Projects
| (In)flammable Cities: How fire risks and prevention transformed the Low Countries (1200-1650) | Pre-industrial cities were plagued by fires because of timber construction and the use of open fires. This project investigates how Dutch cities adapted their socio-political organisation and environment to reduce these risks. This will provide insight into both the impact of (major) incidents and preventive practices to avoid them.
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| Opera omnia Desiderii Erasmi | Under the auspices of the Union Académique Internationale and the Conseil international pour l'édition des œuvres complètes d'Erasme, David Napolitano is part of an international team of some 35 editors. More specifically, they have been working since 1960 to make Erasmus's oeuvre accessible to an academic audience. This long-term project is preparing a critical edition of the Ratio verae theologiae (1518).
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| Anonymous Knowledge | This is a long-term international collaboration investigating what role anonymous knowledge played in the medieval world from around 500 to 1000. Authority and reliability were associated with well-known authors during this period, so how could texts without a known author still become so popular?
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| Corpus of Early Medieval Latin Medicine | This long-term international research project unlocks, edits and studies unknown recipe collections from early medieval manuscripts. The editions and translations are published as its own series at the Dallas Medieval Texts and Translations.
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| Small Worlds, Wide Horizons | A long-term international project, initially affiliated to the Austrian Academy of Sciences (OeAW), investigating interdisciplinary research into the historical and archaeological dimensions of rural communities in the former Western Roman Empire during the early Middle Ages (c.500-ca.1000).
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| Moving Jobs: Occupational Identity and Motility in the Early Middle Ages | This project investigates the movement of people in connection to their work during the early medieval period, and the repercussions of such movement in terms of construction of job identities. The project assumes a global perspective, and brings together experts on a wide range of areas, from the North Sea to India.
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| Textual Communities in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages | This international project investigates the different ways in which authoritative texts were used to form social and religious groups in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. The project aims to explore new methods and theories to explore the content, form, and social function of particular texts in late antique and early medieval communities. This research project takes place i.c.w. Hebrew University, Israel and is supported by several partners including the Israeli Institute for Advanced Studies and Princeton University.
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| The Development of Literacy in the Early Medieval Diocese of Utrecht (c. 700-1250) | In the early Middle Ages the inhabitants of Europe, who had until then mainly relied on forms of oral or non-verbal communication, started to turn to writing. This gradual process, known as the 'development of literacy', was to transform Western society. It caused fundamental changes in the exercise of power, systems of law, the economy, and ways of thinking, to name but a few fields that would never be the same. This ambitious project will establish the origin and development of literacy in the territory of the present-day Netherlands. It will do this by studying the creation, keeping and use of all written texts by ever more groups in society. Internationally, this process has been an appealing and successful field of research in the last decades. Remarkably, it has hardly been studied for the Netherlands. This means that we still lack true knowledge of how this cultural and societal revolution came about in this region. This project, which will be carried out with Jan Burgers, will chart the early stages of this important process in the Netherlands up to 1250. To do this, we will use an innovative interdisciplinary method, by analysing all extant documents, books as well as administrative documents, applying a single research procedure and new digital tools. Such a study has never been attempted. It will shed light on the origins of Dutch cultural and administrative identities and advance the international methodology of this type of research. The project will be published as a volume in Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy (Turnhout: Brepols).
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| Rethinking Reforms and Categorizing the Church in the Carolingian Era | This project, which had its start at the International Medieval Congress in Leeds, builds upon the work done by previous generations of scholars in questioning the exact nature of the “religious reforms” that are thought to characterise the reigns of Frankish rulers such as Charlemagne and his son, Louis the Pious. Rather than seeing this as a disruptive, top-down attempt to control the religious life of monks and priests in the realm, researchers in this project try to determine the extent to which the changes we can discern actually reflect the lived experiences of people ‘on the ground’ before they were incorporated and institutionalised by the Carolingian court. So far, the project has resulted in several workshops and publications, a masterclass, a special issue of the Cahiers Médiévales, and a well-received edited volume. In the future, we aim to explore the ways in which religious change (or: reform) would have actually affected feelings of belonging and self-identification of religious officials across the centuries.
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| Overlapping Identities: Abbots and Abbesses within and without the Cloister | Abbots and abbesses wore many hats: they could hold lay abbacies, represent familial interests, and/or serve as heads of multiple houses; abbots could further serve as bishops and/or royal agents, and bishops could supervise canonical communities without assuming the title of abbot. How salient were abbatial identities in their wider social worlds? In the course of several closed workshop and one public conference, the collaborators within this project seek to collectively develop new paradigms for looking at the (gendered) identities of the leaders of monasteries in the Early Middle Ages.
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| Carolingian Culture in Septimania and Catalonia The Transformation of a Multi-Ethnic Middle Ground of the Euro-Mediterranean World | Septimania and Catalonia, belonging today to two different national states (France and Spain), were one space of communication especially after the expansion of the ecclesia Narbonensis to the Hispanic south caused by the Muslim domination of Tarragona. The present project addresses this region as a whole in its Euro-Mediterranean network of knowledge transfer and learning. This perspective offers the chance of overcoming modern national(istic) political perspectives and narratives, which still favour the concept of a medieval ‘History of France’ or ‘Spain’ (or, recently, ‘Catalonia’), and allows interconnecting previous studies of historical regional identities which are often artificially separated. A central question within this project is which Carolingian texts, manuscripts, and corpora were used or not used in the region under study and in what way. How could they help to shape the transformation towards a new religious/political order in the border zone between the Frankish kingdom and the former Gothic lands now largely under Muslim rule? The project here to focuses on three central text corpora which were all interacting with each other: 1) the Bible, 2) liturgy and biblical exegesis, and 3) historiography. Each text corpus has its specific character of transmission, which calls for an adapted treatment under the general perspective of the project.
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