BretPal · Breton Palaeography

BretPal seeks to answer the main question of what is Breton Caroline minuscule, who wrote it, and where? Despite advances in our understanding of early medieval Brittany's political history, our knowledge of Brittany's literary and intellectual history remains stunted due to a lack of being able to definitively ascribe manuscripts (and, therefore, the texts contained within) to Brittany. BretPal will establish parameters to identify those manuscripts from early medieval Brittany (c. 780–1100) based upon palaeographic and Digital Humanities methods. The project offers the first comprehensive narrative of the scribal and literary culture of early medieval Brittany, as well as an open-access digital database using the Archetype software. Further, the project will examine the wider impact that Breton intellectual culture had upon wider early medieval western Europe through the Breton diaspora from the ninth century onwards. BretPal will be hosted by the National University of Ireland, Galway (NUIG) and will be carried out under the auspices of the Moore Institute with a secondment at the École Pratique de Hautes Études, Université Paris, Sciences & Lettres.