European Arthurs, Medieval to Modern (EUARTHURS) is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Doctoral Network. Our site serves as a collaborative platform to promote academic exchange and innovation.
Visitors will find information about the network’s goals, researcher profiles, and upcoming events.
We invite you to explore, participate, and connect with us in building a vibrant and supportive research environment.
Edward Burne-Jones, The Last Sleep of Arthur in Avalon, 1881–1898. A nineteenth-century reimagining of Arthur’s legendary rest in Avalon.
Collection: Museo de Arte de Ponce, Puerto Rico. Image via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
EUARTHURS examines, for the first time, in cross-cultural synchronic and diachronic ways, the conceptualisation and the transmission of Arthurian matter in its move from its origins in early medieval narratives from Wales into other geographical and linguistic areas in Europe in the Middle Ages, into other genres and art forms that endure to the present day.
EUARTHURS is led by Prof. Raluca Radulescu(Bangor University, Wales, United Kingdom), PI, with a team of Co-PIs from 6 countries:
- United Kingdom – Wales (Bangor University: Prof. Raluca Radulescu and Dr Aled Llion Jones);
- Iceland (University of Iceland, Reykjavik: Prof. Sif Rikhardsdottir);
- Italy (Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa: Prof. Lino Leonardi and Prof. Fabrizio Cigni);
- The Netherlands (University of Amsterdam: Dr Marjolein Hogenbirk and Prof. Irene van Renswoude, and University of Utrecht: Dr Martine Meuwese);
- France (University of Clermont Auvergne: Prof. Sébastien Douchet).
- Two additional doctoral students are part of the network, funded separately by SERI (the Swiss government) at the University of Zürich and supervised by Prof. Richard Trachsler.
The project is hosted by the Centre for Arthurian Studies at Bangor University, where the post-doctoral researcher and Project Manager Dr Edward Caddy assists Prof. Radulescu in the network coordination is also based.
Starting from the dichotomy that used to be perceived, in modern scholarship, between ‘centres’ of cultural power and diverse regional ‘peripheries’, EUARTHURS problematises both medieval and modern academic definitions of where the centre or centres were (and are) of this best-selling tradition in the Middle Ages, and explores their constant re-invention in traditions seen for far too long as ‘peripheral’ in European medieval writing and art, then in post-medieval forms.
Supported by a team of non-academic partners, including repository libraries, archives, museums, and publishers, as well as creative environments, EUARTHURS aims to demonstrate that the culturally- and politically-specific environment which framed the appearance and then the dissemination of Arthurian legends across Europe shaped the key elements in these stories that led to the endurance of this global cultural export from then on and to the present day.
King Arthur (from the Heroes Tapestries), South Netherlandish, c. 1400–1410. Arthur depicted as one of the Nine Heroes of medieval tradition.
Collection: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Cloisters Collection. Munsey Fund, 1932; Gift of John D. Rockefeller Jr., 1947. Image: The Met, public domain.
