Vom Nutzen des Schreibens

This collection of essays brings together the work of for the most part younger Austrian historians presenting the findings of their ongoing research and contributions by non-Austrian academics, amongst them scholars at the forefront of their field. The contributions arose out of a series of lectures "Vom Nutzen des Schreibens" ("On the Use of Writing") organised by the Forschungsstelle für Geschichte des Mittelalters of the Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften and out of a workshop on "Zugänge zur Schriftlichkeit" ("Approaches to Literacy") held under the joint auspices of the Forschungsstelle and the Institut für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung in October 1999. The volume is thus the result of dialogue between experts on literacy from outside Austria and younger Austrian medievalists which has visibly stimulated research in the area. The essays in this volume are organised around two thematic foci, with three programmatic essays at the beginning, in the middle and the end of the book drawing the contributions together. The first nine essays examine Frankish social memory under the Merovingians and Carolingians, with specific consideration being given to manuscripts containing historiographical works. The second part of the book comprises seven papers on later medieval literacy, which lead on from and develop the most recent research on pragmatic literacy. They deal in particular with the use of writing for administrative purposes and representations of rulership examining the uses of the rapidly increasing numbers of written documents. The non-Austrian contributors are for the most part collaborators in the major research projects currently investigating questions of medieval literacy. Many of the articles in this book also rely on the findings and publications of long-term projects generating editions and research tools run by the Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, such as the Regesta Imperii and Die Deutschen Inschriften. The essays brought together in this volume not only represent substantial advances in individual areas of specialisation through the application of the most recent findings on the sources examined, but their incorporation within each thematic strand affords the reader a unique overview of that field. This is particularly true for the contributions on Frankish literacy, which taken together present a hitherto unattained panoramic view of the corpus of extant manuscripts, but the essays dealing with the later Middle Ages are equally pioneering in asking new questions of mostly Austrian source material. The new approaches developed and demonstrated in this volume will undoubtedly be an important inspiration and stimulation for further research not just in the specialist areas covered but in the whole field of the study of medieval literacy.