Medieval Literature and History

Medieval literature and history examines the texts, institutions, and social formations of Europe roughly between the fifth and fifteenth centuries, drawing on surviving manuscripts to reconstruct how people understood faith, power, community, and the natural world before the age of print. Because so much of what was written during this period passed through monastic scriptoria, scholars must work simultaneously as literary critics, historians, paleographers, and theologians, reading works from Beowulf to Hildegard of Bingen against the material conditions of their production and transmission. A persistent question is how to recover the voices and experiences of those who left few written records — peasants, women, non-Latin speakers — when the archive itself was shaped by literate clerical elites. Active research is also grappling with how digital imaging and computational tools can reveal erased or damaged text in manuscripts, potentially reshaping the canon and our understanding of what medieval people actually read.

Works

204,616

Total citations

662,985

Keywords

MedievalLiteratureReligionSocietyManuscriptsMonasticism