| Project Detail |
This project will investigate how medieval historiographers employed a range of rewriting strategies to reproduce and subvert narratives of social order and dissent and constructed complex and fluid group identities. The ability of chroniclers to influence the sociopolitical views of their imagined audiences,makes them, in collusion with their patrons, into powerful opinion makers with the ability to reshape social reality. The case study that will be developed here is that of the medieval duchy of Brabant in the Low Countries. Its longstanding and coherent historiographical tradition will facilitate the comparative analysis of the social and political discourses propagated by a number of well-know and anonymous chroniclers over a period of nearly two centuries. Point of departure will be the social and political views of Jan van Boendale, municipal clerk of Antwerp and author of a considerable oeuvre of historiographical and didactic texts. This project will demonstrate how Boendale’s work was reframed by subsequent scribes/authorsto better suit the needs and expectations of new political and social circumstances. Alongside other less canonical texts, this research will present a first in-depth investigation of the Livre des cronicques, a compilation of Middle Dutch historiographical texts, translated into French by Jean d’Enghien and dedicated to the Duke of Burgundy. Not only will the projects approach along the lines of narrative theory offer new perspectives on the dynamics of medieval textual culture and pre-modern modes of historiography, it will also yield new insights in processes of transculturation and the importance of languages in the construction of group identities. More generally, results will be of interest to literary scholars, researchers in political theory, historiography and social sciences. The projects engagement with multilingualism and complex identities in composite states is particularly relevant to the Europe of the regions |
