From Insular to European Romance: The Medieval 'Bevis'-Tradition in Multi-Text Manuscript Contexts

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Miriam Edlich-Muth
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies ; European and American Literary and Cultural Studies ; Medieval History
• Term: from 2019 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 434448311

The most popular form of secular literature to spread across Western Europe during the political upheaval of the late medieval period was the romance, a genre that concerns itself among other things with leadership and encounters between different communities. Studying the material adaptation history of these texts can reveal how narratives of inter-cultural conflict and engagement were being re-cast and reinterpreted in the course of being disseminated across the shifting linguistic and cultural borders of medieval Europe. Our proposed pan-European study of the widespread medieval romance 'Bevis of Hampton' ('Bevis') investigates how these romance texts became popular in a wide range of reading communities across Western Europe and the extent to which this process was facilitated by the medium of the medieval multi-text manuscript. As a well-studied tradition that has been preserved in at least fifteen multi-text manuscripts, 'Bevis' has particular potential to form the basis of an illuminating case-study on the role of multi-text manuscripts in shaping the reception of romances as foreign or part of regional textual traditions. The project will address the following questions:1. How do the subject matter and reception history of medieval romance traditions intersect with issues of regional identity?2. How did manuscript context influence the reception of popular medieval romances in reading communities from different regions?3. How did 'Bevis' and other short romances of the late medieval period become popular in such a wide range of reading communities?In answering these questions, our research will work toward four overarching objectives:Firstly, to create a theoretical and methodological template for assessing the degree to which the editorial and visual representation of a text within a multi-text manuscript contributes either to an ‘othering’ of the text as foreign or a domestication of the text into the literary tradition of a given reading community.Secondly, to create a comprehensive analysis of the specific role the multi-text manuscripts in which popular romances such as 'Bevis' were disseminated played in the process of culturally assimilating these texts across cultural and linguistic borders.Thirdly, to examine the process of adapting these romances across languages and dialects within the British Isles alongside the process of adapting these texts across the political and linguistic borders of Continental Europe and to thereby overcome the artificial separation between medieval romance research within national philologies and comparative research on medieval romance as a European tradition. Finally, our project aims to provide a counter-narrative to the assumed hegemony of medieval France as the point of origin for pan-European romances by engaging in depth with the process by which a romance that originated in a multi-lingual Insular setting was adapted regionally before being translated into Old French.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants