Arts

23 Jul 09

Wimpheling's Germania (Strasbourg 1500): an example of late-medieval Strasbourg printing in the collection of the Taylor Institution Library, Oxford.

Oxford University’s medieval and modern languages faculty is celebrating some good news that underlines its continued commitment to research excellence.

First, Oxford and a consortium of four other European universities have received a grant of 2.3 million Euros for medieval German studies.

And secondly, Professor Nigel Palmer, holder of the Chair in German Medieval and Linguistic Studies, is associated with two grants made to the university in his special research area. The first is from the British Academy in excess of £100,000 for a history of the book project. The second is a grant of 80,000 Euros from the Thyssen foundation to the Bodleian library to continue cataloguing the Latin manuscripts from Germany in the Bodleian, carried out by Dr Daniela Mairhofer.

Head of Humanities Professor Sally Shuttleworth said: ‘The three grants offer further evidence of the outstanding research within the German sub-faculty, which was ranked top of the country in the recent RAE, and the international leadership role it is playing within the discipline.’

These awards are of particular note following the concerns raised by the British Academy in its paper last month, Language Matters. The paper concludes that because of the marginalisation of language teaching in UK schools, UK graduates will be increasingly unable to pursue research projects that require knowledge of languages or compete with their overseas counterparts. Equally, UK graduates are at risk of losing out on EU funded research posts – such as the ones Oxford has been awarded – because they require candidates to be fluent in at least two languages. Finally, it affects the UK’s ability to address many of the most urgent global challenges. Oxford, in its commitment to modern languages, is working hard to counteract these negative trends. 

The EU funding will set up an international training network in medieval German studies under the EU’s Marie Curie programme, which funds the training and mobility of researchers within the European Union. The project, Mobility of Ideas and Transmission of Texts, will fund postgraduate scholars to study one of the fundamental changes in the late medieval intellectual and religious culture of Western Europe: the transmission of learning from the professional spheres of the ecclesiastical and academic elite to the wider audiences that could be reached through vernacular texts.

The funding has been awarded to a consortium of individual subject areas within five European universities, of which Oxford is the only one in the UK. 'We are very pleased that this consortium is one of the few Humanities projects receiving programme funding from over 900 applicants from all disciplines. The network will allow us to strengthen the international dimension of our graduate programme,' said Professor Michael Sheringham, Chair of the Modern Languages Faculty Board. The programme builds on existing research collaborations with Freiburg and Leiden universities: early career researchers will spend time at partner institutions within the network, and come together in a series of research colloquia.

Professor Nigel Palmer’s £100,000 grant from the British Academy is for a History of the Book project, in collaboration with colleague Dr Cristina Dondi, on the Venetian booktrade in the 15th century. Professor Palmer will also play a key role in the EU consortium. ‘Late medieval cultural regions were not demarcated in terms of political entities or territories’, he says. ‘The project allows us to study how two fundamental changes – the development of a literature of learning in the vernacular, and the rise of a tradition of thinking outside the universities – altered the intellectual landscape of late medieval Europe.’