Location
German Historical Institute, London (and via Zoom)

Join us for a GHIL Lecture by Joanna Story (University of Leicester).
There survive today about 850 manuscripts or fragments written in Insular scripts between the years c.650 and 900 CE. Of these, about 45 per cent are in libraries in Germany with a further 10 per cent in Switzerland or Austria. This distribution reflects both the establishment of monasteries in Francia by clerics from the Irish and Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in the seventh and eighth centuries, which imported books from the islands and where scribes learned to make books in insular fashion, as well as the destructive impact on libraries of the Reformation and Thirty Years War. This talk introduces a new multidisciplinary research project – INSULAR – focused on these manuscripts and their historical context in German-speaking lands.
Jo Story is Professor of Early Medieval History at the University of Leicester and PI of INSULAR (UKRI/ERC AdG), co-ordinating an international, multidisciplinary team of scholars to research manuscripts in Insular scripts made before c.900. The material culture of the written word is central to her research, using manuscript and epigraphic evidence as well as sculpture, coinage, and archaeology.
This lecture will take place as a hybrid event at the GHIL and online via Zoom. In order to attend this event, please register via our website to take part in person or online: https://www.ghil.ac.uk/events/lectures.
Image: An initial from a manuscript written in the early ninth century, probably at Werden, by a scribe called Feluuald, using an insular minuscule script. The initial is decorated to look like a hide, stretched for drying and making into parchment. Berlin, BSB MS theol. lat. fol. 356, fol.7v