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Laufende Forschungsprojekte

Materialities of the past in fifteenth century Iceland: The sögubók as cultural history

Abstract. Iceland's fifteenth century remains an understudied period in both literary and historical scholarship. Recent revaluations of late medieval saga literature, and an ongoing trend of rethinking long-held historical narratives based on earlier scholars' assumptions about cultural decline and textual transmission in the later Middle Ages, have so far only scratched the surface of what Iceland's fifteenth century manuscript evidence has to offer. This dissertation synthesizes methods from material philology, media studies, and ongoing historical rethinking in order to reappraise Iceland's late medieval sögubækur ('saga-books') and develop a methodology to approach them as sources of cultural mentalités, specifically concerning medieval Icelandic ideas about and uses of the past. Sagas are consciously and deliberately composed in a retrospective mood, and the ways in which medieval individuals or communities compiled, performed, and manipulated these sagas within the material contexts of the sögubók demonstrate a vivid and diverse cultural dialogue about how the past relates to, exposits, or obfuscates their fifteenth century present. Each manuscript uses the diverse catalogue of Iceland's late medieval textual culture to affect different constructions or narratives upon the past that in their own numerically unique material and narratological interplay reflect the aspirations, anxieties, wishes, fears, and lived experiences of the individuals or groups that produced and used them. In this investigation, the material identity, structure, and history of use beyond merely the initial creation of the manuscript are sources of valuable historical and cultural insights, in addition to and in dialogue with the diagetic complexities of the manuscript's (inter)text and paratext. Given that such sögubækur are numerous and often difficult to date, this dissertation selects a handful of well-localizable and dateable candidates as comparative case studies, including AM 471 4to, AM 557 4to (Skálholtsbók), AM 343 a 4to, etc. Such comparisons shall shed further light on the true cultural innovation of fifteenth century Icelandic textual culture and reveal the myriad ways in which late medieval Icelanders understood the past and related themselves to it.

Forschungsschwerpunkte

• Medialität und Materialität
• Kulturaustausch
• Erstellung und Austausch von Handschriften
• Kulturelle Konzeptualisierung der Vergangenheit
• Leserituale (z.B. kvöldvaka)
• Romanzen und Heldensagen
• Histoire des mentalités
• Identität und Alterität
• Uchronia und kulturelles Gedächtnis