Project Details
Projekt
Coordination Funds
Applicant
Professorin Dr. Birgit Emich
Subject Area
Early Modern History
Ancient History
Ancient History
Term
since 2025
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 558650976
Delving into the polycentricity and plurality of premodern Christianities, the Research Group aims to investigate phenomena that shed significant light on global history from Antiquity to the 18th Century. Scholarship of the last two decades has profoundly revolutionized our understanding of the history of Christians. However, historians need a systematical, methodological toolkit to capture the plural, polycentric and tangled nature of religious affiliations and orderings in their historical complexity. Discussions in the research group seek primarily to address methodological and conceptual gaps in religious history. They aim to develop a line of approach in tandem with a language and model that valorizes the plurality of Christian formations and simultaneously unfolds common features. Our fourfold move to de-center the history of Christianities consists in center-staging actors (m/f); transcending a-priori chronologies; valorizing regional plurality; multiplying the dynamics fueling centralization beyond dogma and hierarchic authority. A polycentric matrix bundles the concerns underpinning this fourfold move. This matrix does not primarily aim to identify and define centers but instead attracts attention to contexts and factors grounding centralization and de-centralization as much as to elements that boost their emergence, transformation and disappearance. Within this matrix, four dimensions can be discerned: polycentricity sheds light on the variable objectives and functions of centralization in its thematical dimension. In its spatial dimension, it highlights the transformation of the relation between center and periphery. Its social dimension allows distinguishing practices of centering within social orderings and communication modes, time horizons and agencies as much as categories of social distinction. Within the chronological dimension, it captures centering and de-centering as processual categories that showcase continuous change. Through these four dimensions, a multi-level concept of change will be developed that is chronologically, thematically and spatially scalable, i.e. that can flexibly connect specific periods with the longue durée and local histories with global perspectives. The central aim of the second phase consists in the redaction of a textbook on plurality and polycentricity of premodern Christianities that synthesizes, within the research group’s actor-centered, trans-epochal, intra- and interconfessional, global, and praxeological line of approach, our results and reflections in an interdisciplinary scientific discourse in the English language. The format of this textbook consists in edited volumes authored by cooperating teams and in a digital version that allows detecting new crossroads and entanglements.
DFG Programme
Advanced Studies Centres in SSH
