Ireland

The project can be located within several overlapping historiographical contexts, which have shown a capacity to enlarge our understanding. These include the interactions between 'core' and 'peripheral' areas of Europe; the complex relationships between the countries and regions of the British Isles; and the ubiquitous debates about colonization, cultural transfer, and the formation of identities, in which medievalists have increasingly been involved. Studies of elites and landholding are fundamental to an understanding of such issues.

The aim of this project is to investigate how and why reading as an individual and social practice has changed over the period 1450 to 1945, in terms of who readers were; how they accessed reading material; what, where, and how they read; and how they responded to what they read. Supported by funding from AHRC and from The Open University, the central achievement of the project to date has been the establishment of The Reading Experience Database (RED) at The Open University.

"The 'Imagining History' project is the first large-scale collaborative investigation of the manuscripts of the Middle English Prose Brut chronicle, arguably the most prolificly disseminated secular text of the English Middle Ages.

An important resource for our understanding of the literary and cultural environment of medieval Ireland is a series of three inter-related early Irish glossaries, known as Sanas Cormaic ‘Cormac’s Glossary’, O’Mulconry’s Glossary, and Dúil Dromma Cetta ‘the Collection of Druim Cett’. They each consist of alphabetically listed (first letter only) headwords followed by an entry which can range from a single word explanation, often an explanation of the headword, to a whole narrative running to several pages.