Paula Harrison

PhD research: Paula Harrison

A study and critical edition of the Carolingian compilation De Astronomia in Laon, Bibliothèque Municipale, MS 422.

This research is undertaken as part of the project ‘Ireland and Carolingian Brittany: Texts and Transmission,’ funded by the Laureate Scheme of the Irish Research Council. It explores the intellectual exchanges between Ireland, Brittany and Francia during the Carolingian age, in particular the impact of the literary and scholarly heritage of early Christian Ireland on the shaping of textual and cultural identity among the intellectual élite of medieval Brittany. The study will focus on a newly-discovered early medieval text on computus (the science of time-reckoning). A comprehensive philological analysis of the text in question and a collation of its main manuscript witness (Laon Bibliothèque Municipale, 422) will be carried out, with a view to shedding light on the sources available to the medieval Breton ecclesiastical literati, the linguistic character of Breton Latinity, and the Breton contribution to the development of Carolingian computus.

E-mail: p.harrison3@universityofgalway.ie
Supervisor: Dr Jacopo Bisagni
Funding: Irish Research Council Laureate Project Scholarship (2018–2022)

Research areas: the Latin tradition