Looking back from the twenty-first century, our knowledge of ancient libraries and book collections is painfully limited. The earliest and most vivid period of library history for which we have a sizeable corpus of sources is the early medieval west in the latter half of the first millennium. Yet, the corpus of library catalogues and other booklists that have survived from this period has never been the focus of a single study.
Drawing on approximately seventy booklists and related contemporary corpora, this thesis challenges traditional and more recent approaches that treat these booklists as passive records of library administration or as symbolic expressions of communal identity and aspiration. The thesis demonstrates that book listing constituted a broad textual practice embedded in the practical, documentary, and commemorative cultures of early medieval ecclesiastical communities.
Through the systematic analysis of their manuscript contexts, their textual features, transmission patterns, and the broader historical settings in which inventorying practices were embedded, the study advances a new view of early medieval inventorying as a coherent and historically salient phenomenon. It reveals the role played by booklists in shaping access to written knowledge and facilitating the everyday use of manuscripts. Furthermore, it shows how lists could acquire commemorative functions through integration into explicitly memorial contexts, particularly so when older inventories were copied into new textual settings. Booklists thus often exist at the intersection of administration and memoria, combining pragmatic documentary culture with the preservation of cultural memory.
Trial lecture
Designated topic: Monastic book usage and the organization of knowledge from late Antiquity to the high Middle Ages.
Time and place: Thursday 15 October 11:15 AM, Gamle festsal
Zoom webinar
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Evaluation committee
- Professor Helmut Reimitz, Princeton University (first opponent)
- Professor Benjamin Pohl, University of Bristol (second opponent)
- Associate Professor Erika Graham-Goering, University of Oslo (committee administrator)
Chair of the defence
- Professor Anders Winroth, University of Oslo
Supervisors
- Professor Ildar Garipzanov, University of Oslo
- Professor Rosamond McKitterick, University of Cambridge †