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

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 – c. 50.000 – from these precious books have been preserved.

CODICUM will study and analyse the Nordic book fragments as sources to medieval book culture and its networks.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. How was Scandinavia included in different intellectual networks and how did these networks evolve and overlap? How was book production adapted to the limited resources of the north?

What can this cross-national archive teach us about curating textual heritage in the long term?CODICUM is led by 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 c. 1000-1500, 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 and 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 into the fore of European book-historical research.