Review of the Research Institute for History and - Universiteit Utrecht

making ancient and medieval sources accessible by means of editions and commentaries, of the kind undertaken
by dr Hans Teitler (Ancient History), prof. Arpad Orbán (Medieval Latin) and others. In the middle,
there was the level of inter pretation of this material within a given social and cultural context, while the
top of the pyramid focused on a more specifi c research area, i.e. the interference between literate and nonliterate
modes of com munication, and their impact on ancient and medieval societies. In 1996 this research
orientation yielded a prestigious NWO ‘Pioneer Project’ by dr Marco Mostert’s on Medieval Literacy (Verschriftelijking),
c. 400-c.1100, which by its many activities (conferences, workshops, etcetera) has provided
a great stimulus to the entire research group. From questioning the status of written sources within their
social and cultural context, the group’s interest turned to the manuscripts themselves, and the way in which
separate texts were embedded within these codices. We aim for an approach to manuscripts that does not perceive
later and altered text transmissions as a divergence from some kind of ‘original’, but as an integral and
worthwhile aspect of the history and impact of this text in a later period. This provides an important focus
of Utrecht medievalist research, especially for Wackers, Meens, De Jong, Mostert and a substantial number of
postdocs and junior researchers. Similar questions concerning the status of epigraphical and archaeological
sources are being asked by ancient historians. The upshot of all this is that the need for advanced teaching in
the so-called auxiliary sciences (paleography, codicology, epigraphy, papyrology) is greater than ever before.
Such disciplines are no luxury – albeit almost extinct in this country, they are indispensable to advanced
research in the older historical periods, and to the creation of an internationally competitive Nachwuchs.
Inevitably, such training has to be organized nationally, within the framework of the two national Research
Schools in which the Utrecht group actively participates. Blok (with dr A. Lardinois, Radboud University)
heads a research group ‘Sacred and Profane in Ancient Greece’ within OIKOS, and she is also a member of
the research committee of this national Research School, based in Leiden. During the period under review,
De Jong chaired the Board of the Research School of Medieval Studies (based in Groningen); dr Bart Besamusca
represents Utrecht in the teaching committee. Utrecht ancient historians and medievalists have made a
substantial contribution to special courses and conferences organized for PhD students at the national level.
A 3. Processes in research, internal and external collaboration
In years to come, there will be a substantial group of researchers, mostly recruited from history and Dutch
literature, that will be interested in the manuscript-based re-evaluation of sources, including the more
far-reaching issues of how textual transmission affected the ‘uses of the past’ in a given period or society. In
due course this kind of critical manuscript work will also become a self-understood part of any research
endeavour, but for the next fi ve years or so, it is important to have this explicitly on the agenda – as was once
the case with literacy and orality.
Meanwhile, this is not the only spearhead of Utrecht ancient and medieval research to remain important,
as will become clear from Blok’s Vici-project on ‘Citizenship on Classical Athens’. Among medievalists, the
Arthurian studies remain a central concern. This legacy of prof. Wim Gerritsen, who retired in 2000, is now
carried on primarily by Besamusca and dr Frank Brandsma. These literary historians approach the study of
literacy differently from the historians, exploring the oral context of their texts’ transmission by means of
stylistic analysis. This line of research has proven very productive, also in terms of international acclaim and
raising extra research money. Another research strand is dr Erik Kooper’s work on Medieval Chronicles. In
the wake of organizing two highly successful international conferences in Utrecht on this topic, in 1996 and
1999, Kooper has become pivotal to an international research network on medieval chronicles.
The supervision of research students as well as MA’s and advanced graduates usually means intensive
communication among all those involved, professors as well as senior faculty. The group tries to expose its
research students to an international fi eld of senior scholars and fellow-juniors who will scrutinize their
progress and who will give them informal and pertinent feedback in the course of writing their dissertations.
In 1997 De Jong (with dr Walter Pohl, Vienna, and prof. Rosamond McKitterick, Cambridge) founded Texts
and Identities in the Early Middle Ages, a training network for research students in early medieval history, with
an annual workshop devoted to work in progress, and sessions organized at the Leeds International Medieval
Conference. Since 2000 this successful enterprise has been funded by NWO, the Austrian Academy of
11 Ancient and Medieval Cultures OGC
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