Lettercraft and Epistolary Performance in Early Medieval Europe, 476-751 CE

NWO VIDI, 1 January 2023-31 December 2027

Project Leader: Robert Flierman

The lettercraft project approaches the early medieval letter as a performative medium, whose communicative potential was defined principally by non-textual features: its materiality, its ability to be publicly read out and talked over, and its potential quickly to reach wide and diverse audiences. The project thus submits that the letter was a far more inclusive medium than is commonly assumed on the basis of its textual qualities. Literacy or social status were not required to participate in what this project calls lettercraft, i.e. the various performative actions (e.g. listening, speaking, negotiating, gossiping) that along with writing and reading made up epistolary communication. The project will show, moreover, that due to its public nature and social range, the letter was an essential tool of community-building and conflict-resolution in medieval society. As long as it was properly performed, a single letter could persuade an entire community.

The project studies the performative potential of the letter in the context of the Merovingian Kingdoms, 476- 751 CE, whose communicative networks covered much of Europe. Innovatively, it will rely not on the surviving letter-collections, which showcase the literary exploits of elite ecclesiastical men, but rather on descriptions of lettercraft in Merovingian histories, saint-lives and legal documents such as formularies and charters. The project will proceed along three lines. It will establish a comprehensive index of epistolary terminology that is sensitive to all (textual and non-textual) aspects of lettercraft (subproject 1). It will develop a new open access database of Merovingian epistolary communication, which analyses the social contexts in which such communication took place, the diverse individuals and groups who participated in it, and the actions they performed (subproject 2). It will conduct a case study of the consensus-building powers of lettercraft in the context of episcopal successions, disruptive events that required careful social mediation (subproject 3).