Wandering Books

For over a millennium, before paper became widely available and printing was introduced to Europe in the fifteenth Century, knowledge circulated and was preserved primarily on animal skin, handwritten, in manuscripts like the Book of Kells. Today, manuscripts are the key sources for cultural, social, intellectual, literary and linguistic history of the Middle Ages, a formative period of human history. As well as being repositories of language and text, manuscripts are simultaneously material objects that preserve ancient DNA which offers information about the biological past that may be key to contemporary issues of agricultural sustainability.

Central to utilising the various kinds of evidence manuscripts offer are a better understanding of how existing disciplinary techniques interact to determine where particular manuscripts were made and the innovation of new methodologies. No single discipline can adequately address this challenge. Wandering Books therefore brings together a geneticist (Bradley), a manuscript specialist (Volmering), an intellectual historian (Warntjes) and a historical linguist (Faulkner) to supervise between them four PhDs taking distinct methodological approaches to the same corpus of manuscripts deriving from early medieval Britain and Ireland: one hunting the animals whose skins made the manuscripts, one tracing the techniques used to assemble the skins into a book and write it, another tracking the texts it contains as they diffused across Europe, and a fourth listening for the languages the manuscript contains.

Wandering Books will articulate a new understanding of the relationship between existing methods for dating medieval manuscripts and introduce innovative new approaches, which, through the new localisations they propose, will revolutionise our understanding of the medieval textual record, and key questions of intellectual, cultural, social, linguistic and biological history. These findings will be shared through a rich set of public engagement activities, delivered through the new Long-Room-Hub-based Trinity Centre for the Book. Wandering Books has received generous funding from the Trinity Research Doctorate Awards: Group-based Research Projects 2024-5.