Title Promoter Affiliations Abstract "Byzantine scholia on historians and the literature of marginalia: reading and writing practices in the margins of medieval Greek manuscripts" "Kristoffel Demoen" "Department of Literary Studies" "The margins of medieval Greek manuscripts are often filled with annotations of all sorts, from systematic commentaries to occasional reactions of readers. This project aims to study Byzantine marginal texts in all their facets: the material features, the literary form and the cultural circumstances in which they were written. Byzantine scholia are triggered by the main text and at the same time loaded with the intentions of annotators, which often reveal the preoccupations of their time. The genre of historiography was particularly apt to provoke commentaries about the current situations through which the readers perceived their past. This project will examine the changing attitudes of the Byzantines towards the classical past, a decisive yet controversial factor of their own identity, in the margins of the manuscripts of ancient Greek historians. It will also investigate the Byzantine marginalia on medieval Greek historians, as these engage with the literary representation of the recent past. Special attention will be paid to the compositional methods that take place in the margins. As a complement to these interpretative issues, I will prepare modern critical editions of the relevant texts including their codicological and cultural contexts. My approach thus differs from the traditional vision of scholia as mere appendages to a text. I intend to offer a reassessment of scholia as constitutive parts of the practices of reading and writing historiography in Byzantium." "BOF ZAP medieval Greek literature" "Kristoffel Demoen" "Department of Literary Studies" "A professorship granted by the Special Research Fund is a primarily research-oriented position and is made available for excellent researchers with a high-quality research programme." "The changing face of medieval Dutch narrative literature in the early period of print (1477-c.1540)." "Frank Willaert" "Institute for the Study of Literature in the Low Countries (ISLN)" "This research project will, for the first time, study the early printed Dutch narratives as a whole corpus. These texts are of outmost importance for the history of Dutch literature, because they are the link between medieval narratives copied in manuscripts andearly modern narratives, printed after c. 1540. While the first of the 35 texts involved, the Historie of Alexander, was published as early as 1477, the dates of the latest ones coincide with the end of what Dutch scholars call the period of the post-incunabula (1501- c. 1540). These Dutch narrative texts will be studied in their international context, because printed narratives are a cross-European phenomenon." "Cross-Channel Stylistic Exchanges: A Stylometric Approach to the Impact of Mobility and Multilingualism on Medieval Latin Literature (1000–1150)" "Jeroen Deploige" "Department of History" "This project will apply stylometry, the computational analysis of style, to investigate how cross-channel mobility and multilingualism impacted Latin literary style in 1000–1150. Due to the many invasions and colonization in this period, an important religious and intellectual migration took place along the channel, making it a contact zone of literary interchange. England became a polyglot melting pot of cultures where Latin, English, French and Norse competed with one another. In this context the contacts with Flanders, Normandy and the Loire are investigated. Firstly, the stylometric state of the art will be extended to detect how mobility impacted auditive and semantic features of style. Secondly, the implications of cross-channel stylistic exchanges are assessed against a backdrop of Latin losing its literary monopoly and homogeneity, causing diverse Latinities to compete. The third objective is to come to an improved contextual understanding of cross-channel stylistic exchanges through text attribution to mobile authors, the reconstruction of literary networks through stylistic affinities, and an assessment of the agency of a reader’s audience through style registers. As thus, this project will contribute to questions of style, of medieval Latin literature in a time of colonization, and of the authors and readers of Latin literary culture on both sides of the channel in 1000–1150." "A medieval Stylome? Exploring the Universal Stylome Hypothesis in medieval prose." "Antwerp Centre for Digital humanities and literary Criticism (ACDC), Centre for Computational Linguistics, Psycholinguistics and Sociolinguistics (CLiPS), Institute for the Study of Literature in the Low Countries (ISLN)" "In this project I will further explore the applicability of the Stylome Hypothesis in medieval literature:1. I will apply computational stylometry to medieval prose. Because so many (anonymous) medieval prose texts survive, stylometric techniques for authorship attribution in prose are highly relevant. The proposed case study targets religious prose (13th/14th century) from Brabant.2. Throughout medieval Europe, a lot of Latin literature was produced. I propose to extend my research to Latin, via the original case study of the Flemish monks (11th century) who were attracted by English nobility to write Latin biographies." "Sabbatical Gert Partoens: Completion of two edition projects related to the early medieval reception of Augustine's exegesis of Paul + Contribution to the scientific description of a series of medieval homiliaria in the Florentine Biblioteca Laurenzia" "Gert Partoens" "Latin Literature, Leuven" "I will devote most of my time to the completion of two edition projects, each of which will result in a volume in the Corpus Christianorum (Brepols): (1) (in collaboration with Dr. Nicolas De Maeyer) the second volume of the Collectio ex opusculis sancti Augustini in epistolas Pauli of Beda Venerabilis (672/3-735); (2) the first part of the voluminous commentary on the letter to the Romans in the Expositio in epistolas beati Pauli ex operibus sancti Augustini by Florus van Lyon (+ c. 860). Both commentaries on Paul's epistles are composed of quotes from Augustine's works and have strongly influenced not only the medieval exegesis of Paul, but also the reception of the Church Father himself. I have already made arrangements with Prof. Francesco Santi (Bologna + director of S.I.S.M.E.L.) with a view to cooperating in the scientific description of a series of medieval homiliaries in the Florentine Biblioteca Laurenziana. This contribution will allow me to expand my knowledge of late antique and medieval sermon corpora and also to turn my focus to the transmission of authors other than Augustine (which has hitherto been the main focus of my attention). I shall begin the study of the manuscript transmission of the sermons of Valerian of Cimiez (+ c. 460) with a view to a future critical edition in the Series Latina of the Corpus Christianorum." "Multilingual encounters in the late medieval town. Rewriting history in multilingual social and political contexts in late medieval Flanders and Brabant (1380-1500)" "Jan Dumolyn" "Department of History" "This project deals with the various multilingual social networks in the commercial towns in the County of Flanders and the Duchy of Brabant during the Late Middle Ages (1380-1500). The Burgundian Low Countries were multilingual in their speaking and writing culture. So far, literary and historical scholarship has been rather one-dimensional in its approach towards multilingualism in literature, focusing predominantly on place or cultural context. Bringing social and political (and to a lesser extent cultural and economic) factors into the equation, this project aims to re-evaluate current views on multilingualism in medieval urban literary culture. Chronicles constitute a pre-eminent source to further this end: historiographical sources are prime testimonies of both active and passive multilingualism. The research objectives of this project are twofold. First, it will reconstruct the multilingual writing and reading contexts of late medieval chronicles. Second, it will home in on the political nature of language choice by relating the various social contexts to the chronicles’ contents. Thus, the project will lay bare the interplay of the multifarious aspects shaping the multilingual society in which historiographical texts were being (re)written and read in late medieval Flanders and Brabant." "The Romance between Greece and the West. Heroes and Heroines in French, Anglo-Norman and English medieval narrative." "Koen De Temmerman" "Department of Literary Studies" "This project reconstructs and interprets the persistence of (ancient) novelistic and (late antique and medieval) hagiographical traditions in vernacular medieval romance. Narratological and rhetorical analyses trace diachronic continuities and synchronic differentiation in the characterization of heroes. The study can thus enhance our knowledge about the medieval reception of ancient narrating strategies and the literary complexities of an influential, fictional genre." "Pomerius’ De vita contemplativa (CPL 998): text-critical study and analysis of the Late Antique and Medieval reception of a 6th-century treatise on the ascetic-contemplative life" "Gert Partoens" "Latin Literature, Leuven, Research Unit of History of Church and Theology" "De vita contemplativa (VC) is a treatise on the ascetic-contemplative life written by the 5th/6th-century cleric Pomerius of Arles, a central figure in the intellectual life of Late Antique Gaul. In essence, VC teaches clerics how they can reconcile their active, pastoral life with the ideal of the contemplative, ascetic life. Pomerius’ treatise is a key text from Late Antique Christian literature: it survives in over 230 manuscripts (an impressive number for a text not written by one of the ‘great’ Latin Church Fathers), enjoyed consistent and wide popularity among Late Antique/Medieval authors (many moralistic, pastoral and doctrinal texts between the 6th-15th cc. quote from VC), and had a lasting impact on, e.g., the development of ecclesiastical legislation, the conception of episcopal authority, and the organization of the clerical life in the Latin Church. Nonetheless, VC has been largely neglected: no in-depth study of its transmission/reception exists and the most recent edition of the work is Patrologia Latina 59 (1847, based on an unsatisfactory edition from 1711). This project will bring back to light Pomerius’ treatise by providing (1) the first modern critical edition of VC, and (2) the first systematic study of its manuscript transmission and the Late Antique/Medieval reception of its ascetic-contemplative, pastoral, moralistic, and doctrinal positions, to assess VC’s influence on the Western religious tradition." "Multiple identities in a late medieval and early modern city: Mechelen in the 15th and 16th centuries." "Peter Stabel" "Centre for Urban History" "This project aims at analysing multiple identities that town dwellers adopt and (re)produce and in doing so it will try to present a more nuanced image of pre-modern urban society than traditional social and cultural history usually permits. For the case-study of Mechelen in the late medieval and early modern period, it wants to identify how identities are constructed (by the participation of different groups in civil society), how they are performed in the public arena and how identities are perceived in collective memory (rituals, historiography, literature)."