Afgelopen week is het boek ‘De inventieve middeleeuwen. Praktische kennis en kunde van voor het jaar 1000’ verschenen bij Uitgeverij Verloren. Het is een samenwerking van (veelal Utrechtse) historici die werken aan de vroege middeleeuwen en geïnteresseerd zijn, zoals de titel al aangeeft, in praktische kennis. Het gaat hier dus niet om politiek gemanoeuvreer of theologische debatten, maar over nuttige kennis voor het alledaagse leven. Denk hierbij aan recepten, medische weetjes, gebeden en dieetadvies van voor het jaar duizend....
During the last semester, I have taught an undergraduate course (Übung) at the Universität Tübingen together with my great colleague Johanna Jebe. The aim of the course was to introduce students to the study of medieval history in general and the study of medieval manuscripts in particular. In this post, I will try to give some insights into the structure of the course, our ideas behind it, and its final result....
Some personal news: since the end of September I have been in Edinburgh as a visiting scholar. I am currently working together with prof. dr. Charles West on a book as part of the project ‘Priests in a post-imperial world, 900-1050’. It is slowely taking shape and we hope to finish it at some point next year. Besides writing, I have also given a talk at the medieval seminar in Edinburgh with the title ‘Episcopal manuals and the ordering of knowledge in a post-Carolingian world’....
The first output of the project I am currently working on has finally been published in the journal Frühmittelalterliche Studien. Together with my colleagues, we wrote a series of articles on priests in the long tenth century, using different types of source material and methodologies to better understand their role in the organisation of pastoral care in the post-Carolingian period. We devote special attention to priests and kinship, tithing, ecclesiastical discipline, and changing normative frameworks surrounding priests....
In this blog post for the ‘Post-imperial priests’-project, I discuss traces of use and what they can tell us about how manuscripts were used. I examine three sets of neumes specifically (see the dots and scribbles in the image above), which are examples of an early medieval notation system for music. The blog post is a byproduct of the research I have done in the past months on the group of manuscripts that I have discussed in a previous post on the same blog....