Our three thematic strands – "People and movement", "Place and space", and "Textual culture" – are intended to connect relatively isolated works of scholarship, both in terms of gaining a better overall sense of eleventh-century realities and perspectives, and in terms of making these realities and the various perspectives legible to the modern scholar through well thought-out data analysis and visualizations.

We will focus primarily on areas to the east where, according to most estimates, the majority of Christians lived at the time. We will also focus on areas of heavy cultural interchange such as southern Italy and Sicily.

People and movement

Our aim is to record information about the people who lived during this time, with a view to studying their perceptions of other people – especially those from outside their own community – and their movements. The existing prosopographies already provide quite a lot of relevant information, which must nevertheless be cast in the form of historical assertions that can be compared and contrasted with other assertions; as described above, we also aim to increase the prosopographical coverage for the period.

We aim over the course of the project to extend and expand the amount of data available digitally on Christians of this period, and others who interacted with Christians on the margins of Christendom, especially in Syria and Sicily. The reuse of the existing prosopographical data will provide the first test of the assertion-based data model at the core of the project. The factoid-based prosopographies are an ideal test case for this, as much of the information about provenance and scholarly authority is already available on the website in some form, even if not in a machine-readable form.

Place and Space

One of the most important questions for understanding the situation of the late eleventh century concerns the contemporary conceptions of places, especially in the latter half of the century when the rulership of many of these places were changing hands.

Our approach to this question will draw, first of all, on the movements of people as they are recorded in the textual sources: how did these flows of travel change, and how closely (or not) did they follow the changes in rulership that are used today for periodization of the history of these places?

The second source of information that will be used is mentions of places in texts of all kinds: who was mentioning them, writing in what language, and in what context? What kind of descriptions were given – was Edessa, for example, regarded as a Byzantine city, a Syrian city, or an Armenian city, and by whom? Drawing on both recorded movements and recorded perceptions, we will construct a series of maps that show different perspectives of the geography and how these perceptions changed over time.

Texts

Just as information about people on a relatively large scale is a useful means of tracing the social trends of a period, so information about texts is a useful means of tracing certain intellectual trends. Textual production was restricted largely to the elite but could also include relatively non-mobile segments of these societies, such as small landholders and people associated with monastic institutions.

The question we aim to answer in this strand is: what sorts of texts were being produced in the period 1025– 1095, and for whom? In this case our concept of text production is intentionally broad; of interest are texts that were copied in this period, as well as texts that were composed in this period and copied even in later periods. These can include narrative histories, saints’ lives, collections of fables, Gospels, legal or commercial documents, florilegia, or any other genre for which ink was applied to paper or parchment – or even, in the case of Sicily, papyrus.

These texts will, of course, be important sources for the study of people mentioned in them, but they will also be studied as intellectual and material carriers of ideas, usages, and formulae that could serve to integrate the disparate perceptions of different regions during this period.