Literary Beginnings in the European Middle Ages

How did new literatures begin in the Middle Ages and what does it mean to ask about such beginnings? These are the questions this volume pursues across the regions and languages of medieval Europe from Iceland Scandinavia and Iberia through Irish Welsh English French Dutch Occitan German Italian Czech and Croatian to Medieval Greek and the East Slavonic of early Rus. Focusing on vernacular scripted cultures and their complicated relationships with the established literary cultures of Latin Greek and Church Slavonic the volume''s contributors describe the processes of emergence consolidation and institutionalization that make it possible to speak of a literary tradition in any given language. Moreover by concentrating on beginnings the volume avoids the pitfalls of viewing earlier phenomena through the lens of later national developments; the result is a heightened sense of the historical contingency of categories of language literature and territory in the space we call ''Europe''.