Modes of Modification. Variance and Change in Medieval Manuscript Culture
Variance and change is central to this program. The manuscript culture of the Middle Ages has been characterised as constituted by variance on all levels, from palaeography and ortography to the transmission of motifs and larger textual units. An important contention at the outset of the program is that this variance plays perhaps the most significant role in our understanding of norms and change in the establishing of a literate culture. We therefore intend to carry out investigations of the modes of modification on various levels in the transmission of texts in order to establish a systematic synthesis. Two central perspectives concern time and space. We will operate with rather open definitions of both the time period covered by the program and the delimiting of the geographical area, something that may prove challenging but is essential to our approach. As for the time period relevant for the program the preliminary time-frame will be c. 900 to c. 1600, but this period will be transcended in both directions when necessary to achieve the synthesis we wish to establish. Primarily we will study the literate output of the Nordic region, but our perspective must inevitably lead us into European comparison. The overall aim of the program is twofold. Our first objective is to form a new synthesis in the view of texts in transmission in the Nordic realm. A second objective is to explore the theoretical and methodological issues further in order to contribute to the debate.
Final report
The programme followed the original plan with minor administrative adjustments. These were all within the financial frames allowed by the application and after consultation with RJ. Regarding the scholarly activities, plans have been followed at the same time as the research questions have been elaborated. We were able to extend the period of our seventh member, Anna Blennow, to the end of 2025, which allowed us to further expand the important perspective of Latin written culture. During the first two years the whole group gathered for three longer meetings according to the original plan, one week in October 2018 (Hamar), a second week in February 2019 (Tübingen) and the third week in October 2019 (Trento). Our first conference took place in November 2018 in Oslo to further develop our network with scholars working within our fields of interest and present the programme and its aims. This conference was successful and has opened for several new collaboration projects which we return to below. After the meeting in Trento we decided to replace the longer meetings with shorter meetings with a focus on well-defined research questions from the individual strands. During the pandemic also the shorter meetings were cancelled and replaced by frequent meetings on Zoom. Since the late spring of 2022 we have again been able to meet at conferences and workshops which was obviously a relief and necessary for the development of our common work. We still, however, continued to use Zoom to keep up our internal discussion on theory and method as well as on the devlopments of the individual strands.
There were small changes concerning the time and organisation of the planned conferences. The first of the thematic conferences with the title “Models of Change in Medieval Textual Culture” was planned in Stockholm in September 2020, but it could not be carried through depending on the Cocid pandemic. Instead, the invited speakers were gathered to two digital workshops in Autumn 2020 as a preparation for the conference which was subsequently held in Stockholm in August 2022. The following three planned conferences also had to be postponed. Our second conference with the concept of translatio and the meaning of translation of text and culture as its subject was organised in Venice in May 2022 according to the original plan. The third conference, with a focus on regional and international networks, was held in August 2023 while the last thematic conference in the planned series was held in Oslo in the fall of 2024, concentrating on the bilingual and digraphical situation in Scandinavia with a wider European outlook. These conferences have opened for new networks with scholars in other philological disciplines and for further collaboration. This has provided important inspiration and new ideas to all the strands of the programme.
In December 2025 we organised a final conference, inviting scholars with whom we have collaborated throughout the programme. This conference was also intended as an opening for new collaboration in joint research projects related to the overall theme of the programme. The members of the Modes of Modification group all held papers at the conference to present results from their respective strand of the programme.
As mentioned above the Latin scholar Anna Blennow (Göteborg University) prolonged her participation in the programme to the end of 2025. The bilingual aspect of medieval manuscript culture has therefore become more emphasised in our work. This has led us to address questions pertaining to the importance of bilingual as well as di-graphical contexts for the modifications of literacy and the use of texts in the Middle Ages. Anna Blennow has contributed to the focus on epigraphic strand of the project both concerning runes and Roman writing and in Latin and the vernacular languages. This focus was further strengthed as Alessandro Palumbo was associated to the programme and will be carried on in the ERC project received by Palumbo with participation of Anna Blennow, Elise Kleivane and Johan Bollaert in Göteborg and Oslo.
As already mentioned the overall research approach has been kept in its basic structure and layout, but parts of it have been modified over the years in various ways, partly due to input from expert assessors and from the Advisory Board, partly due to the fact that humanistic historical research, as a rule, is exploratory work where the overall goal of understanding human culture also involves a deepening of the understanding of which research questions are relevant and possible to ask. This applies in particular to the overarching goals that the project has suggested of synthesizing and developing theory, but it also applies to the more imperical studies of the individual sub-projects.
For instance, the programme intended to explore Europeanization as a process, but in our work we have become increasingly aware of the problems of this concept. While not neglecting the extremely important question of how Scandinavia became part of Europe, we realise that we have to address relations between Scandinavia and Europe in different ways, in terms of ecologies of literature, in polysystemic cultural relations, in the case of personal networks, as well as in the question of the relation between cosmopolitan language and the vernacular.
An example of a re-orientation in one of the sub-projects is Jonatan Pettersson’s research on pragmatic literacy in towns, in which the initially important idea that the towns played a pioneering role for the development of an administrative literacy did not meet the empirical support. Instead of holding on to a line of thinking that does not seem to provide sound insights it was therefore more rewarding to step back and consider towns as parts of the larger emerging textual landscape and thus shift the question towards a wider material and a wider perspective. This will prove an important new understanding of the role of urbanisation in the emerging administrative literacy.
A further example of an unexpected development was when we received additional epigraphic expertise and were able to test concepts from one material group, for instance administrative writing, on another, like runic epigraphy. Following such an intra-disciplinary route, the development of a ‘literate mentality’, which has been discussed for a long time solely against the background of administrative texts, was treated in the light of models and material from epigraphy, e.g. in relation to the concept of ‘epigraphic habit’, enabling theoretical innovation as well as synthesis. Both have been applied in our further investigations and have had significant implications for the outcome of our collective work.
We have generally been able to pursue studies along many of the lines suggested at the outset of the programme. The final results are expected to be presented in eight monographs in 2026 and 2027. The most exciting new issues that have appeared concern the relation between Latin written culture and the processes of vernacularisation of literate culture. Already at the outset we stated the importance of Latin written culture and the tendency in earlier scholarship to separate the vernacular from the common learned language of Latin. In the process of work this insight has been further strengthened and we are now even more convinced of the importance to see Latin and vernacular as parts of interrelated processes of literarisation throughout the period under scrutiny. We have also been strengthened in our conviction that it is of central importance to include all kinds of textual expressions – regarding genres as well as media – if we are to further our understanding of medieval textual culture, emphasising the incorporation of epigraphic and administrative texts in our study of the overall processes of literacy. This is a thread of inquiry where the programme has been innovative and will deliver new insights in the final publications.
Another material that has moved more to the centre in the programme concerns administrative, documentary and juridical texts. When these types of texts are related to the more literary canon we see lines of modifications and change in the interaction which are not recognised when they are studied separately. This line of investigation has been combined with observations concerning urbanisation where the importance of towns will be re-evaluated. The networks of Church and monasteries, aristocracy as well as the emerging towns play an important part in our investigation of these administrative texts.
The overall research questions of our programme, therefore, move the focus away from the traditional philological aim at recovering specific empirical results (e.g. which manuscript is the oldest one, what year was it written, which saga influenced other sagas, which years did the language change take place). These questions are absolutely still relevant, but they are often less important for the deeper understanding of the manuscript culture aimed at in our programme. Important results of the programme provide new insights in the role of various social groups in the fields of for example documentary writing and how these relate to texts that have traditionally been at the centre of philological investigations, as e.g. the Icelandic saga texts or the later eastern Scandinavian chronicles and translations of French romances. When we re-evaluate the concept of text this also opens up for new perspectives on the concept of author as well as our use of generic divisions, changing not only our understanding of documentary writing in the towns or epigraphic writing in various contexts, but also challenges us when we approach what has generally been considered the canon and the centre for philological investigation.
Our general approach to medieval textual culture has further opened up for new perspectives on the transition between this culture and the emerging printed book culture in the late Middle Ages. Here we have focused on to lines of this interesting transition: first, the continuity of some textual traditions from medieval manuscript to the printed form and the modes of modifying these texts in new contexts, and second, the long tradition of Biblical texts in the Middle Ages and its significance for the post-Reformation printed texts and their use.
Our new forum, using Zoom, enabled us to meet more frequently and these meetings have provided an arena to re-think our investigations in relation to observation points as well as the overall theoretical aspects of our endeavour such as Latinisation, vernacularisation, diversity, variance and change. From this new theoretical foundation each strand develops new questions that are treated in articles in journals and anthologies in preparation for the final monographs to be published in 2026 and 2027. The overall research questions are still the ones formed in the application, but they have been further nuanced. A new focus that is relevant for all strands concerns the relation between centre and periphery as it is used in e.g. the polysystem theory. The above-mentioned concepts have generated much debate in medieval scholarship in recent years and have been brought to the fore in our recent theoretical discussions. As an example, our conviction is that centre and periphery are not to be considered as a dichotomy but as different points of view: for example, a medieval user of learned texts could be geographically peripheral (in e.g. northern Iceland) and at the same time definitely in the centre of education (in reading contemporary texts in transmission and perhaps even having an education from Paris or Bologna). This discussion and the awareness of this multifaceted perspective has been highly relevant for our overall approach as well as for the individual strands. The aspects of centre and periphery are closely related to the polysystem theory that has been governing much of our work and the idea of observation points as nodes in the polysystem. Each node is expected to elucidate the relation between centre and periphery in the overall polysystem of literate activities both concerning space and time.
The two above-mentioned areas of epigraphy and administrative texts have instigated new questions concerning the relation between Latin and the vernaculars as well as the importance of these types of texts in the overall development of literacy in the Scandinavian region. Instead of discussing them as separate from the canonical texts we have involved them in our overall research questions, something that has proved to be very fruitful.
A common topic to all strands of the project concerns the various networks operating in the Middle Ages. Inspired by David Wallace’s use of the concept itineraries for the movement of ideas, texts, books as well as people we further our investigation of networks and their roles in modifying the use of writing and manuscripts in the Middle Ages. Our conference in Göteborg in August 2023 was dedicated to networks and their importance for changes and innovations in the overall culture. We had invited David Wallace to take part as a speaker at this conference and have received much inspiration in our collaboration.
The final thematic conference in Oslo 2024 opened a new line of collaboration in the field of bi-lingual and di-graphic studies. Our aim here was to invite scholars from other lingustic and textual studies in order to exchange experiences and to enhance further collaboration. As this had turned out to be an area where our programme have come to play a central role in Scandinavian studies we expect this conference to further strengthen international collaboration in mutual exchange in the future as the programme now is finished.
The programme has been engaged in a highly international field of research and has developed a strong international network within Scandinavian studies as well as within more general medieval scholarship. To our first conference in Oslo in 2018 we had invited participants from Europe as well as from overseas (a total of 25 invited scholars) primarily from our own disciplines. This initiative turned out very well and resulted in a number of collaboration projects. Our Advisory Board has consisted of members from England and the United States. The members have contributed actively to our work and furthered our network within their fields of expertise. We also invited Itamar Even-Zohar, the scholar who coined the concept of polysystem, in our group of close collaborators, and he participated in our meeting in Trento in October 2019. In our web conference on change we invited scholars from various disciplines from a wider area of interests in order to open up new avenues of international and multidisciplinary collaboration. This ambition to open new lines of collaboration was continued in our two international conferences on compilations and translatio, both organised in Venice in the spring of 2022. Creating networks outside of our own discipline has been crucial for our work on the use of writing and texts in the Scandinavian Middle Ages. In November 2022 we organised a conference with scholars of medieval Latin from all the Nordic countries in Stockholm in order to further our network in this area. At this conference a new more formal network was initiated where Anna Blennow and Karl G. Johansson have participated to enhance the coordination and initiate further collaboration between researchers of Latin and the vernacular. In November 2023 we invited a number of scholars to a workshop concerning manuscript culture in Norway in the period c. 1350 to c. 1550 in order to further our understanding of literacy in this period of alleged decay. This workshop also resulted a book on this theme (under publication 2026). A parallel book is under production on Icelandic manuscript culture in the same period, a collaboration between philologists and historians from a number of European universities (to be published in 2026 or 2027). These workshops and book projects have been initiated in order to enhance our own work towards the goals of the programme.
At the outset we established a publication series at Walter de Gruyter in Berlin. In this series we have so far published three anthologies, while two more are at the moment in press. In accordance with the publication plan eight monographs are to be submitted to the series during 2026 and 2027:
• Massimiliano Bampi. Working title: The Text as Process: Intertextual Dynamics and Generic Perspectives in Late Medieval Scandinavian Multi-Text Manuscripts
• Stefanie Gropper. Working title: Aspects of Authorship in Icelandic Saga Literature
• Anna Catharina Horn. Working title: Archiving practices in Medieval Scandinavia
• Karl G. Johansson. Working title: People, Texts and Manuscripts in the Scandinavian Middle Ages. Eight Chapters Towards a History of Texts
• Karl G. Johansson. Working title: The Use and Functions of Eddic Poetry in Medieval Manuscript Culture
• Elise Kleivane. Working title: Public and very personal. Writing in medieval Norway – the epigraphic side of the story
• Alessandro Palumbo. Working title: A medieval linguistic landscape: Multilingualism and multiscriptality in Scandinavian epigraphy 1100–1500.
• Jonatan Pettersson. Working title: Documentary Writing in Medieval Scandinavia: Textualisation and Vernacularisation
It should also be mentioned that the series has been opened to publications from outside of the programme (one volume is under publication) and that it will be continued after the programme monographs are published. All volumes will be published with Walter de Gruyter both as printed books and as Open Access. As the programme has generated a lot of research by each individual member and in various forms of collaboration with other scholars, there is a large number of publications of our results in journals and anthologies as well as in monographs. These publications are part of a wide range of activities and thus reach a broad and interdisciplinary audience. They are part of the presentation of the project but are still additions to the original publication plan. It has been an ambition thoughout the programme to publish in peer-reviewed journals and anthologies and Open Access whenever possible. The individual strands have been actively conducted since the programme was started in January 2018 and there are now a large number of publications documenting our work, and more are forthcoming, with preliminary results for each strand (see Publications). The members of the group have taken part in the editing of a number of anthologies that present important results related to the programme at the same time as they reflect our work to build networks of scholars working with related questions. Good examples of this is the collaborative editorial work presented by Bampi (2020 and 2021), Gropper (2021), Horn (2020), Johansson (2021), and Kleivane (2021). We have also started a number of sub-projects involving co-writing between the strands. Some results can be seen in the list of publications and further collaborative texts are due in the near future. As an example Massimiliano Bampi and Karl G. Johansson are writing a chapter in a book together with Lena Rohrbach (Zürich) where the questions concern the relation between 15th century Icelandic manuscripts, the texts they present and how the appearance of texts in various manuscript contexts has implications for our understanding of genre in the later Middle Ages.
All the members of the programme have presented their research at international conferences as well as in more local contexts. We have also presented the programme in various contexts on several occasions thoughout the programme period. From 2020 much of our outreach has been directed to digital media and some of our planned activities have been postponed, but we still have been able to take part in relevant activities.
The members of the programme have all been active both in their field of specialisation as well as in cross-disciplinary collaboration. We choose here to present a selection of the individual activities alphabetically.
Massimiliano Bampi has been involved in the project “Emotion and the Medieval Self in Northern Europe” (http://medievalemotion.hi.is/). Within the project, he has worked on emotions and genre. In collaboration with Anna Katharina Richter (Zürich) he arranged the conference The "Eufemiaviser" and the Reception of Courtly Culture in Late Medieval Denmark, Zürich, 13.–14. September 2018. This collaboration has also led to a publication which includes articles by Bampi, Johansson and Pettersson (see Bibliography). Together with Karl G. Johansson he organised a workshop on compilations and collections in medieval manuscripts (Compilations, Collections and the Composite Manuscript in the Middle Ages: Genres on the Move and Networks of Dissemination) including scholars from English, German, French, Italian and Russian philology. The workshop took place in Venice in March 2022.
Anna Blennow organised a workshop at the Swedish Institute in Rome on texts related to Pilgrimages to Rome (Textspår av medeltidens Rom – på besök i pilgrimernas textvärld) in March 2023 with contributions from members of the program. In her work in Rome Blennow has established a number of new network contacts relevant to her own strand and further research activities, as e.g. the Norwegian Institute in Rome, and with colleagues at the universities Università Gregoriana and Università la Sapienza. Blennow organised a workshop at the Swedish Institute in Rome with the title Medeltida texter i rörelse – nordeuropeiska pilgrimsfärder till Rom. The arrangement was in collaboration with Modes of Modification and was carried out within the frameworks of Blennow’s guest research stay at the Institute, funded by RJ. The workshop handled texts describing pilgrimage from the north to Rome in relation to a more general European material. There was also a session on medieval runic graffiti in Italy as well as the mention of northern pilgrims in monastic guestbooks. Finally Blennow organised a conference (Medeltida latin i Norden: forskningsläge och framtid) at the National Archives, Stockholm in November 2022 in a collaboration between Stockholm University and the programme. This conference resulted in the establishing of a more formal network for collaboration between scholars of medieval Latin in Scandinavia and is also expected to lead to further collaboration between Latin scholars and scholars working with the vernacular languages.
The strong milieu for the study of runic and Latin epigraphy which has its core group within the programme has arranged a number of activites. Anna Blennow and Elise Kleivane together with PhD candidate Johan Bollaert arranged an international workshop at Göteborg University on Epigraphy and Visuality – Visual Aspects of Runic and Latin Inscriptions, 23.–24. October 2019. Involving also Alessandro Palumbo they arranged a web workshop, Epigraphy and Place, on classical and medieval epigraphy and theoretical aspects of epigraphy with a group of invited international scholars, 17. February 2021.
Stefanie Gropper has been part of a German collaborative research project, which was funded by the German Research Organisation (DFG) from July 2019 to June 2023 and which received a prolongation for another four years. In the first funding period Gropper’s project about the narrative voice in the Íslendingasögur involved funding for a postdoc working with research questions relevant for the Modes of Modification programme. In the second period her project will extend her text corpus to the thirteenth century text Sturlunga saga. In collaboration with Judy Quinn from Cambridge University Gropper has carried out a German-British collaborative research project (2020-2023) which was funded by the German Research Organisation and the British Arts and Humanities Research Council. The project about the Íslendingasögur as Prosimetrum involved two postdocs – one in Germany and one in the UK – working with research questions relevant for the Modes of Modification programme. Finally, Gropper organised an international workshop, The Medieval Author. A Phantasm? Tübingen, 24.–25. July 2019. The workshop was a collaboration with Lukas Rösli, then at University of Zürich, and has also led to a publication (2021; see Publications).
Anna Catharina Horn participated in a group of scholars from Bergen and Oslo that established a number of projects in relation to Magnus Lagabætr’s law of the Realm (MLL) in preparation for the 750-year celebration of the law in 2024. In relation to this Horn published an electronic edition of a manuscript of MLL (Holm perg 34 4to) with parallel translation in Norwegian (see: https://clarino.uib.no/menota/catalogue). Together with Karl G. Johansson she organised a workshop in collaboration with professor Jón Viðar Sigurðsson (University of Oslo) and professor Lena Rohrbach (Universities of Zürich and Basel) held in October 2019 in Basel. The theme of this workshop was the administrative literacy of three bishop sees, Skálholt and Hólar in Iceland and Skara in Sweden, from a comparative perspective. Fifteen scholars (including Blennow, Palumbo and Pettersson) with expertise in these fields attended the workshop. This activity has generated a book project on manuscript culture in the 15th century to be edited by Lena Rohrbach, Jón Viðar Sigurðsson and Karl G. Johansson (expected in 2026) and a workshop on aspects of Norwegian literacy in the 15th century organised by Anna Horn and Karl G. Johansson in the fall of 2023 which is currently being under preparation for publication in 2026.
Karl G. Johansson formed a group of scholars which arranged three conferences investigating the importance of the Augustine abbey of St Victor in Paris for the emerging literacy in Scandinavia in the twelfth century (Odense in June 2022, Oslo in November 2022 and Stockholm May 2023). The group received funding from NOS-HS. The papers from these conferences are now forming the core of a publication due to be published by Brepols in 2026. The collaboration team consisted of scholars from England (Siân Grønlie, Oxford University), Denmark (Christian Etheridge, Copenhagen/Nationalmuseum, Stockholm), Finland (Samu Niskanen, University of Helsinki), Sweden (Roger Andersson, Stockholm University) and Norway (Hilde Bliksrud, University of Oslo).
Elise Kleivane arranged a conference, Writing and the Vikings, at the University of Nottingham on the 16. March 2019 in collaboration with Professor Judith Jesch (Nottingham). The conference formed a part of Kleivane’s individual project ‘Between Runes and Manuscripts’ funded by the Norwegian Research Council (NFR). Together with Alessandro Palumbo she has received funding for developing a database with Latin and vernacular epigraphy by University of Oslo. This database will contribute significantly to our work.
Jonatan Pettersson together with colleagues from Stockholm University (Richard Pleijel) and Uppsala University (Henrik Williams and Lasse Mårtensson) initiated a collaboration to form a book in time for the 500th anniversary of the first translation of the New Testament into Swedish in 1526. This publication is now in print and will be presented at an event in Stockholm in August 2026. Together with Lasse Mårtensson (Uppsala University) he is planning a parallel book project on the manuscript Cod Holm A 1 which contains medieval translations of Biblical texts and was produced in 1526, the same year as the publication of the Swedish translation of the New Testament in print.
The programme succeeded with an application for a postdoc funded by Marie Sklodowska Curie Individual Fellowship in 2018. Alessandro Palumbo received funding and was associated to the programme in the years 2019–2022. During this period, however, he received a position as associate professor at the University of Oslo which enabled him to be part of the programme group until 2025. From January 2026 Palumbo leads a project financed by ERC (Starting grant) until 2029. The programme ventured another two applications for two postdocs within the Marie Sklodowska Curie Individual Fellowship for Minjie Su who defended her PhD thesis at Oxford University in 2020 and Nelson Goering with an MPhil and DPhil from the University of Oxford in General Linguistics and Comparative Philology. Both applications succeeded and both postdocs are at the moment active at University of Oslo.
One strength of the programme has been that the scholars who participate represent a wide spectrum of competence within the field of Scandinavian studies, from runic inscriptions and Latin epigraphy to late medieval charters and on to the reformation period manuscripts and early printed books. This has allowed for an intradiciplinary discussion which has proven especially fruitful in the exchange of concepts and analytical framworks between the different sub-disciplines. Furthermore, the joint theoretical approach, using a modified polysystem theory has provided means to study the mechanisms of variance and change in various contexts in a fruitful way. This was a necessary joint standpoint if the wide spatial as well as temporal perspectives of the programme were to be handled according to the overall plan. It has also been a strength of the project that the individual members are parts of large international networks which has opened for further collaborative efforts to reach some of the goals. Some of the weaknesses of the programme were also relatively clear to us from the outset and were to some extent related to the strengths. The wide competence represented in the programme needed to be coordinated in order for us to reach the synthesis that we aimed for. This meant that the involved scholars needed to find new ways to collaborate, something that at times was posing challenges. We therefore were challenged to address common questions of theory and method continuously in order to make the individual strands correspond in forming the end result in eight monographs. As has been mentioned above the development over the last years strengthened our group in these respects. The pandemic thus not only had disadvantages but also advantages for our programme. From our frequent web meetings, both with the full group and on a more individual level, there have appeared a number of collaborative writing projects, both on the theoretical and methodological aspects of the programme as well as of a more empirical nature where two or more of the group members approach the material from different perspectives. As the individual monographs are now beginning to form, we continue the process of reading and commenting extensively on eachother’s written texts. We have great expectations that this will all turn out to present relevant and engaging results in relation to the overall goals of the programme.
There were small changes concerning the time and organisation of the planned conferences. The first of the thematic conferences with the title “Models of Change in Medieval Textual Culture” was planned in Stockholm in September 2020, but it could not be carried through depending on the Cocid pandemic. Instead, the invited speakers were gathered to two digital workshops in Autumn 2020 as a preparation for the conference which was subsequently held in Stockholm in August 2022. The following three planned conferences also had to be postponed. Our second conference with the concept of translatio and the meaning of translation of text and culture as its subject was organised in Venice in May 2022 according to the original plan. The third conference, with a focus on regional and international networks, was held in August 2023 while the last thematic conference in the planned series was held in Oslo in the fall of 2024, concentrating on the bilingual and digraphical situation in Scandinavia with a wider European outlook. These conferences have opened for new networks with scholars in other philological disciplines and for further collaboration. This has provided important inspiration and new ideas to all the strands of the programme.
In December 2025 we organised a final conference, inviting scholars with whom we have collaborated throughout the programme. This conference was also intended as an opening for new collaboration in joint research projects related to the overall theme of the programme. The members of the Modes of Modification group all held papers at the conference to present results from their respective strand of the programme.
As mentioned above the Latin scholar Anna Blennow (Göteborg University) prolonged her participation in the programme to the end of 2025. The bilingual aspect of medieval manuscript culture has therefore become more emphasised in our work. This has led us to address questions pertaining to the importance of bilingual as well as di-graphical contexts for the modifications of literacy and the use of texts in the Middle Ages. Anna Blennow has contributed to the focus on epigraphic strand of the project both concerning runes and Roman writing and in Latin and the vernacular languages. This focus was further strengthed as Alessandro Palumbo was associated to the programme and will be carried on in the ERC project received by Palumbo with participation of Anna Blennow, Elise Kleivane and Johan Bollaert in Göteborg and Oslo.
As already mentioned the overall research approach has been kept in its basic structure and layout, but parts of it have been modified over the years in various ways, partly due to input from expert assessors and from the Advisory Board, partly due to the fact that humanistic historical research, as a rule, is exploratory work where the overall goal of understanding human culture also involves a deepening of the understanding of which research questions are relevant and possible to ask. This applies in particular to the overarching goals that the project has suggested of synthesizing and developing theory, but it also applies to the more imperical studies of the individual sub-projects.
For instance, the programme intended to explore Europeanization as a process, but in our work we have become increasingly aware of the problems of this concept. While not neglecting the extremely important question of how Scandinavia became part of Europe, we realise that we have to address relations between Scandinavia and Europe in different ways, in terms of ecologies of literature, in polysystemic cultural relations, in the case of personal networks, as well as in the question of the relation between cosmopolitan language and the vernacular.
An example of a re-orientation in one of the sub-projects is Jonatan Pettersson’s research on pragmatic literacy in towns, in which the initially important idea that the towns played a pioneering role for the development of an administrative literacy did not meet the empirical support. Instead of holding on to a line of thinking that does not seem to provide sound insights it was therefore more rewarding to step back and consider towns as parts of the larger emerging textual landscape and thus shift the question towards a wider material and a wider perspective. This will prove an important new understanding of the role of urbanisation in the emerging administrative literacy.
A further example of an unexpected development was when we received additional epigraphic expertise and were able to test concepts from one material group, for instance administrative writing, on another, like runic epigraphy. Following such an intra-disciplinary route, the development of a ‘literate mentality’, which has been discussed for a long time solely against the background of administrative texts, was treated in the light of models and material from epigraphy, e.g. in relation to the concept of ‘epigraphic habit’, enabling theoretical innovation as well as synthesis. Both have been applied in our further investigations and have had significant implications for the outcome of our collective work.
We have generally been able to pursue studies along many of the lines suggested at the outset of the programme. The final results are expected to be presented in eight monographs in 2026 and 2027. The most exciting new issues that have appeared concern the relation between Latin written culture and the processes of vernacularisation of literate culture. Already at the outset we stated the importance of Latin written culture and the tendency in earlier scholarship to separate the vernacular from the common learned language of Latin. In the process of work this insight has been further strengthened and we are now even more convinced of the importance to see Latin and vernacular as parts of interrelated processes of literarisation throughout the period under scrutiny. We have also been strengthened in our conviction that it is of central importance to include all kinds of textual expressions – regarding genres as well as media – if we are to further our understanding of medieval textual culture, emphasising the incorporation of epigraphic and administrative texts in our study of the overall processes of literacy. This is a thread of inquiry where the programme has been innovative and will deliver new insights in the final publications.
Another material that has moved more to the centre in the programme concerns administrative, documentary and juridical texts. When these types of texts are related to the more literary canon we see lines of modifications and change in the interaction which are not recognised when they are studied separately. This line of investigation has been combined with observations concerning urbanisation where the importance of towns will be re-evaluated. The networks of Church and monasteries, aristocracy as well as the emerging towns play an important part in our investigation of these administrative texts.
The overall research questions of our programme, therefore, move the focus away from the traditional philological aim at recovering specific empirical results (e.g. which manuscript is the oldest one, what year was it written, which saga influenced other sagas, which years did the language change take place). These questions are absolutely still relevant, but they are often less important for the deeper understanding of the manuscript culture aimed at in our programme. Important results of the programme provide new insights in the role of various social groups in the fields of for example documentary writing and how these relate to texts that have traditionally been at the centre of philological investigations, as e.g. the Icelandic saga texts or the later eastern Scandinavian chronicles and translations of French romances. When we re-evaluate the concept of text this also opens up for new perspectives on the concept of author as well as our use of generic divisions, changing not only our understanding of documentary writing in the towns or epigraphic writing in various contexts, but also challenges us when we approach what has generally been considered the canon and the centre for philological investigation.
Our general approach to medieval textual culture has further opened up for new perspectives on the transition between this culture and the emerging printed book culture in the late Middle Ages. Here we have focused on to lines of this interesting transition: first, the continuity of some textual traditions from medieval manuscript to the printed form and the modes of modifying these texts in new contexts, and second, the long tradition of Biblical texts in the Middle Ages and its significance for the post-Reformation printed texts and their use.
Our new forum, using Zoom, enabled us to meet more frequently and these meetings have provided an arena to re-think our investigations in relation to observation points as well as the overall theoretical aspects of our endeavour such as Latinisation, vernacularisation, diversity, variance and change. From this new theoretical foundation each strand develops new questions that are treated in articles in journals and anthologies in preparation for the final monographs to be published in 2026 and 2027. The overall research questions are still the ones formed in the application, but they have been further nuanced. A new focus that is relevant for all strands concerns the relation between centre and periphery as it is used in e.g. the polysystem theory. The above-mentioned concepts have generated much debate in medieval scholarship in recent years and have been brought to the fore in our recent theoretical discussions. As an example, our conviction is that centre and periphery are not to be considered as a dichotomy but as different points of view: for example, a medieval user of learned texts could be geographically peripheral (in e.g. northern Iceland) and at the same time definitely in the centre of education (in reading contemporary texts in transmission and perhaps even having an education from Paris or Bologna). This discussion and the awareness of this multifaceted perspective has been highly relevant for our overall approach as well as for the individual strands. The aspects of centre and periphery are closely related to the polysystem theory that has been governing much of our work and the idea of observation points as nodes in the polysystem. Each node is expected to elucidate the relation between centre and periphery in the overall polysystem of literate activities both concerning space and time.
The two above-mentioned areas of epigraphy and administrative texts have instigated new questions concerning the relation between Latin and the vernaculars as well as the importance of these types of texts in the overall development of literacy in the Scandinavian region. Instead of discussing them as separate from the canonical texts we have involved them in our overall research questions, something that has proved to be very fruitful.
A common topic to all strands of the project concerns the various networks operating in the Middle Ages. Inspired by David Wallace’s use of the concept itineraries for the movement of ideas, texts, books as well as people we further our investigation of networks and their roles in modifying the use of writing and manuscripts in the Middle Ages. Our conference in Göteborg in August 2023 was dedicated to networks and their importance for changes and innovations in the overall culture. We had invited David Wallace to take part as a speaker at this conference and have received much inspiration in our collaboration.
The final thematic conference in Oslo 2024 opened a new line of collaboration in the field of bi-lingual and di-graphic studies. Our aim here was to invite scholars from other lingustic and textual studies in order to exchange experiences and to enhance further collaboration. As this had turned out to be an area where our programme have come to play a central role in Scandinavian studies we expect this conference to further strengthen international collaboration in mutual exchange in the future as the programme now is finished.
The programme has been engaged in a highly international field of research and has developed a strong international network within Scandinavian studies as well as within more general medieval scholarship. To our first conference in Oslo in 2018 we had invited participants from Europe as well as from overseas (a total of 25 invited scholars) primarily from our own disciplines. This initiative turned out very well and resulted in a number of collaboration projects. Our Advisory Board has consisted of members from England and the United States. The members have contributed actively to our work and furthered our network within their fields of expertise. We also invited Itamar Even-Zohar, the scholar who coined the concept of polysystem, in our group of close collaborators, and he participated in our meeting in Trento in October 2019. In our web conference on change we invited scholars from various disciplines from a wider area of interests in order to open up new avenues of international and multidisciplinary collaboration. This ambition to open new lines of collaboration was continued in our two international conferences on compilations and translatio, both organised in Venice in the spring of 2022. Creating networks outside of our own discipline has been crucial for our work on the use of writing and texts in the Scandinavian Middle Ages. In November 2022 we organised a conference with scholars of medieval Latin from all the Nordic countries in Stockholm in order to further our network in this area. At this conference a new more formal network was initiated where Anna Blennow and Karl G. Johansson have participated to enhance the coordination and initiate further collaboration between researchers of Latin and the vernacular. In November 2023 we invited a number of scholars to a workshop concerning manuscript culture in Norway in the period c. 1350 to c. 1550 in order to further our understanding of literacy in this period of alleged decay. This workshop also resulted a book on this theme (under publication 2026). A parallel book is under production on Icelandic manuscript culture in the same period, a collaboration between philologists and historians from a number of European universities (to be published in 2026 or 2027). These workshops and book projects have been initiated in order to enhance our own work towards the goals of the programme.
At the outset we established a publication series at Walter de Gruyter in Berlin
• Massimiliano Bampi. Working title: The Text as Process: Intertextual Dynamics and Generic Perspectives in Late Medieval Scandinavian Multi-Text Manuscripts
• Stefanie Gropper. Working title: Aspects of Authorship in Icelandic Saga Literature
• Anna Catharina Horn. Working title: Archiving practices in Medieval Scandinavia
• Karl G. Johansson. Working title: People, Texts and Manuscripts in the Scandinavian Middle Ages. Eight Chapters Towards a History of Texts
• Karl G. Johansson. Working title: The Use and Functions of Eddic Poetry in Medieval Manuscript Culture
• Elise Kleivane. Working title: Public and very personal. Writing in medieval Norway – the epigraphic side of the story
• Alessandro Palumbo. Working title: A medieval linguistic landscape: Multilingualism and multiscriptality in Scandinavian epigraphy 1100–1500.
• Jonatan Pettersson. Working title: Documentary Writing in Medieval Scandinavia: Textualisation and Vernacularisation
It should also be mentioned that the series has been opened to publications from outside of the programme (one volume is under publication) and that it will be continued after the programme monographs are published. All volumes will be published with Walter de Gruyter both as printed books and as Open Access. As the programme has generated a lot of research by each individual member and in various forms of collaboration with other scholars, there is a large number of publications of our results in journals and anthologies as well as in monographs. These publications are part of a wide range of activities and thus reach a broad and interdisciplinary audience. They are part of the presentation of the project but are still additions to the original publication plan. It has been an ambition thoughout the programme to publish in peer-reviewed journals and anthologies and Open Access whenever possible. The individual strands have been actively conducted since the programme was started in January 2018 and there are now a large number of publications documenting our work, and more are forthcoming, with preliminary results for each strand (see Publications). The members of the group have taken part in the editing of a number of anthologies that present important results related to the programme at the same time as they reflect our work to build networks of scholars working with related questions. Good examples of this is the collaborative editorial work presented by Bampi (2020 and 2021), Gropper (2021), Horn (2020), Johansson (2021), and Kleivane (2021). We have also started a number of sub-projects involving co-writing between the strands. Some results can be seen in the list of publications and further collaborative texts are due in the near future. As an example Massimiliano Bampi and Karl G. Johansson are writing a chapter in a book together with Lena Rohrbach (Zürich) where the questions concern the relation between 15th century Icelandic manuscripts, the texts they present and how the appearance of texts in various manuscript contexts has implications for our understanding of genre in the later Middle Ages.
All the members of the programme have presented their research at international conferences as well as in more local contexts. We have also presented the programme in various contexts on several occasions thoughout the programme period. From 2020 much of our outreach has been directed to digital media and some of our planned activities have been postponed, but we still have been able to take part in relevant activities.
The members of the programme have all been active both in their field of specialisation as well as in cross-disciplinary collaboration. We choose here to present a selection of the individual activities alphabetically.
Massimiliano Bampi has been involved in the project “Emotion and the Medieval Self in Northern Europe” (http://medievalemotion.hi.is/). Within the project, he has worked on emotions and genre. In collaboration with Anna Katharina Richter (Zürich) he arranged the conference The "Eufemiaviser" and the Reception of Courtly Culture in Late Medieval Denmark, Zürich, 13.–14. September 2018. This collaboration has also led to a publication which includes articles by Bampi, Johansson and Pettersson (see Bibliography). Together with Karl G. Johansson he organised a workshop on compilations and collections in medieval manuscripts (Compilations, Collections and the Composite Manuscript in the Middle Ages: Genres on the Move and Networks of Dissemination) including scholars from English, German, French, Italian and Russian philology. The workshop took place in Venice in March 2022.
Anna Blennow organised a workshop at the Swedish Institute in Rome on texts related to Pilgrimages to Rome (Textspår av medeltidens Rom – på besök i pilgrimernas textvärld) in March 2023 with contributions from members of the program. In her work in Rome Blennow has established a number of new network contacts relevant to her own strand and further research activities, as e.g. the Norwegian Institute in Rome, and with colleagues at the universities Università Gregoriana and Università la Sapienza. Blennow organised a workshop at the Swedish Institute in Rome with the title Medeltida texter i rörelse – nordeuropeiska pilgrimsfärder till Rom. The arrangement was in collaboration with Modes of Modification and was carried out within the frameworks of Blennow’s guest research stay at the Institute, funded by RJ. The workshop handled texts describing pilgrimage from the north to Rome in relation to a more general European material. There was also a session on medieval runic graffiti in Italy as well as the mention of northern pilgrims in monastic guestbooks. Finally Blennow organised a conference (Medeltida latin i Norden: forskningsläge och framtid) at the National Archives, Stockholm in November 2022 in a collaboration between Stockholm University and the programme. This conference resulted in the establishing of a more formal network for collaboration between scholars of medieval Latin in Scandinavia and is also expected to lead to further collaboration between Latin scholars and scholars working with the vernacular languages.
The strong milieu for the study of runic and Latin epigraphy which has its core group within the programme has arranged a number of activites. Anna Blennow and Elise Kleivane together with PhD candidate Johan Bollaert arranged an international workshop at Göteborg University on Epigraphy and Visuality – Visual Aspects of Runic and Latin Inscriptions, 23.–24. October 2019. Involving also Alessandro Palumbo they arranged a web workshop, Epigraphy and Place, on classical and medieval epigraphy and theoretical aspects of epigraphy with a group of invited international scholars, 17. February 2021.
Stefanie Gropper has been part of a German collaborative research project, which was funded by the German Research Organisation (DFG) from July 2019 to June 2023 and which received a prolongation for another four years. In the first funding period Gropper’s project about the narrative voice in the Íslendingasögur involved funding for a postdoc working with research questions relevant for the Modes of Modification programme. In the second period her project will extend her text corpus to the thirteenth century text Sturlunga saga. In collaboration with Judy Quinn from Cambridge University Gropper has carried out a German-British collaborative research project (2020-2023) which was funded by the German Research Organisation and the British Arts and Humanities Research Council. The project about the Íslendingasögur as Prosimetrum involved two postdocs – one in Germany and one in the UK – working with research questions relevant for the Modes of Modification programme. Finally, Gropper organised an international workshop, The Medieval Author. A Phantasm? Tübingen, 24.–25. July 2019. The workshop was a collaboration with Lukas Rösli, then at University of Zürich, and has also led to a publication (2021; see Publications).
Anna Catharina Horn participated in a group of scholars from Bergen and Oslo that established a number of projects in relation to Magnus Lagabætr’s law of the Realm (MLL) in preparation for the 750-year celebration of the law in 2024. In relation to this Horn published an electronic edition of a manuscript of MLL (Holm perg 34 4to) with parallel translation in Norwegian (see: https://clarino.uib.no/menota/catalogue). Together with Karl G. Johansson she organised a workshop in collaboration with professor Jón Viðar Sigurðsson (University of Oslo) and professor Lena Rohrbach (Universities of Zürich and Basel) held in October 2019 in Basel. The theme of this workshop was the administrative literacy of three bishop sees, Skálholt and Hólar in Iceland and Skara in Sweden, from a comparative perspective. Fifteen scholars (including Blennow, Palumbo and Pettersson) with expertise in these fields attended the workshop. This activity has generated a book project on manuscript culture in the 15th century to be edited by Lena Rohrbach, Jón Viðar Sigurðsson and Karl G. Johansson (expected in 2026) and a workshop on aspects of Norwegian literacy in the 15th century organised by Anna Horn and Karl G. Johansson in the fall of 2023 which is currently being under preparation for publication in 2026.
Karl G. Johansson formed a group of scholars which arranged three conferences investigating the importance of the Augustine abbey of St Victor in Paris for the emerging literacy in Scandinavia in the twelfth century (Odense in June 2022, Oslo in November 2022 and Stockholm May 2023). The group received funding from NOS-HS. The papers from these conferences are now forming the core of a publication due to be published by Brepols in 2026. The collaboration team consisted of scholars from England (Siân Grønlie, Oxford University), Denmark (Christian Etheridge, Copenhagen/Nationalmuseum, Stockholm), Finland (Samu Niskanen, University of Helsinki), Sweden (Roger Andersson, Stockholm University) and Norway (Hilde Bliksrud, University of Oslo).
Elise Kleivane arranged a conference, Writing and the Vikings, at the University of Nottingham on the 16. March 2019 in collaboration with Professor Judith Jesch (Nottingham). The conference formed a part of Kleivane’s individual project ‘Between Runes and Manuscripts’ funded by the Norwegian Research Council (NFR). Together with Alessandro Palumbo she has received funding for developing a database with Latin and vernacular epigraphy by University of Oslo. This database will contribute significantly to our work.
Jonatan Pettersson together with colleagues from Stockholm University (Richard Pleijel) and Uppsala University (Henrik Williams and Lasse Mårtensson) initiated a collaboration to form a book in time for the 500th anniversary of the first translation of the New Testament into Swedish in 1526. This publication is now in print and will be presented at an event in Stockholm in August 2026. Together with Lasse Mårtensson (Uppsala University) he is planning a parallel book project on the manuscript Cod Holm A 1 which contains medieval translations of Biblical texts and was produced in 1526, the same year as the publication of the Swedish translation of the New Testament in print.
The programme succeeded with an application for a postdoc funded by Marie Sklodowska Curie Individual Fellowship in 2018. Alessandro Palumbo received funding and was associated to the programme in the years 2019–2022. During this period, however, he received a position as associate professor at the University of Oslo which enabled him to be part of the programme group until 2025. From January 2026 Palumbo leads a project financed by ERC (Starting grant) until 2029. The programme ventured another two applications for two postdocs within the Marie Sklodowska Curie Individual Fellowship for Minjie Su who defended her PhD thesis at Oxford University in 2020 and Nelson Goering with an MPhil and DPhil from the University of Oxford in General Linguistics and Comparative Philology. Both applications succeeded and both postdocs are at the moment active at University of Oslo.
One strength of the programme has been that the scholars who participate represent a wide spectrum of competence within the field of Scandinavian studies, from runic inscriptions and Latin epigraphy to late medieval charters and on to the reformation period manuscripts and early printed books. This has allowed for an intradiciplinary discussion which has proven especially fruitful in the exchange of concepts and analytical framworks between the different sub-disciplines. Furthermore, the joint theoretical approach, using a modified polysystem theory has provided means to study the mechanisms of variance and change in various contexts in a fruitful way. This was a necessary joint standpoint if the wide spatial as well as temporal perspectives of the programme were to be handled according to the overall plan. It has also been a strength of the project that the individual members are parts of large international networks which has opened for further collaborative efforts to reach some of the goals. Some of the weaknesses of the programme were also relatively clear to us from the outset and were to some extent related to the strengths. The wide competence represented in the programme needed to be coordinated in order for us to reach the synthesis that we aimed for. This meant that the involved scholars needed to find new ways to collaborate, something that at times was posing challenges. We therefore were challenged to address common questions of theory and method continuously in order to make the individual strands correspond in forming the end result in eight monographs. As has been mentioned above the development over the last years strengthened our group in these respects. The pandemic thus not only had disadvantages but also advantages for our programme. From our frequent web meetings, both with the full group and on a more individual level, there have appeared a number of collaborative writing projects, both on the theoretical and methodological aspects of the programme as well as of a more empirical nature where two or more of the group members approach the material from different perspectives. As the individual monographs are now beginning to form, we continue the process of reading and commenting extensively on eachother’s written texts. We have great expectations that this will all turn out to present relevant and engaging results in relation to the overall goals of the programme.