Text, Transmission, and Transformation in the European Middle Ages, 1000-1500

This collection of essays is primarily concerned with the different ways in which European readers, writers, and translators engaged with texts and concepts, and with the movement and exchange of those texts and ideas across boundaries and geographical spaces. It brings together new research on relating Anglophone and Latinate writings as well as in other vernaculars (Old Norse, Anglo-Saxon, Medieval Irish, Welsh, Arabic, Middle Dutch, Middle German, French, and Italian) as well as texts and ideas that are experienced in aural and oral contexts (music and song). Texts are examined not in isolation but in direct relation and as responses to wider European culture; several of the contributions theorize the translation of works, for example those relating to spiritual instruction and prayer, into other European languages and contexts. Together the essays reconstruct an outward-looking, networked and engaged Europe in which people used texts in order to communicate, discover and explore as well as to record and preserve.