Our professor of church history, Tuomas Heikkilä, along with his Nordic colleagues Åslaug Ommundsen, Lars Boje Mortensen, and Matthew Collins, has received a €13 million grant from the European Research Council.
Over the next six years, medieval historians will delve into how the Nordic countries became part of Western Europe during the Middle Ages through the influence of books.
Their material consists of tens of thousands of fragments of medieval books, which will be studied by combining traditional humanities methods with, for example, DNA sampling and artificial intelligence.
Research will provide new insights into the medieval ecosystem of written culture and answer important questions like how the Nordics became culturally connected to the West – already hundreds of years ago.