Project led by Richard Matthew Pollard.
Funded by the SSHRC (Insight Development, 2021-2023), this project will lay the foundations of a new, quantitative, and “democratic” intellectual history in Carolingian Europe (750–900). This project will do all this by creating a database encompassing nearly every single physically extant book from the ninth century (about 7656 in total). The database we produce will show, at a glance, a whole slew of forgotten genres, texts, and authors largely ignored by historians, but that – by the numbers – dominated the libraries, scriptoria, and therefore minds of Carolingian Europe. The database will also help to reveal hidden networks of knowledge, distinct cultural zones, and the role of women during this fundamental period in Western scientific, artistic, and intellectual development, often known as the “Carolingian Renaissance”.