Key research themes
1. How did court patronage and imperial ideology shape medieval historical writing in different cultures?
This theme explores how historians in medieval societies, particularly within imperial courts like the Ottoman Empire and English royal circles, produced historical narratives constrained by political power structures and patronage. It focuses on how imperial ideology, notions of royal authority, and court affiliations influenced both the content and form of historical texts, including mechanisms of self-censorship, the framing of political critique, and the centrality of capital cities or seats of power as narrative vantage points. Understanding these dynamics reveals the intertwined relationship between history writing and the maintenance or contestation of secular authority in medieval contexts.
2. What role did manuscript culture and reading/writing practices play in the production and reception of medieval historical texts?
This theme investigates the materiality of medieval historical writing by focusing on manuscript compilation, annotation practices, literacy, and reading cultures. It encompasses how multi-text codices, scribal communities, and their annotation techniques contributed to the shaping, transmission, and reception of historical narratives. These practices embody not merely mechanisms of textual preservation but active intellectual engagements, reflecting scholarly methods, communal identities, and evolving literary norms that influenced both the form and interpretive possibilities of medieval historiography.
3. How have computational and comparative authorship analyses advanced the study of medieval Latin historical texts?
This theme addresses recent methodological developments in computational authorship analysis applied to medieval Latin documents, focusing on techniques such as authorship attribution and verification. By employing curated datasets of epistolary and literary texts, this research provides quantitative frameworks to investigate questions of authenticity, authorial identity, and textual transmission, thereby influencing the critical assessment and scholarly interpretation of medieval historiographical and literary corpora.