Samira Rebecca Maria Lindstedt
Position
Guest Researcher, Researcher
Affiliation
- samira.lindstedt@uib.no
- Visitor address
-
Sydnesplassen 7
5007 Bergen - Postal address
-
P.O. Box 7805NO-5020 BergenNorway
Samira Rebecca Maria Lindstedt
Position
Guest Researcher, Researcher
Affiliation
Research
As a full-time researcher on the project ReVISION: Reassessing St. Birgitta and her Revelations in Medieval England: Circulation and Influence, 1380-1530, I am contributing to the production of an edition of the only complete manuscript of the Revelations in Middle English, to be published by EETS. My research presently focuses on analysing the content, influences, and stemmatic affiliations of this version of the text, correcting the typescripts of each folio against the original and evaluating its readings alongside those of Latin versions of the Revelations known to have been produced or circulated in England. ReVISION will thus integrate the English translations of the Revelations into the wider Birgittine textual tradition for the first time, and subsequently reassess the transmission and reception of this highly influential body of mystical texts in fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century England.
In addition to these contributions to ReVISION, I am currently preparing a number of papers that present critical editions and literary analyses of unpublished Anglo-Norman Psalmic prayers. Having edited the only known Anglo-Norman version of the Psalter of Saint Jerome, perhaps the most influential and well-known abbreviated Psalter archetype of the Middle Ages, and a sequence of unpublished Psalmic prayers that circulated in manuscripts owned by audiences as diverse as Augustinian nuns and Henry VIII, I will present on these works at academic conferences with the hope of attracting interest in future editions of these significant texts.
The paleographical, codicological, and analytic skills integral to these editorial projects have been consistent elements of my academic research at postgraduate and doctoral level. My MSt and DPhil theses both examined manuscripts of non-liturgical prayer texts produced in England between 1050-1250, considering how such devotional literature functioned, signified, and was performed by contemporary audiences. This close reading incorporates aspects of the material text that are rarely represented in critical editions, such as mise-en-page, punctuation, and rubrication, into holistic analyses of these texts in the manuscript(s) in which they are contained. In so doing, it intends to reconstruct the experience of engaging with these texts and understand how medieval interpretations of the meaning and purpose of prayer differ from our own. In addition to examining texts composed in a period that conventional literary historiography portrays as a barren, “lost” era in which little “English” material was composed, my research preference is to select primary source materials that are unpublished in critical editions or comparatively overlooked by academics, seeking to broaden the corpus of sources available for related research.