GRK 2945:  Knowing – Believing – Asserting: Production and Enforement of Truth in the Premodern Period

• Subject Area: Literary Studies ; History ; Art History, Music, Theatre and Media Studies ; Social and Cultural Anthropology, Non-European Cultures, Jewish Studies and Religious Studies
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 507435944

The Research Training Group (RTG) aims to investigate truth production and truth enforcement between the 13th and 17th century. It targets a period that is characterized by social, political, and religious dynamics as well as by transformations of knowledge cultures, by media change, and by altering public spheres. In this period, symbolically generalized media of communication evolve, while at the same time rhetorical or moral arguments and well established institutional or ritual ways of securing truth remain effective. A multitude of new and established practices of asserting and enforcing truth existed simultaneously – ignoring, supporting, negating, or copying each other. The RTG wants to attract doctoral projects that, on the one hand, investigate how truth is claimed, asserted, enforced, and made acceptable to guide speech, thought, action and decision-making. On the other hand, the projects should explore how processes of ‘making truth’ are observed and reflected in images, plays, and texts. The focus on Europe and its early colonial contact zones will be supplemented by a contrasting perspective on China and Korea, which are particularly suitable for a comparative study due to their highly differentiated written cultures and their specific dynamics. By conceiving truth as something that is made or produced, we acknowledge the fact that even though truth can be conceptualized as ontological, unattainable, or eternal, it only becomes tangible in the mode of its mediation. Truth must be declared or claimed, its status must be asserted, inscribed, or embodied – it always appears within media. Complementing existing research on the history of sciences, on institutional claims of validity, or on the role of the expert, the RTG focuses on practices and processes of making truth and explores their dependence on bodies, natural things, and artefacts. It observes truth production as a bundle of practices and material arrangements in which humans, media, things, and spatial arrangements interact. Bodies, instruments, tools, natural and artificial objects, texts, images, diagrams, architectures, workshops, court sites, or stages all participate in the assertion of truth.

• DFG Programme: Research Training Groups
• Applicant Institution: Ruhr-Universität Bochum
• Spokesperson: Professorin Dr. Christina Lechtermann
• Participating Researchers: Professorin Dr. Tina Asmussen; Professorin Dr. Marion Eggert; Professorin Dr. Susanne A. Friede; Professor Dr. Roger Friedlein; Professor Dr. Arndt Kiehnle; Professorin Dr. Maren Lorenz; Privatdozentin Dr. Katharina Mersch; Professor Dr. Ulrich Rehm; Professor Dr. Christian Schwermann; Professorin Dr. Linda Simonis; Professor Dr. Roland Weidle