Models of Change in Medieval Textual Culture

Change is a matter of central concern and interest in the study of history, and it has been approached with various methodological and theoretical means in different historical disciplines. The concept is, however, rarely addressed per se, despite its fundamental role for historical insight. This book addresses different kinds of change in medieval textual culture as examples or models of change. A model can take different forms: it consists of abstract representations, like a flowchart or a series of stages within a development, it might be a concept, like paradigm shift, or a single, but telling historical example. In their different forms, models serve as conceptual tools to enlighten historical instances of change.

The contributions of this volume gather cases from a series of aspects of medieval textual culture which are subject to change: physical books, the acoustics of performed text, textualized worlds, scribes and authorship, genre, the choice of language in texts, and paleographic variance. The book also addresses problems of thinking in models and metaphors of change, as they also – as idols of the market – have the power to lead us astray if not carefully meditated.

Jonatan Pettersson, Stockholm University, Sweden; Anna Blennow, University of Gothenburg, Göteborg, Sweden.