FOR 5138:  Spiritual Intermediality in the Early Modern Period

• Subject Area: Humanities
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 435118611

The FOR’s analysis of intermedial representations and disseminations of religious contents, practices and aims from the 16th to the 18th century is informed by a new approach. This approach is based on a comprehensive cooperation comprising German, English and Italian/French literary studies, Latin studies, historical musicology, art history, history, Ethiopian and Jewish studies as well as Protestant and Catholic theology. The FOR hereby will establish for the first time a transdisciplinary research cooperation integrating pertinent academic disciplines in order to analyse phenomena of early modern intermediality in the context of spiritual and religious discourse. Eight interdisciplinary sub-research groups, closely collaborating in terms of content as well as on an operative level, will investigate the intermediality of religious artefacts. Thus, these groups will pay particular attention to artefacts in which the fusion and interaction of the media involved generates additional semantic, aesthetic and spiritual-affective value. The cultural artefacts to be analysed range from sacred music, combinations of words and images, the theory and practice of meditation aspiring to internal and external pictoriality (imagery), dramas based on sacred subjects, the culture of processions, mystagogical and memorial practices commemorating the saints, as well as documentations of sacred monuments and artefacts in city and country descriptions.As regards the methodological and theoretical framework, the FOR will follow up on established concepts of inter- and transmediality. However, these concepts will have to be differentiated fundamentally in order to capture the specific cultural context of the early modern period and the physiognomy of the specific constellations of spiritual mediality. This differentiation is prerequisite for a proper hermeneutical, philological and theological description and analysis of the heterogeneous manifestations of early modern spiritual intermediality. Following this approach, all sub-projects will take into account the following assumptions: Firstly, early modern religious practice was always embedded in media practice. Secondly, the horizontal intermedial configurations in spiritual artefacts always relate to a vertical dimension of intermediality, the interplay and connectivity of this world and the world to come embodied in the figure of Christ as explicated in christological and soteriological concepts. The projected FOR connects to numerous joint research projects located in the faculty of humanities at Universität Hamburg. Based on its research strategy, the faculty has managed to establish in recent years a core research field in the context of early modern studies. It thereby provides – as measured by national and international standards – an ideal context for the FOR, making the most of the existing structures and expertise as well as pushing Universität Hamburg’s potential in the field even further.

• DFG Programme: Research Units

Projects

• Coordination Funds (Applicant Steiger, Johann Anselm )
• Intermedial spheres of action in sacred performances: Rogation processions as intermedial practices in South German Catholicism (Applicants Büchner, Christine ;  Friedrich, Markus )
• Manifestations of spiritual intermediality in Protestant drama around 1700: plays, operas and oratorios (Applicants Jahn, Bernhard ;  Rentsch, Ivana )
• musica angelica et consociatio hominum cum angelis. Angelic music in sacred spaces (Applicants Droese, Janine ;  Huck, Oliver ;  Steiger, Johann Anselm )
• Representations of love in the Early Modern period seen against the backdrop of Baroque theory on symbolic art (Applicants Arend, Stefanie ;  Schmidt, Peter )
• The constitution of media, intermediality and media criticism in Italian, French and English meditational literature from the 16th and 17th century (Applicants Föcking, Marc ;  Rupp, Susanne )
• The medial status of the body – the body as an image and images of the body: King Kāleb and other Ethiopian saints depicted in Portugal and Brazil in the 18th century (Applicant Kern, Margit )

• Spokesperson: Professor Dr. Johann Anselm Steiger