with each other quickly and easily. Funded by the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7), it is based at the Department of Digital Humanities at King's College London.

DigiPal

Professor emerita Karen Pratt, The Dynamics of the Medieval Manuscript.

This is a HERA project (2010-2013). This cross-European research project studied the dynamics of a number of late-medieval Dutch, English, French and German miscellany manuscripts, focusing on the highly mobile short verse narratives they contain. Characterised by the migration of works from one manuscript context to another, this cultural phenomenon was ideally suited to the HERA JRP theme ‘Cultural Dynamics’. In each unique, newly formed text collection new meanings are generated, enabling us to understand the cultural identity of the compiler or commissioner of a manuscript and to investigate how cultural, social and moral heritage is conveyed to new generations.Our comparative, multilingual approach made it possible to determine trans-European characteristics in the organisation of text collections and to analyse how new author and reader identities were created. The research was conducted by 4 PhD students, 2 Post-doctoral and 4 senior researchers in close collaboration, and culminated in a large-scale conference.

The Dynamics of the Medieval Manuscript.

Professor Stephen Baxter, Profile of a Doomed Elite: The Structure of English Landed Society in 1066.

This is a Leverhulme project (2010-2012). The project will use innovative methods for interpreting Domesday Book to survey the whole of English landed society on the eve of the Norman Conquest in 1066, identifying landowners at all levels of society from the king and earls down to the parish gentry and even some prosperous peasants.

Professor Emma Dillon, Major Research Fellowship 2015, ‘The romance of song: the early trouvères and their reception, 1150–1350’

Funded by The Leverhulme Trust.

Professor Clare Lees, Major Research Fellowship 2015, ‘The contemporary arts and early medieval culture in Britain and Ireland’

Funded by The Leverhulme Trust.

Innovation

INNOVATION anticipates a breakthrough in scholarly understanding of the medieval origins of modern Western philosophy. This breakthrough will be achieved by exposing the pioneering nature of early thirteenth-century Franciscan thought and its pivotal significance for the subsequent formation of the Western philosophical identity. The work of early Franciscans has largely been neglected in scholarly circles, on the assumption that they merely codified the work of past authorities, where later Franciscans developed innovative ideas that laid the foundation for the development of modern philosophy. INNOVATION will contest this assumption by producing the first comprehensive study of the sources, method, content, and later medieval reception of early Franciscan thought. In conducting this study, the research team will implement a groundbreaking method of reading scholastic texts, which is attentive to the way that practice informed theory in the high Middle Ages. This ‘practice-led’ hermeneutic will provide a resource for re-envisaging the entire state of the art in the study of scholasticism. As regards early Franciscans, it will allow us to identify novelty, often due to the use of Islamic sources, where past scholars have perceived unoriginality. On this basis, we will highlight previously unnoticed connections between the early and late Franciscan schools. By these means, we will illustrate how Western thought has been nourished by the ethos of a particular religious order and by Islamic thought, pointing up a shared Muslim-Western philosophical identity that is often overlooked but urgently needed to overcome severe fractures in today’s society. At the same time, we will emphasize that Franciscan ideas only became modern once removed from their practice-led context. In juxtaposing the cultural paradigms of philosophy and religious practice, consequently, we will advance knowledge by producing the first nuanced scholarly account of the Franciscan origins of modern Western thought.

Early Franciscans

Constructed Sainthood: Test Cases for a Literary Approach to Hagiography.

BA/Leverhulme-funded project, held together with Dr. Christa Gray, University of Reading, exploring literary (rather than primarily historical or theological) perspectives approaches to Christian texts about the lives of saints in late antiquity and beyond. An edited collection, The Hagiographical Experiment: Developing Discourses of Sainthood (Leiden: Brill, 2020), will be published in 2020.