Invisibilia · Tracing the Invisible. Old Norse and Latin in medieval manuscripts.

Tracing the Invisible. Old Norse and Latin in medieval manuscripts.

In the project “Tracing the Invisible. Old Norse and Latin in Medieval Manuscripts (INVISIBILIA)”, I investigated bilingualism in medieval Northern Europe by focussing on the most popular media of the time: manuscripts. I traced their Latin components, which have mostly been neglected in research until the present day, and made them accessible to the scientific community digitally, thus providing essential texts and finding aids for the Latin sections. I analysed the interaction of the Latin with the Old Norse texts. By relating them to the production, dissemination and use of manuscripts by people from different social backgrounds, I gave a deep insight into the European literacy of medieval Icelanders and Norwegians in the time span ca. 1100 – ca. 1550. The project focussed on the manuscripts held in the Arnamagnaean Collections in Copenhagen and Reykjavik, which represent approximately 90 % of the total number of Old Norse codices. Out of these, all manuscripts containing both Old Norse and Latin as clearly distinct entities constituted the corpus of the study, 629 manuscripts in total. This corpus was approached according to three major objectives, namely a full catalogue of the Latin parts, a comprehensive multi-level digital edition, and comparative studies. The results of the three research objectives were integrated in an open-access on-line website linked to existing scholarly databases. By spanning the borders between Traditional and Material Philology, Cataloguing and Editing, and Traditional and Digital Humanities, INVISIBILIA reaches out to scholars of medieval Scandinavia and Medieval Latin alike. The research results are directly comparable to other pre-modern bilingual literary systems. Moreover, they challenge the isolationism still found in Old Norse-Icelandic scholarship by showing that despite the impression given by previously available catalogues and editions, Latin text parts can be found in all manuscript types from medieval Norway and Iceland across the Middle Ages while being mostly religious (including devotional and ecclesiastical) and scientific in nature.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union