Project Details
Projekt
SFB 644: Transformations of Antiquity
Subject Area
Humanities
Social and Behavioural Sciences
Social and Behavioural Sciences
Term
from 2005 to 2016
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 5486176
The Collaborative Research Centre seeks to overcome the extensive disciplinary sectorialisation of the study of antiquity and its reception as this study previously has been practiced. Its programmatic aim is to contextualise, in an interdisciplinary way, the various productive adaptations and transformations of the ancient sciences and arts. The gradual development of a system of science through the course of the Middle Ages to Modernity, and the accompanying articulation of the cultural self-construction of European societies, are the processes which constitute the main objects of study. The Collaborative Research Centre is further dedicated to laying a theoretical foundation for the interdisciplinary contextualisation of these processes, and supplying examples for their illustration.
In particular, the following topics are to be analysed:
-- the constitutive functions of antiquity in the formation of a European society of science and its disciplines
-- the role of antiquity in the creation of early and later modern cultural identities and self-constructions
-- the artistic, literary, translation-based and media-based forms of the transformation of antiquity
Since the early Middle Ages, the primary objective of the study of antiquity has been to collect the remains of ancient literature and philosophy, the fragments of previous scientific and technical literature and the extant monuments of material culture and art, and to combine these relicts with one s own world of experience. The results of these labors of collection and interpretation were then apt to be absorbed into further constructions fashioned of both antiquity and the present. Such reciprocating processes of discovery and transformation, of imagination, idealisation and critical displacement were repeated for generations, and continue up to this very day. It is the primary goal of the Collaborative Research Centre to carefully analyse these developments. As a result, we hope to gain new insights into the creation and successive articulation of the natural and human sciences, of the arts and media; and we also hope to learn more about the self-construction of the respective cultures of reception. The central theoretical concept of transformation permits us, furthermore, to understand reference to antiquity not as a one-sided reception of an invariable object, but rather to analyse such reference as a two-sided relation involving the mutually dependent processes of constructing Self and Other .
In particular, the following topics are to be analysed:
-- the constitutive functions of antiquity in the formation of a European society of science and its disciplines
-- the role of antiquity in the creation of early and later modern cultural identities and self-constructions
-- the artistic, literary, translation-based and media-based forms of the transformation of antiquity
Since the early Middle Ages, the primary objective of the study of antiquity has been to collect the remains of ancient literature and philosophy, the fragments of previous scientific and technical literature and the extant monuments of material culture and art, and to combine these relicts with one s own world of experience. The results of these labors of collection and interpretation were then apt to be absorbed into further constructions fashioned of both antiquity and the present. Such reciprocating processes of discovery and transformation, of imagination, idealisation and critical displacement were repeated for generations, and continue up to this very day. It is the primary goal of the Collaborative Research Centre to carefully analyse these developments. As a result, we hope to gain new insights into the creation and successive articulation of the natural and human sciences, of the arts and media; and we also hope to learn more about the self-construction of the respective cultures of reception. The central theoretical concept of transformation permits us, furthermore, to understand reference to antiquity not as a one-sided reception of an invariable object, but rather to analyse such reference as a two-sided relation involving the mutually dependent processes of constructing Self and Other .
DFG Programme
Collaborative Research Centres
Completed projects
- A01 - Sources of Normativity: Ancient Approaches and their Transformation in Contemporary Philosophy (Project Heads Rapp, Christof Karl ; Schmidt, Thomas )
- A02 - Demons and Salvation (Project Head Markschies, Christoph )
- A03 - The Transformation and Function of Sympathy between 1600 and 1800 (Project Heads Lobsien, Verena ; Schwalm, Helga )
- A04 - Medieval and Renaissance Transformations of Ancient Historiography (Project Head Helmrath, Johannes )
- A05 - Bios and Techne - Transformations of Ancient Knowledge: Encyclopedia, Illustration, Concept (Project Head Böhme, Hartmut )
- A06 - The Finale of Antiquity: the Analytical Turn of Mechanics between Emancipatory Claims and Traditional Models of Thought (Project Head Renn, Ph.D., Jürgen )
- A07 - Transformationen der Chronologie: Zur Konstruktion kultureller Selbstbilder durch Zeitrechnung und Universalgeschichte (Project Head Macho, Thomas )
- A09 - Zentrum und Provinz: Kulturkonstruktionen als Transformationen der Antikevorstellung im 19. Jahrhundert (Project Head Wrede, Henning )
- A10 - Structural Change in Ancient History in the 19th Century (Project Head Nippel, Wilfried )
- A11 - Interpretive Patterns of Power and Order: Imperium, Republic, and Federation as Categories of Political Reflection (Project Heads Fischer, Karsten ; Münkler, Herfried )
- A14 - Nature/Culture: on the History of the Transformation of a Mythical Demarcation (Project Head Därmann, Iris )
- A15 - The Nordic Transformation of Antiquity: Rudbeckianism as a Scientific Paradigm in the 17th and 18th Centuries (Project Head Roling, Bernd )
- A16 - Transformations of Ancient "Society" in the Late 19th and 20th Centuries (Project Head Winterling, Aloys )
- A17 - The Need to Know: Curiosity in the Middle Ages (Project Head Bredekamp, Horst )
- B02 - Identity in Transformation. Figures of Metamorphosis and Conversion in Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern Literature (Project Head Röcke, Werner )
- B03 - Diversity and Alterity: Pictorial Transformations of Roman History/Histories in the Italian Renaissance (Project Head Seiler, Peter )
- B04 - Classification and Pluralization: Antiquity in the Museum (Project Head Scholl, Andreas )
- B06 - Literary Transformations of Aniquity in the Century after Goethe's Death (Project Head Osterkamp, Ernst )
- B07 - Translation of antiquity (Project Heads Asper, Markus ; Schmitzer, Ulrich )
- B08 - The Different God. Constructions of Dionysos in Modernity (Project Head Schlesier, Renate )
- B09 - Transformationen des griechischen Theaters als Konstruktionen neuer kultureller Modelle (Project Head Fischer-Lichte, Erika )
- B10 - Appropriations of Ancient Sculpture Beginning in the 16th Century: Perception and Canonization (Project Heads Giuliani, Luca ; Muth, Susanne )
- B11 - Rivalry of the Antiquities: Germany's Tectonics of Antiquity between Historicism and Modernity (Project Head Polaschegg, Andrea )
- B12 - The Pluralization of Antiquity in 18th Century German Literature (Project Head Martus, Steffen )
- B13 - Appropriation, Imitation, Invention: Transformations of Antiquity in the Literature of the Italian and French Renaissances (1450-1590) (Project Head Pfeiffer, Helmut )
- B14 - Moving Spaces: the Filmic Scenography of Antiquity (Project Head Dorgerloh, Annette )
- B16 - Transformations of Intimacy. Love, Friendship, and Sexuality in Ancient Epics and Medieval and Early Modern Adaptations (Project Head Kraß, Andreas )
- Z - Central Tasks (Project Head Helmrath, Johannes )
Applicant Institution
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Participating Institution
Staatliche Museen zu Berlin - Preußischer Kulturbesitz
Antikensammlung; Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte (MPIWG)
Antikensammlung; Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte (MPIWG)
Participating University
Freie Universität Berlin
Spokesperson
Professor Dr. Johannes Helmrath
