Project acronym ACADEMIA
Project Reconstructing Late Medieval Quests for Knowledge: Quodlibetal Debates as Precursors of Modern Academic Practice
Researcher (PI) Ota PavlIcek
Host Institution (HI) FILOSOFICKY USTAV AV CR, v.v.i.
Country Czechia
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH6, ERC-2020-STG
Summary ACADEMIA proposes a pioneering study of a neglected corpus of manuscripts stemming from the practice of quodlibetal debates held at Faculties of Arts of European universities, flourishing from the 14th to the early 16th century. As prescribed by the university statutes, dozens of professors participated periodically in these unique collective works of the Middle Ages, which encompassed all the disciplines pursued at the university, from logic to medicine to theology. The PI hypothesises that the professors presented at the hitherto mostly ignored quodlibets their recent scientific innovations, which they then published in the first collective volumes of European academia. The PI thus proposes a novel theoretical framework for understanding the quodlibets: they stand at the origin of the modern concept of science as a collective intellectual enterprise, similar to modern conferences and the subsequent dissemination of results. This makes them and their written form critical for understanding European intellectual and scientific traditions, both past and present. ACADEMIA’s ambition is to establish the corpus of these debates as a new field of study through an extensive examination of manuscripts, thus filling a substantial gap, radically extending the fields of the history of universities and intellectual history, and reconstructing the roots of the modern practice of fostering collective science. A complex analysis of the corpus will bring about a substantial change in our understanding of medieval practices of the production and sharing of knowledge. Aiming to examine the quodlibets as a phenomenon successively interconnecting European intellectual space, ACADEMIA focuses on fourteen universities at which the PI has identified the tradition so far and on their mutual relations and development. ACADEMIA employs an interdisciplinary team and an innovative combination of approaches from history, codicology, palaeography, philology, hermeneutics and Digital Humanities.
Summary
ACADEMIA proposes a pioneering study of a neglected corpus of manuscripts stemming from the practice of quodlibetal debates held at Faculties of Arts of European universities, flourishing from the 14th to the early 16th century. As prescribed by the university statutes, dozens of professors participated periodically in these unique collective works of the Middle Ages, which encompassed all the disciplines pursued at the university, from logic to medicine to theology. The PI hypothesises that the professors presented at the hitherto mostly ignored quodlibets their recent scientific innovations, which they then published in the first collective volumes of European academia. The PI thus proposes a novel theoretical framework for understanding the quodlibets: they stand at the origin of the modern concept of science as a collective intellectual enterprise, similar to modern conferences and the subsequent dissemination of results. This makes them and their written form critical for understanding European intellectual and scientific traditions, both past and present. ACADEMIA’s ambition is to establish the corpus of these debates as a new field of study through an extensive examination of manuscripts, thus filling a substantial gap, radically extending the fields of the history of universities and intellectual history, and reconstructing the roots of the modern practice of fostering collective science. A complex analysis of the corpus will bring about a substantial change in our understanding of medieval practices of the production and sharing of knowledge. Aiming to examine the quodlibets as a phenomenon successively interconnecting European intellectual space, ACADEMIA focuses on fourteen universities at which the PI has identified the tradition so far and on their mutual relations and development. ACADEMIA employs an interdisciplinary team and an innovative combination of approaches from history, codicology, palaeography, philology, hermeneutics and Digital Humanities.
Max ERC Funding
1 260 485 €
Duration
Start date: 2021-07-01, End date: 2026-06-30
Project acronym DISSINET
Project Networks of Dissent: Computational Modelling of Dissident and Inquisitorial Cultures in Medieval Europe
Researcher (PI) David ZBIRAL
Host Institution (HI) Masarykova univerzita
Country Czechia
Call Details Consolidator Grant (CoG), SH6, ERC-2020-COG
Summary The DISSINET project will provide an unprecedented, “networked” understanding of dissident religious and inquisitorial cultures in medieval Europe through a vast computational analysis of the social, spatial, and textual relationships by which they were formed and recorded. Rather than treating these cultures through narrative case-study or traditional social-historical analysis, our approach will build upwards from the microscopic details of human interactivity towards a broader social picture. Historiographical impressions of the social grounding and spread of religious dissidence, the specifics of dissident cultures as well as their shared characteristics, and the confrontation between inquisitors and suspects will thus be challenged from a previously inaccessible perspective. To achieve this goal, we will manually collect data on every aspect of dissident and inquisitorial interactivity from inquisition records that cover thousands of individuals from the 13th to the 16th centuries. The resulting database will be large-scale and yet retain every nuance of our sources. Our data model will allow us to employ cutting-edge computational techniques, well-adapted to uncover hitherto undetected and historically significant patterns: these methods will include social network analysis, geographic information science, and computational text analysis. In its broader implications, the project will open up a significant new dimension in the conversation between history and the social sciences. It will offer the former a novel approach to challenging historical material, and the latter pre-modern perspectives on the bottom-up emergence of larger social phenomena such as covert networks, repression, and shared religious culture. Finally, DISSINET will make a significant contribution to the digital humanities, providing a powerful digital toolkit for research into multifaceted human phenomena that retains and makes use of the complexities of textual sources.
Summary
The DISSINET project will provide an unprecedented, “networked” understanding of dissident religious and inquisitorial cultures in medieval Europe through a vast computational analysis of the social, spatial, and textual relationships by which they were formed and recorded. Rather than treating these cultures through narrative case-study or traditional social-historical analysis, our approach will build upwards from the microscopic details of human interactivity towards a broader social picture. Historiographical impressions of the social grounding and spread of religious dissidence, the specifics of dissident cultures as well as their shared characteristics, and the confrontation between inquisitors and suspects will thus be challenged from a previously inaccessible perspective. To achieve this goal, we will manually collect data on every aspect of dissident and inquisitorial interactivity from inquisition records that cover thousands of individuals from the 13th to the 16th centuries. The resulting database will be large-scale and yet retain every nuance of our sources. Our data model will allow us to employ cutting-edge computational techniques, well-adapted to uncover hitherto undetected and historically significant patterns: these methods will include social network analysis, geographic information science, and computational text analysis. In its broader implications, the project will open up a significant new dimension in the conversation between history and the social sciences. It will offer the former a novel approach to challenging historical material, and the latter pre-modern perspectives on the bottom-up emergence of larger social phenomena such as covert networks, repression, and shared religious culture. Finally, DISSINET will make a significant contribution to the digital humanities, providing a powerful digital toolkit for research into multifaceted human phenomena that retains and makes use of the complexities of textual sources.
Max ERC Funding
1 991 868 €
Duration
Start date: 2021-07-01, End date: 2026-06-30
Project acronym UnRef
Project Unlikely refuge? Refugees and citizens in East-Central Europe in the 20th century
Researcher (PI) Michal FRANKL
Host Institution (HI) MASARYKUV USTAV A ARCHIV AV CR VVI
Country Czechia
Call Details Consolidator Grant (CoG), SH6, ERC-2018-COG
Summary The project aims to write refugees back into the history of East-Central Europe in the 20th century. In this “age of refugees”, the region became a destination of large refugee migrations, forcing civil societies and governments to negotiate difficult decisions about protection for those fleeing the war and persecution. Yet, at the same time, East-Central Europe does not enjoy the reputation as a welcoming place for people persecuted for political persuasion, for their “racial”, ethnic identity or any other reason. It would appear that the histories of ethnic conflict and violence, political oppression and economic underdevelopment make it a place to leave behind rather than to search for as a safe harbour.
Studies about specific groups and instances notwithstanding, historical research remains highly unsatisfactory, failing to address refugee protection in a systematic comparative way and transcending national master narratives. Worse than this, historical writing about refugees in the “East” often re-inscribes the very (ethnic, political) categories which lead to the production of refugees in the first place.
Comparative research spanning across a longer period and a wider territory promises therefore not only major insights about the “East” as a refuge, but also a significant contribution to the emerging field of global refugee history. In this project, an international research team led by the PI will, using comparative historical research combined with multi-disciplinary approaches, probe the multifaceted entanglements with refugees in countries created in 1918 on the ruins of the Habsburg Monarchy (Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary, Yugoslavia) over the 20th century. By doing so, it wishes to return the discussion of protection of refugees into the region’s history and to contribute – from a scholarly perspective – to the cultivation of current and future public debate about this divisive subject.
Summary
The project aims to write refugees back into the history of East-Central Europe in the 20th century. In this “age of refugees”, the region became a destination of large refugee migrations, forcing civil societies and governments to negotiate difficult decisions about protection for those fleeing the war and persecution. Yet, at the same time, East-Central Europe does not enjoy the reputation as a welcoming place for people persecuted for political persuasion, for their “racial”, ethnic identity or any other reason. It would appear that the histories of ethnic conflict and violence, political oppression and economic underdevelopment make it a place to leave behind rather than to search for as a safe harbour.
Studies about specific groups and instances notwithstanding, historical research remains highly unsatisfactory, failing to address refugee protection in a systematic comparative way and transcending national master narratives. Worse than this, historical writing about refugees in the “East” often re-inscribes the very (ethnic, political) categories which lead to the production of refugees in the first place.
Comparative research spanning across a longer period and a wider territory promises therefore not only major insights about the “East” as a refuge, but also a significant contribution to the emerging field of global refugee history. In this project, an international research team led by the PI will, using comparative historical research combined with multi-disciplinary approaches, probe the multifaceted entanglements with refugees in countries created in 1918 on the ruins of the Habsburg Monarchy (Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary, Yugoslavia) over the 20th century. By doing so, it wishes to return the discussion of protection of refugees into the region’s history and to contribute – from a scholarly perspective – to the cultivation of current and future public debate about this divisive subject.
Max ERC Funding
1 995 950 €
Duration
Start date: 2019-09-01, End date: 2024-08-31
