The long arc of research - reflections on adventures in fragmentology

This December, I will have been a professional medievalist for fourteen years. While I still qualify as an early career researcher, I have now been active in medieval studies for long enough to see the impact of some of the things that I have been doing over the years. I was reminded of this as I began working on an article on fragments of medieval manuscripts, which reaches back to some of the earliest work I did on this topic. This has been a reminder that research has a long arc, and there are many things with which you are never quite finished - in a good way. 

 

I first started researching medieval fragments in 2017, during the last year of my PhD. The University Library of Southern Denmark had recently began to investigate the bindings of some of the volumes in its special collection, and one of the librarians reached out to the centre where I was working in order to inform us about this material. Thanks to the generosity of the research librarian, Jakob Povl Holck, I was allowed to examine these materials to my heart's content, and this led to a collaboration between the two of us that is still ongoing. Later that year, we were hired for a pilot project concerning these fragments, and for four months I spent my days transcribing, identifying and researching some of the many liturgical fragments in the collection. My work resulted in a preliminary report which covered twelve fragment-carriers. This report has not been published. 

Syddansk Universitetsbibliotek, RARA L 31

This was one of the first fragments Jakob and I researched together

October last year, I was back in Odense for a research stay. This time, I was on a short-term hire on a different project, yet one that also focused on fragmentology, namely the CODICUM project. My work consisted of gathering information from the files of an old project at the Royal Library in Copenhagen. However, I was also able to revisit some of the materials that I had worked on during my last time in Odense, and I was given an update on the fragmentology work that is still ongoing at the university library. One of the pleasant surprises about the current work is that one of the researchers has been using my report from 2017 in her work on some of the fragments which I examined during the pilot project. I was doubly pleased about this. Firstly, because the work I had done was now proving useful to a new generation of researchers, which is an academic's dream. Secondly, I was happy because the work of this younger researcher was both better than mine and unfolding over a longer period, which would give them time to delve deeper into the material and provide more knowledge about this material.   

Academic work is an inter-generational communal labour that unfolds over centuries. However, it is not always easy to see the effects of one's work. Anyone who has had to describe the impact of the work for research applications can testify to how frustrating it can be to prove that research matters in some way or other. In my case, I have been extremely fortunate in that I have been able to witness the long arc of my research, and to see how something I did at an early stage in my research - as a still-inexperienced fragmentologist - has provided a stepping-stone for someone else. This is immensely gratifying.