manuscripts

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....

Today I wrote a new blog post for the ‘Post-imperial priests’-project, where I delve deeper into a network of episcopal handbooks. After working on the manuscript Troyes, MJC, Ms. 1979 for a while, I noticed that there are various other manuscripts with comparable contents from the same period. In the coming months, I will examine this network further to hopefully know more about tenth-century bishops and their priests. The blog post can be seen as a first step in that direction....

Building on my last post for the ‘Post-imperial priests’-project, I have written a new entry for the blog. This time I’m looking into the organization of local synods in the tenth and eleventh century and how priests were examined at these events. The manuscript I’m using is Troyes, MJC, Ms. 1979. Read the blog entry here.