Manuscript and memory in religious communities in the Medieval Low Countries: an introduction

The special issue 'Manuscript and Memory in Religious Communities in the Medieval Low Countries' aims at critically questioning how memory practices, developed through and shaped by the medieval manuscript culture, contributed to strengthening religious communal life between the tenth and the early sixteenth centuries. The introductory article discusses the research traditions that have informed this collection of essays. There is, on the one hand, the tradition of memory studies, which since the late 1980s has become increasingly important in many humanities disciplines, particularly in medieval studies with its significant interest in the impact of the religiously-inspired memoria culture on medieval society. On the other hand, since the 1990s the same field of medieval studies has also been marked by the rise of material philology, which has not only fuelled many theoretical debates about the way in which our textual heritage should be understood and edited, but has also resulted in a renewed appreciation of the study of manuscripts themselves as meaningful bearers of medieval textual traditions. The introductory article subsequently explains how combining these two research traditions compels us to critically reconsider the role of manuscripts (cartularies, miscellanies, collections of sermons…) and the deployment of genres (annals, charters, lives, necrologia, treatises…) in the actual study of the culture of memoria in medieval religious communities.

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