Seminar on March 26, 2025 – On the Trail of Medieval Readers: Textual Networks and Reading Communities

In the last centuries of the Middle Ages, manuscript production experienced a dramatic increase; a significant part of this new production consisted of vernacular books, written for a new audience of readers who consumed both entertainment literature and religious and moral edification. Within this context, a prominent place is occupied by meditation texts on the life of Christ: these highly engaging texts were often transmitted within religious miscellanies that are poorly known. This lecture aims to reconstruct the network of these texts and of the manuscripts that preserve them, applying both traditional historical and philological methodologies and some techniques from social network analysis; the final goal is to outline a picture of the dissemination of these texts, which played an important role in spreading a new religious sensibility in premodern Europe.

Image: London, The British Library, MS. Harley 4431, f. 107r. © Public Domain.

The event will take place at Central European University, Nador u. 13., Budapest, Hungary, 1051.

For online participation, please write to Agnes Bendik at bendikag@ceu.edu.