The network will appoint 11 Doctoral Candidates across six universities, beginning in Autumn 2026. Each project is pre-defined and contributes to one of the network’s methodological strands:

• materiality (manuscripts, early printed books, monumental art).
• mediality (post‑medieval scholarship, editorial history, critical theory, music and theatre).

The AHM project 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 to the data of the mirror project in Zurich (Doctoral Project 4). 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 (which is part of the mirror project) and to manuscripts from other neighbouring traditions (Middle High/Low German manuscripts).

The deadline for applications is 4 May 2026.