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'Histories and Genealogies: British Library Egerton 1500.'
Professor Catherine Leglu (MLES) is Principal Investigator on this project, which is funded by the Leverhulme Trust from 2011 to 2013. The project also employs two research assistants, Dr Alexander Ibarz and Dr Federico Botana.
British Library ms. Egerton 1500 is one of the last unedited Occitan texts, and an important yet unexplored example of vernacular translation from Latin in the later Middle Ages. It is a translation of one of the multiple drafts of a universal history (known successively as the Epitome, the Compendium and the Satyrica Historia) by the Franciscan inquisitor and diplomat Paolino da Venezia (Paolino Veneto), bishop of Pozzuoli (d.1344).
Our project aims to edit the Occitan text, and in so doing to establish as coherent a picture as possible of the codicological, artistic, linguistic, and historiographical contexts (Avignon, Naples and Venice) that inform that work. The visual scheme has long been identified as an adaptation of some of the most popular teaching/didactic schemata for biblical and other histories, but it is also evidence of the many techniques that were being developed by the mendicant orders for creating comprehensible tools for passing on knowledge.
To find out more about this project, visit our blog: http://blogs.reading.ac.uk/manuscript-egerton-1500/
Members of the GCMS are involved in national and international research projects.
Dr Aleksander Pluskowski (Archaeology) is principal investigator in a project on 'The Environmental Impact of Conquest, Colonisation and Religious Conversion in the Medieval Baltic', a multi-disciplinary research programme running from October 2010-2014, funded by the European Research Council. See their website:
The project, led by the Department of Archaeology at the University of Reading, consists of a core team of eight research associates, and collaborators from the Universities of Tartu (Estonia), Toruń and Białystok (Poland), as well as the castle museums at Malbork (Poland) and Cēsis (Latvia). It will be advised by an international steering panel and will involve students from all participating institutions.
For further enquiries please contact:
Amanda Harvey
(Postgraduate Administrator and GCMS Administrator)
or by mail
GCMS, Department of History, School of Humanities, University of Reading, Whiteknights, Reading RG6 6AA.
For current students requiring specific information regarding their course refer to Blackboard