The EUARTHURS project aims to examine Arthurian traditions from Wales to wider Europe, tracing their reinvention in literature, art and material culture. Working with libraries, archives, museums, publishers and creative practitioners, EUARTHURS explores how political and cultural contexts shaped these tales and why they continue to resonate today. The project also trains researchers to study how cultural texts travel, adapt and endure across time.

The Dutch project at AHM focusses on Middle Dutch Arthurian romances and historiography and the manuscripts in which these genres have survived. These manuscripts were produced in various regions of the Low Countries and date from the late 13th to the 15th century. Compared to many French manuscripts from the region, they have a rather modest appearance. The doctoral candidate in this project studies the way in which reader guidance is achieved internally, for example by means of temporal structuring or other narrative junctions, but also through paratextual elements such as layout, decoration, paragraph marks and punctuation. Quantitative data on size, number of columns, words per column, intervals between display letters etc. will be gathered and compared. From the beginning of the 14th century, the paratextual design of vernacular Dutch literature is taking its shape, which may be connected to the emergence of individual reading. To gain better understanding about how audiences in the Low Countries engaged with Arthurian texts and how the development from listening to reading may have taken place, this project will compare Middle Dutch manuscripts first of all with their French counterparts from the same region and to manuscripts from other neighbouring traditions (Middle High/Low German manuscripts).