Post-National Reconceptions of European Literary History: A MixedMethod Approach to a Late Medieval Text Tradition: Post-REALM

 Programme(s): HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) 

Topic(s): ERC-2022-COG - ERC CONSOLIDATOR GRANTS

Call for proposal: ERC-2022-COG

Funding Scheme: ERC - Support for frontier research (ERC)

Grant agreement ID: 101088560

Objective:

The study of pan-European medieval literature faces two significant problems. The first is so obvious that it is rarely given much thought: only a fraction of the texts created in this period have survived. The second problem is similarly easy to overlook when working on any one text, which is that the content and reception history of those texts that do survive are usually studied separately within the ‘national’ philologies, whose linguistic and cultural borders make it difficult to gain insights into the broader patterns of creation, dissemination, and reception arising out of these fragments of cross-regional text traditions. At the same time, the linguistic and temporal limitations of analogue study make it all but impossible to gain a comprehensive overview of text traditions spanning different languages and large numbers of text versions. The interdisciplinary Post-REALM project will combine digital analysis with close reading and study of material context in order to focus on 26 versions of the late medieval pan-European 'Floire and Blancheflor' narrative. Drawing on a broad range of analogue and digital forms of analysis, we will develop and refine a new mixedmethod template for how to approach widespread cross-lingual text traditions from the past. The aim of the project is not simply to create an entirely new understanding of how this popular late medieval narrative was written, adapted, and disseminated across different regions of Western Europe, but to inspire a step change in how the study of medieval literature is approached. Doing so will provide new conceptual frameworks and resource formats within which to relate the different surviving versions of historical text traditions to each other and new ways of understanding and visualising their contents, material context and paths of dissemination.