manuscripts

It came a bit as a surprise, but I’ve been able to publish my first article! In the bundle Kleriker und Laien. Verfestigung und Verflüssigung einer Grenze im Mittelalter edited by Jonathan Reinert and Volker Leppin you’ll find an article by me (pp. 17-35) on a priest’s book. It’s titled ‘Priests, pastoral compendia and the laity in the Carolingian local church: The case of Sélestat, Bibliothèque humaniste, Ms. 132’ and is a byproduct of the research I did for my dissertation but was unable to fit in....

On the blog of the ‘Post-imperial priests’-project, I wrote a short post on my most recent research questions. The post is about Atto of Vercelli’s (ca. 885-957/8) episcopal statutes and what kind of knowledge he expected his priests to have. Read it here.

Doing online manuscript research is not that difficult, if you know where to look. In this short overview, I will present some of the most useful websites for doing such a task. The information we are looking for requires little prior knowledge. Still, it might be useful to have some basic understanding of codicology and palaeography when looking at scans. For that purpose, I recommend reading the first chapter (esp. pp....

An Airtable (wait a few seconds for it to load) with manuscripts that I found during my research. All manuscripts are from the 10-12th c. and contain at least one text that can be characterized as ‘pastoral’. Selecting a manuscript will display additional notes with the relevant texts. To the search the full table click here. I want to use this list for a project that I will start in April at the Universität Tübingen....

Pastoral works. Priests, books and compilative practices in the Carolingian period Download a pdf-version here. Priests are the main subject of this dissertation; clergymen that served communities of laypeople via local churches where they provided them with pastoral care. By examining the books they used for this purpose, we can get a glimpse of what early medieval Christianity and life in a rural context looked like. The dissertation’s main question is how these books can be instrumentalized and what kind of knowledge this yields....