Types of Sources

As you have seen in our film, the textual sources we use for the study of medieval history are extremely various. They were preserved, until the invention of printing, in manuscript form. On account of their particular and peculiar nature, scholars generally distinguish between them to some degree and group them in sources genres. The realization that certain internal features within a group of texts are very similar makes it possible to gain a certain kind of overview, but also helps to discover the individual features of a given text by means of comparison, and to construct methods for textual analysis appropriate to that text.