Collecting, Organizing and Transmitting Knowledge

Medieval miscellanies are ubiquitous in modern manuscript collections. They easily form the single largest group of medieval manuscripts and include texts in all medieval languages. It is especially in the Late Middle Ages when--due to the use of paper rather than more expensive parchment, the move of the professional book production from the monasteries to the cities, the emancipation of the vernacular languages and the growing scholarization and literacy--that the number of personal miscellaneous manuscripts substantially grows. These manuscripts often reflect individuality and particular interests of their compilers and thus they offer a unique insight into medieval mind. Yet until recently late medieval miscellanies have not garnered much scholarly interest in their own right and have been merely studied from the textual and philological point of view of literary historians. Moreover, in spite of the clear reevaluation of the importance of miscellanies in European scholarship, the specific issue of the birth and the specific function of personal miscellanies is still a desideratum. The contributors to the volume have taken on this challenge and address in their contribution specific issues connected to the study of medieval miscellanies: the problem of authorship, non-autonomy, composition, reception and use, as well as more particular issues such as multilingualism and transmission of texts and text clusters.