The Medieval Book and Networks of Northern Europe c. 1000-1500: Texts, Crafts, Fragments

Introduction

Medieval books were instrumental in shaping European history, communicating rituals, stories, and ideas as they were read, copied, and shared. To modern scholars, they illuminate trade, craft, religious, social, and intellectual networks. Less than 10% of the European corpus survives, and in Scandinavia, the situation is far worse. However, by historical accident, a very high number of Latin fragments – approximately 50,000 – from these precious books have been preserved. CODICUM will study and analyze the Nordic book fragments as sources to medieval book culture and its networks.

Significance of Nordic Fragments

While parchment fragments are found throughout Europe, the numbers and the randomness of their survival in the Nordic countries lend them a special significance. The time is now ripe for interrogating this promising material as one unique European archive by combining approaches from the humanities and the sciences.

Key Questions

1. How was Scandinavia included in different intellectual networks and how did these networks evolve and overlap?
2. How was book production adapted to the limited resources of the north?
3. What can this cross-national archive teach us about curating textual heritage in the long term?

Research Team

CODICUM is led by Principal Investigators (PIs) from four different fields – palaeography, literature, history, and bio-codicology. This unique blending of research expertise enables an innovative synergy which will expand the perspective of European book history from approximately 1000 to 1500.

Research Goals

• Reconnect fragments to each other and digitally ‘reassemble’ medieval books.
• Explore the craftsmanship associated with book production.
• Reveal the relationships between the transmitted manuscripts material.
• Illuminate the international networks linking Northern Europe.

Researching medieval book culture on an unprecedented scale, CODICUM will seek to resituate our understanding of the book in shaping the Nordic region and connecting the region to the rest of Europe, thereby pushing the poorly known Nordic fragment archive to the forefront of European book-historical research.