About the Project: Strategies and Outputs
Page Information
Author: John Thompson
Revised: July 22, 2005 August 8th, 2005
Reviewed: Stephen Kelly John Thompson
What is the Brut?
Project Rationales
Outputs
Resources for
the Scholarly Community
Strategies and Outputs
Our methodology as a team offers a blend of applied theoretical and codicological investigation and is guided by the imperatives of recent sociological, ethnographic and reader-response theories. Our preliminary task will be to identify clusters of textually-affiliated Brut manuscripts that are also related by geographical, scribal, linguistic or other details of provenance, before undertaking an archaeological-style ‘delayering’ codicological analysis of the works in question. Such a process will enable us to begin the reconstruction of a production history for individual texts and manuscripts before, finally, a revised reception history for the most distinctive aspects of the Brut tradition can be offered.
A general objective of the 'Imagining History' project is to establish a model of 'cultural mapping' that has both pragmatic and methodological aims: pragmatically it allows for contextualisation of literary works through manuscript geography, with explicit reference to the linguistic and political situatedness of such texts in specific regional contexts.
The understanding of manuscript geography promoted by 'cultural mapping' allows us to examine the cultures of production and reception of Brut manuscripts in a way which avoids what are, arguably, the pitfalls of traditional philological analysis and editorial practice: namely, the commitment to determining the genetic descent of manuscripts from an 'original' ur-text. Rather, we are committed to assessing each manuscript in its own terms, attending to the sedimentation of scribes, readers, owners and annotators and the concomitant cultures within which such individuals, where known, lived and worked. Cultural mapping takes us beyond the manuscript and its textual and material provenance and closer tothe milieux within which these manuscripts performed cultural work.1
We will be representing the outcomes of our research in a number of ways; firstly, there will be traditional publication by members of the project throughout its lifetime.2 Kelly and Thompson will be co-authoring a major study of the cultures of the Brut and there will be a commissioned volume of essays, to be entitled 'Island Identities: imagining history in Britain and Ireland.'
Electronic outputs include a fully searchable index of detailed descriptions of all known Brut manuscripts. The index will be a major resource for scholars of medieval and early modern historiography and book history. The index provides the backbone of the project's other electronic component, a series of interactive case-studies of Brut manuscript clusters, reception situations and affiliated literary and textual cultures. Deploying the latest, commercially-oriented digital technologies, the case-studies will demonstrate cultural mapping in action and will function as online essays on aspects of our research which reach beyond the scope of the project monograph.
