Making Livonia by Anu Mänd Marek Tamm

Author:Anu Mänd, Marek Tamm [Anu Mänd, Marek Tamm]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367481285
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2020-07-03T00:00:00+00:00

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Manuscript fragments as testimony of intellectual contacts between Tallinn and European learning centres in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries

Tiina Kala

The scarcity of sources is a major obstacle in the research on medieval religious, cultural and intellectual history of the north-eastern Baltic region.1 This is especially true in the case of the first two centuries following the Christian conquest of the region. From that period, there is practically no information about specific local practices in religious matters (such as liturgy or the church calendar) or in the sphere of education (such as local school curricula or collections of books used for study). Similarly, information on learned individuals is limited to biographies of a few clergymen and is of modest scope.

This has been one of the main reasons why, until the last decades of the twentieth century, professional historiography did not focus on Livonia’s local intellectual life.2 The best overview of the intellectual and religious life of medieval Livonia is still found in Leonid Arbusow’s 1919–21 grand treatise on the Livonian Reformation, which surveys the medieval period of the region as an introduction to its main theme (Arbusow 1921: 38–115). Thus, a comprehensive study of religious and intellectual history of medieval Livonia still remains to be written. Although recent scholarly literature has shown far more interest in intellectual endeavours of the region, this has so far mainly focussed on individual institutions, specific collections of texts or single outstanding sources (e.g., Tamm 2001; Kolk 2002; Friedenthal 2008; Newhauser, Kala and Friedenthal 2008; Kala 2016). The situation is similar in the area of manuscript studies, from which the present chapter draws its particular subject. I will investigate the fragments of scholarly texts preserved in Tallinn and shed some light on their background, thus making a small contribution to forming a comprehensive view of what went on in the intellectual and religious sphere in Livonia during the thirteenth–fourteenth centuries.

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