Jonatan Pettersson – författare

Change is a matter of central concern and interest in the study of history, and it has been approached with various methodological and theoretical means in different historical disciplines. The concept is, however, rarely addressed per se, despite its fundamental role for historical insight. This book addresses different kinds of change in medieval textual culture as examples or models of change. A model can take different forms: it consists of abstract representations, like a flowchart or a series of stages within a development, it might be a concept, like paradigm shift, or a single, but telling historical example. In their different forms, models serve as conceptual tools to enlighten historical instances of change. The contributions of this volume gather cases from a series of aspects of medieval textual culture which are subject to change: physical books, the acoustics of performed text, textualized worlds, scribes and authorship, genre, the choice of language in texts, and paleographic variance. The book also addresses problems of thinking in models and metaphors of change, as they also – as idols of the market – have the power to lead us astray if not carefully meditated.

How did networks of individuals and of institutions contribute to the reading, writing, and circulation of texts in the Middle Ages, and how did various types of texts in turn establish, manifest, and maintain social networks and identities? This book takes a broad approach on texts and networks in the Middle Ages by studying a wide range of text types and text materialities: courtly romances, compilations and multi-text manuscripts, reused book fragments, administrative texts, pilgrim itineraries, inscriptions, devotional graffiti and epigraphic syllogae. Through which networks were these texts, their authors and their readers connected, and how were texts circulated, copied and changed by religious and worldly institutions and their administrative units as well as by particular individuals?By approaching the material through a geographical and topographical lens by investigating what David Wallace in his 'Europe – a literary history' introduced as 'itineraries', the book will offer a new understanding of the variance and change of the texts in the various medieval 'graphospheres' of both the Nordic countries and Europe.