For seven years, a collaboration between the Institute for Medieval
Studies of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Universities of
Utrecht, Cambridge, Leeds and Paris I, Sorbonne provided the
opportunity for young researchers to discuss and coordinate their
work. The title of the project and of this volume, "Texts and
identities," provides the framework for case studies in different
fields of early medieval history. They include apparently disparate
topics such as historiography and hagiography, monastic spaces and
memories, lay and ecclesiastic legislation, as well as liturgy and
penance. Rather than defining a common field of research, the
meetings from which these papers have emerged derived their
coherence from their common methodological framework. This approach
combines two elements: on the one hand, emphasis has been laid on
the careful analysis of the transmission of texts and of the
manuscript evidence; on the other, research has focused on the
problem of identity, or rather, of processes of identification,
including the perception of differences between specific social,
political and religious communities. In the combination of these
two approaches the extant texts from the early medieval period are
not only seen as mere reflections of ethnic, social and cultural
identities, but also as media that gave meaning to social practices
and were often intended to inspire, guide, change or prevent
action, directly or indirectly. The written texts that have been
transmitted to us can be seen as part of a cultural effort to shape
the present by means of restructuring the past. The often
discordant voices of medieval authors allow modern historians to
grasp something of the multiplicity of the early medieval world,
and of the disagreements, conflicts, idiosyncrasies and individual
perceptions among the people who lived in that period. Many
contributions in this volume propose specific methods for studying
changing identities. They analyse differences between similar texts
over time, or, specifically, changes in texts in the course of
their transmission. The papers collected in this volume illustrate
that texts were integral parts of a world in transformation.
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