Crossing Borders
in the Insular Middle Ages
rossing Borders charts the vernacular translation and transmission of texts in manuscript circulation across the 'Insular world', Britain, Ireland, Scandinavia and France, in the period c. 1200-1600.
The project maps the movement of a number of significant texts in pan-Insular circulation, broken down into two loose genre classifications: romance and prophecy (the manuscript and textual histories of which are approached as closely inter-related), and religious texts (encompassing saints’ lives and apocrypha). These are presented as case studies, and form the early basis for the identification of patterns in textual movement and exchange across the Insular zone. Data collected for the project is by no means intended to be exhaustive, and additions to the database and map will be ongoing in the next phase of the project’s development.
The original selection process was rooted in the specialisms of members of the Crossing Borders network, funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (2016-19), in line with the network’s ambition to bring together existing work on transmission and translation across the Insular regions. Project participants work across different linguistic and literary specialisms in English, Celtic, Scandinavian and French Studies, and the project has been designed to foster dialogue between discrete areas of study here approached in their fuller comparative and connective contexts.
Crossing Borders is designed to expand current understandings of northern European lines of textual transmission, with significant implications for medievalist scholarly approaches to national literatures, challenging previously dominant frameworks for the study of medieval literary cultures. The website is intended both an educational and research tool, as well as a visualisation of the connectedness of the Insular world – a zone which we understand to be connected rather than separated by the sea. This is a task which we recognise as all the more pressing in light of the increasing social and political dominance of narratives of national exceptionalism across Europe during the years of the project’s development. The practice of the project, which builds on the Crossing Borders conference series first held at Philipps-Universität Marburg in 2014, is similarly intended to reflect values of pan-European network and exchange, resting on a developed, and expanding, international network of scholarly collaboration.
