Mae Lyons-Penner
Aug 23, 2017 · 3 min read

Thank you for this compelling and thought-provoking article! As Project Manager of the Global Medieval Sourcebook, I hope you won’t mind me responding and seeking your advice. We at the GMS are very aware of how ambitious our project is, and how difficult it will be to live up to our name. Our collection is still in its infancy: as of today, we have only fourteen texts in our online sourcebook and much of the ‘temperate’ world is not represented within that at all. For instance, we have not yet posted a single text from the Iberian peninsula or the Balkans, and that is certainly not due to a dearth of sources! As the GMS grows, more languages, regions and cultures will be included, and we would value any help in making that happen (that is why our site is already live: we hope that scholars will encounter it and desire to get involved).

As you are well aware, there are several layers of problematic bias when it comes to the study of the Middle Ages. We at the GMS hope to contribute to unravelling some of them without thinking we can solve them all. Firstly, the legacy of nineteenth-century philology and its preferred sources and methods: we are translating texts historically excluded from this canon so as to broaden the range of sources that readers have access to. Secondly, the eurocentrism and orientalism that have shaped historical and cultural enquiry in Western scholarship: we are determined to incorporate written sources from non-Western languages and European languages and dialects usually considered peripheral.

The structure of the traditional academy does not make this easy, and we would value suggestions of scholars working on relevant languages who might be interested in translating material for us. It would be fantastic if your article could join up some dots! Nonetheless, we prefer not to see our sourcebook as an effort to ‘globalize the Middle Ages’, given that the ‘Middle Ages’ is a Western category. Instead, we hope to challenge and expand our readers' understanding of a millennium of global literary production.

You are right to point out that there is a third level of methodological bias which has historically excluded certain kinds of evidence from scholarly enquiry. This is highly problematic, and in our own research many of us at the GMS look beyond the written record in our study of medieval culture and thought. However, the GMS is a sourcebook for textual vestiges of medieval culture, so archaeology and ethnography are unfortunately beyond its scope. We would be delighted to include texts from the tropics in our project and would be very grateful for recommendations. We have no preference for the material upon which a text is written. As you rightly point out, privileging writing will necessarily produce a degree of unevenness in our coverage of the medieval world. However, given the enormous time period and enormous range of cultures in question, our sourcebook could never hope to be representative. We aspire nonetheless to offer an exciting and surprising range of materials that may stimulate research in new directions. If you are able and willing to help us in this endeavour, please get in touch! maelp[at]stanford[dot]edu.

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    Mae Lyons-Penner

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