Throughout Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, a vast corpus of potentially dangerous texts was dismissed as unorthodox and unauthorised by Christian scholars and policy makers. These texts exposed their readers to unorthodox systems of thought and belief, and hence should have been eradicated. And yet, although these texts and the world-view they represented were repeatedly questioned, denounced and condemned, they were still read, copied and commented upon by a select group of Christian scholars, who clearly realised the implications of what they were doing. Given the fact that the attitude towards these texts remained negative and reproachful, their preservation and use seem even more intriguing. In this paper I shall explore some of the mechanism that allowed the preservation, copying, and reading of such texts in the late-antique and the early medieval West.
Yitzhak Hen is a Professor of late-antique and early medieval history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the Director of the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies. His main research focuses on the social, cultural and intellectual history of the post-Roman Barbarians kingdoms of the early Middle Ages, and he has published numerous articles and several book in his field of expertise, among them Culture and Religion in Merovingian Gaul, 481-751 (1995), The Sacramentary of Echternach (1997), The Royal Patronage of Liturgy in Frankish Gaul to the Death of Charles the Bald (2001), Roman Barbarians: The Royal Court and Culture in the Early Medieval West (2007).