ERC Grant: Anglo-Saxon homiletic literature and its European sources

The European Research Council (ERC) has awarded a Consolidator Grant to Prof. Dr. Winfried Rudolf of the English Department at Göttingen University to study medieval preaching literature written for the instruction of non-élite audiences. The project titled “Electronic Corpus of Anonymous Homilies in Old English (ECHOE)“ focuses on Old English preaching texts, written and copied between the ninth and late twelfth centuries. They represent the most comprehensive vernacular preaching corpus of early medieval Europe and depend almost entirely on a wide variety of Latin sources from all over the European continent. ECHOE and its international project team will revolutionise scholarly work on these texts of peripheral education by tracing, visualising, and studying their highly complex material and textual transmission in full. The project will recover, unite, and systematise all surviving Old English anonymous homilies (ca. 500,000 words) and their Latin sources in an online and interactive digital corpus that brings to the fore the individual manuscript version and all its revisional layers from before 1200. The inventive text displays of the corpus and rich markup data can be mined for unprecedented research: on manuscripts, scribes and sources; on the compositional strategies of homilies and their intricate interversional relations; on translation from Latin to Old English; and on the language, style or revisional agendas of individual preachers. The project counters traditional editorial models of collation by exposing substantial textual difference and by analysing compositional and variational procedures in comparison. This will enable users for the first time to study Old English anonymous homilies in their entirety as living texts through the centuries. ECHOE will also create new analytical tools that allow users for the first time to analyse palaeographical features in direct relation to text composition and variation. The project team will thereby reconstruct the Anglo-Saxon preaching library and reach back towards the very beginnings of English preaching. But most importantly, ECHOE will offer to scholars from various disciplines a unique gateway to study linguistic, political, social, and religious change. The project will run from 2018 to 2023 and is already enjoying the support of a number of international partner projects and institutions.

Prof. Dr. Winfried Rudolf graduated from the universities of Jena (Germany) and Oxford (UK). He has previously held an academic lectureship at Jena University, a teaching fellowship at University College London (UK), and the Darby Fellowship for Medieval English at Lincoln College in the University of Oxford. He is currently chair of Medieval English Language and Literature at the University of Göttingen (Germany). Prof. Rudolf is an expert on European palaeography before the year 1200 and specializes in Insular manuscripts of that period. His interests comprise the study of medieval liturgical practices, homiletic literature, and the recovery of hitherto unknown manuscript sources. He is the director of the Vercelli School of Medieval European Palaeography (VSMEP), an international teaching initiative that imparts ancillary skills in the historical disciplines to international graduates and contributes to the preservation of the cultural heritage of the Middle Ages. This initiative has been nominated for the Europa Nostra Award 2017. Prof. Rudolf is Honorary Visiting Professor at University College London from 2015 to 2020.

Contact:
Prof. Dr. Winfried Rudolf
University of Göttingen
Faculty of Humanities – English Department
Käte-Hamburger Weg 3
37073 Göttingen
tel.: (0551) 397571
E-Mail: wrudolf@gwdg.de
Internet: https://www.uni-goettingen.de/en/199321.html