DFG-Funded Project: 'Bevis' in Multi-Text Manuscripts
This three-year project, funded by the DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft / German Research Foundation), will investigate how the medium of the multi-text manuscript facilitated the adaptation of the widespread romance Bevis of Hampton across the linguistic and cultural borders of late medieval Europe.
The most popular form of secular literature to spread across Western Europe during the political upheaval of the late medieval period was the romance, a genre that concerns itself among other things with leadership, travel, and encounters between different communities. Studying the material adaptation history of these texts can reveal how narratives of inter-cultural conflict and engagement were being re-cast and reinterpreted in the course of being disseminated across the shifting linguistic and cultural borders of medieval Europe.
Our pan-European study of the different Bevis versions in their manuscript context will explore how these romance texts became popular in a wide range of reading communities across Western Europe and consider the extent to which this process was facilitated by the medium of the medieval multi-text manuscript.
Principal Investigator: Prof. Dr. Miriam Edlich-Muth
Postdoctoral Research Assistant: Dr. Mary Bateman
Student Assistants: Rebecca Depryck-Grimm, Moritz Draschner