Texts and Identities in the Early Middle Ages

For seven years, a cooperation project between the Austrian Academy and the Universities of Utrecht, Cambridge, Leeds and Paris I provided the opporunity for doctorate students and post-docs to discuss and coordinate their research. The title of the project, and of this volume, "Texts and identities", provides a deliberately wide framework for case studies in different fields of early medieval history. They include apparently disparate topics such as historiography and hagiography, monastic spaces and memories, lay and ecclesiastic legislation, liturgy and penance - to mention just a few. Rather than defining a common field of research, the meetings from which these papers emerge derived their coherence from a joint methodological framework. This approach combines two elements: on the one hand, great stress has been laid on the careful analysis of the transmission of texts and of the manuscript evidence: one the other, research hs focused on the problem of identity, or rather, of processes of identification, including perceptions of difference on the part of specific social, political and religious communities. Texts do not only reflect ethnic, social and cultural identities, they contribute to the creation of "strategies of distinction". They give meaning to social practice and are often intended to inspire, guide, change or prevent action, directly or indirectly. The written texts that have been transmitted to us are therefore traces of social practice and of its changes, not only in a merely descriptive way, but also as part of a cultural effort to shape the present by means of restructuring the past. If texts are seen as an integral part of the past realities under scrutiny, including a plurality of interpretations after the event, then their differences become more interesting than the reality they agree on. The often discordant voices of medieval authors allow modern historians to grasp something of the multiplicity of the early medieval world, and of the disagreements, conflicts, idiosyncrasies and individual perceptions among the people who inhabited it. What did "the Franks" or "monastic life", to name just two examples, mean to different people at the same time? Differences between texts as observed in manuscripts, also provide a precios insight into historical change. How did perceptions of identity, and the text that contributed to an ongoing debate on self-identification, change over time? Many contributions in this volume propose a specific method for studying changing identities. They analyse differences between similar texts over time, or, specifically, changes in texts in the course of their transmission. Seen as pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, the papers collected in this volume can help to illustrate that texts were integral parts of a social world in transfomation. On the whole, a distinct approach emerges that has developed in the course of the project, which may give the young researchers whose (often first) work is published here a distinct voice in the future.