Centre for Medieval Literature (CML) is a Centre of Excellence funded by The Danish National Research Foundation. The centre is operative for six years from February 1st 2012, with a possibility of a further grant for four years.
CML will seek to establish a cross-disciplinary theoretical framework for the study of medieval literature on a European scale.
The Centre is located at The University of Southern Denmark (Odense) and at The University of York and is run by prof. Lars Boje Mortensen (Centre leader, SDU), prof. Elizabeth Tyler (York), and associate prof. Christian Høgel (SDU). CML furthermore consists of participants from York and Odense and of a wider group of European and North American scholars.
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Surprises from the Past?
The impact of modern discoveries of ancient and medieval texts
Medieval Symposium 2013, SDU Odense, 11-12 November
In the field of ancient and medieval text-based scholarship, the unexpected surfacing of unknown texts in the middle of established scholarly fields provides an interesting test case for the issue of the resistance of disciplinary canons to the challenges posed by new discoveries. The interaction between a sudden new voice from the distant past and a field of study can be observed here in a pristine state as the recent find had played no role in defining the canon or canonical questions in the field.
Among the questions that will be addressed are the following:
- Can we assess the role of chance vs more meaningful historical processes in the forgetting and reappearing of this text?
- Did the find lead to any disciplinary soul-searching about the representativity of the old set of canonized texts / sources?
- Are there examples of canonical texts that only just survived and which could prompt useful counterfactual reflections? What would the field have looked like without them?
- Does it make sense to talk of textual 'resilience' in a given case? No matter what we want the text to say, does it stay strange, uncooperative or contradictory?
- Why does it always seem to make a big difference if a discovered text is anonymous or written by a known author?
You will find further details and the programme here.
Please register for the symposium here.