The Early Middle Ages are the first period of history from which many thousand original manuscripts survive. Ancient literature and scholarship, the Bible and patristic writing have come to us through this filter. This rich material has mainly been used to edit texts as witnesses of the period in which they were written. But it also constitutes a fascinating resource to study the process of transmission and transformation of texts and other cultural contexts. It can shed new light on the codification and modification of the cultural heritage and its political uses, and constitutes an exemplary case study for cultural dynamics in general.

Just as the Carolingian period (8th/9th century AD) has filtered and reshaped the past according to its concerns, so the Modern Age has used and sometimes misused its ancient and medieval heritage.

The project thus combines two elements: on the one hand, the careful analysis of the transmission of texts and manuscripts; on the other, the problem of identity formation, including perceptions of difference on the part of specific social, political and religious communities. It regards written texts as traces of social practice and its changes. By studying their potential as resources for repeated scenarios of identification or Othering, this project proposes an exemplary study of the distant past also intended to shed light on the present.