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Research of Prof Dr Blom

Comparative Research on Mediaeval Glosses and Marginalia

Glosses and marginalia are one of the earliest attestations of the European vernacular languages. But how were they used alongside Latin as the standard written language? How were texts in different languages read at the same time, and why? The comparative study of glossed manuscripts offers the opportunity to analyse the language choices of scribes in different parts of Europe.

It is also important to understand how glosses were used in different languages alongside other signs and characters such as punctuation and construe marks, and how they are integrated into the page layout. Only recently has research begun to consider the broader cultural context of these manuscripts and to view glosses and marginalia as important witnesses to the history of reading and the transfer of knowledge in the Middle Ages. 

Professor Blom's research focuses on the written use of vernacular languages in Western Europe from the Late Antiquity to the High Middle Ages. His comparative approach combines historical sociolinguistics with paleography, text philology, comparative linguistics, and cultural history. In this way, Professor Blom attempts to situate early writing in the Celtic and Germanic languages within a broader European context, especially where it interacts with Latin in the form of glosses and marginalia and takes the form of ‘multilingual reading’. 

History of Celtic and Germanic Philology in the Context of Romantic Nationalism

A second research focus is the history of Celtic and Germanic philology in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Here again, Professor Blom has developed a comparative approach based on the networks of scholars and correspondence between linguists and philologists throughout Europe, in order to locate the history of linguistics within the broader cultural-historical context of romantic nationalism and its aftermath in Great Britain, Germany, the Netherlands and Frisia, Scandinavia, and Russia. Among others, he has published on the hitherto little-researched international network of the Danish linguist Rasmus Rask (1787-1832). Scholars of the more recent past Blom has worked on are Whitley Stokes, Rudolf Thurneysen, A.G. van Hamel, and Jan de Vries. In recent years, his research has concentrated on the literary and scholarly relations between the Frisian and the Breton national movements in the twentieth century.

Multilingualism in the Roman Empire: Gaulish and Latin

Professor Blom's third research focus concerns the study of bilingualism and language death in the Roman Empire. To date he has concentrated on Gaulish, a Celtic language spoken in pre-Roman and Roman Gaul on the non-Italian side of the Alpine range. Of all attested Continental Celtic languages, Gaulish is known to have persisted the longest as a community language. It is widely assumed that it continued to be spoken alongside Latin and the various other vernaculars of Gaul, such as Aquitanian and, perhaps, the Germanic and Insular Celtic dialects introduced later by new groups of immigrants, for two or possibly more centuries after its written use had petered out, probably in the third or fourth century A.D. This makes it the only Palaeoeuropean language to have coexisted in writing alongside Latin until far into the imperial period. Professor Blom has studied several late-antique Gaulish inscriptions, especially of the curse-tablet genre. He is specifically interested in the use of the Gaulish vernacular within ritual contexts.