I, Lambert, have compiled this book, in order that faithful honeybees may suck the sweetness of the celestial juice. I called it “flowering”, because it is exquisite in the narration of admirable things.

(Lambertus a. S. Audomaro, 1121, fol.3v).

If you’re reading for a PhD, time and time again you’ll get asked the same, dreaded question: ‘So, what is your PhD on?’

Nine times out of ten, you will robotically relay a rehearsed, overused one-liner that you wish you could find some way of making sound cooler (but believe me, sometimes it’s quite impossible). Something I’ve learned and have tried to work on since beginning my PhD, just over a year ago now, is attempting to articulate my PhD topic differently each time I’m asked by someone. For example:

‘Hey Humma. So, what is your PhD on?’

‘Well, I’m exploring twelfth-to-sixteenth century European and Arabic influences of the Arthurian dragon.’

‘Oh, I’m working on Geoffrey of Monmouth, Thomas Malory and Edmund Spenser, investigating their use of the dragon motif and its potential wider cultural sources beyond the insular.’

‘Erm… dragons, mate.’

One-line introductions aside, I’m currently conducting research for my second chapter, which focuses on two Arthurian works: Geoffrey of Monmouth’s chronicle, the Historia Regum Britanniae (‘The History of the Kings of Britain’), and his Vita Merlini (‘The Life of Merlin’). Old Joe, the University of Birmingham’s campus clocktower has just struck 6pm, a sombre yet welcome jolt to my waning concentration. I’m presently sitting in the Researcher’s Suite in the New Library, head down, pens and books splayed out wondrously. There are five other very tired-looking postgraduates seated around the room, phones switched on, minds slowly switching off.

It’s been a long few weeks. I’ve been sitting here scribbling away on most days, (metaphorically) waist-deep in a multiverse of secondary literature, wading (mentally) through starry skies and astronomical treatises, and furiously chasing (literal) bears and dragons down long, windy rabbit-holes searching for clues and connections in the hope that they may draw me closer to answering a series of self-set, cunningly confounding questions. Sound like a mouthful? It is. Why do we doctoral students make research purposefully difficult for ourselves?

During this month, one particular manuscript that I’ve quietly observed singly and successfully working its way around the peripheries of my mind right into its very centre is the Liber Floridus (‘Book of Flowers’). Completed in Latin by Lambert of Saint-Omer in Flanders in c. 1121, it is a medieval encyclopedia composed of a flurry of works, Lambert having gathered exceptional ‘flowers’ of literature he feared would later be lost, to spread their sweetness to future readers. The encyclopedia itself incorporates the natural histories of Isidore of Seville and Bede- both popular sources in the medieval period, contains maps and a mappa mundi (a medieval European map of the world), a bestiary (a compendium of beasts), crusading rhetoric (describing the First Crusade which occurred in 1096), apocalyptic illustrations, astronomical/ astrological images, multiple dragons (cue excitement), and a narrative of King Arthur written before Geoffrey’s Historia- the beginnings of the Arthurian legend.

For my own research, Lambert’s compiled texts reveal much about the early twelfth-century ideas circulating around England and France, specifically the rising interest in classical texts on the quadrivium sciences (arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy). These emerging concepts were transmitted into England more and more during this period via Latinate-Arabic manuscripts, mainly from Muslim Spain. The popularity of these texts, and the sheer number of translated manuscripts arriving into medieval and early modern England from outside of its national borders gives us a great insight into how knowledge was disseminated: it did not always originate from within our own four walls, but was carried and scribed and swept onto our lands from oceans afar. It is multifaceted and does not always possess ‘English’ origins, and medieval England itself owed those beyond its regional borders a great debt. We do too.

In time, I hope we can explore more of these connections together. But until then, I wonder if there have been any manuscripts with complex histories that have intrigued or inspired you?

If so, I hope its old, wrinkled pages flower new thoughts for you and others, for years to come.

Image: the digitised manuscript of the Liber Floridus, Ghent University Library