COST ACTION IS1301 – New Communities of Interpretation. Contexts, Strategies and Processes of Religious Transformation in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe
Financing: COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) Lead Reseacher: Sabrina Corbellini
Host Institution: University of Groningen IEM Participant Researchers:João Luís Fontes Duração do projeto: 2013-2017
This Action aims to coordinate research activities being currently developed at several European universities and research institutes and create a (virtual) centre of expertise for the study of religious culture in late medieval and early modern Europe, a period traditionally depicted as one of great cultural discontinuity and binary oppositions between learned (Latin) and unlearned (vernacular) and ecclesiastical hierarchy and the lay believers. Challenging stereotypical descriptions of exclusion of lay and non-Latinate people from religious and cultural life the project, this Action will concentrate on the reconstruction of the process of emancipation of the laity and the creation of new “communities of interpretations”. The Action will therefore analyze patterns of social inclusion and exclusion and examine shifts in hierarchic relations amongst groups, individuals and their languages, casting new yet profoundly historical light on themes of seminal relevance to present-days societies.
COST ACTION CA18129 – Islamic Legacy: Narratives East, West, South, North of the Mediterranean (1350-1750)
Fincancing: COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) Lead Reseacher: Antonio Urquizar-Hererra (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia) Host Institution:Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia IEM Participant Researchers:Alicía Miguélez (Action Vice Chair) Duration: 2019-2023
The purpose of the Action is to provide a transnational and interdisciplinary approach capable of overcoming the segmentation that currently characterizes the study of relations between Christianity and Islam in late medieval and early modern Europe and the Mediterranean. Over the last thirty years, some separate geographic and academic areas have been defined in this research field: the Iberian Peninsula, Italy, Central Europe and the Balkans, and Greece and the different islands of the Mediterranean. These different geographical areas have been analysed in isolation and have been further disjointed in a scientific context defined by the separation of disciplines and chronologies. The intention of the Action is to mitigate this academic distortion by creating a common space for scientific exchange and reflection. This space will involve institutions from 30 different European and Mediterranean countries as well as more than 80 senior and junior researchers coming from different disciplines (history, history of art, philology, anthropology, social sciences, history of science, politics, etc.). The creation of this network will help to provide a comprehensive understanding of past relations between Christianity and Islam in the European context through the addressing of three main research problems: otherness, migration and borders. Beyond the strictly academic realm, the Action also aims to revive diversity and Euro-Mediterranean relations in education, at a moment when Europe is at a cultural and political crossroads.
The general objective of the Action is the creation of a stable network of researchers working on late medieval and early modern relations between Christianity and Islam in Europe, in order to identify common questions and open a transnational and transdisciplinary debate on them that will generate findings that can be exported to the entire academic community and society at large.
COST ACTION CA18205 – Worlds of Related Coercions in Work
Financing: COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) Lead Reseacher: Juliane Schiel (Universität Wien) Host Institution: Universität Wien IEM Participant Researchers: Gonçalo Melo da Silva (Management Committee Member) Duration: 2019-2023
The COST Action “Worlds of Related Coercions in work” (WORCK) represents a radical change of perspective on labour history by contending that the coexistence, entanglement and overlapping of diverse work relations has been the rule throughout history. It seeks to overcome the classic divides of labour history discourse (productive/unproductive, free/unfree, capitalist/pre-capitalist) by linking the stories of work and production with those of violence, expropriation and marginalisation. Neither the male-breadwinner model nor the free wage labourer or the capitalist mode of production can form a blueprint for our endeavour; instead we address the persistence and transformation of coercion and bondage across gender orders, world empires and historical eras. WORCK will establish the following four working groups: “Morphologies of Dependence”; “Sites and Fields of Coercion”; “(Im)Mobilisations of the Workforce”; and “Intersecting Marginalities”. This conceptual approach will create an academic space that cuts across standard research fields and enables exchanges between scholars working on topics as various as: construction work in ancient civilisations; indentured work and sharecropping in rural societies; chattel slavery and coolie work; debt bondage, convict labour and military impressment; and coercive mechanisms in household work and wage labour. WORCK bridges the gaps between specialised but hitherto separate subfields. Moreover, it develops an analytical framework that helps to overcome the dominance of the conceptual matrix of the modern West in the humanities and to conceptualise a new history of work. Its activities will result in a collaborative database and a wide range of dissemination activities for the broader public.
VINCULUM. Entailing Perpetuity: Family, Power, Identity. The Social Agency of a Corporate Body (Southern Europe, 14th-17th Centuries)
Lead Researcher: Maria de Lurdes Rosa Host Institution: NOVA FCSH Project Duration at IEM NOVA FCSH: 2019 – February 2024
The “VINCULUM” project emerges out of the continued interest of the lecturer and researcher in the theme of entailment in pre-modern Iberian society. Having begun studying majorat in Portugal during her undergraduate degree, this became the object of her master’s dissertation (published in 1995) and, from a new perspective, specifically the importance of the founding of funereal chapels in late medieval Lisbon in her doctoral degree thesis, defended at EHESS-Paris and UNL (published in 2012). This research gained a new direction and added vitality with the research and heritage defence program that Maria de Lurdes Rosa has been developing since 2008 under the auspices of the IEM, with the occasional collaboration of other History research units (CHAM and IHC).
The program already counts on an FCT funded research project, participation in international projects and programs, six doctoral degree theses finished or under completion and a vast set of publications. Maria de Lurdes Rosa particularly highlights two aspects in this process: on the one hand, the connection to civil society, implemented through the participation of the owners of private archives that open them up to university archive researchers; on the other hand, the direct involvement of young researchers in this team, ranging from undergraduate to doctoral students.
The VINCULUM project seeks to explain how entailment became possible, how this functioned and why it lasted so many centuries. Based on the Portuguese and Iberian case, and the extensive research already undertaken by the LR and the team, the project plans to study ‘entailment’ as a varied but fundamental practice, set in legal principles, aristocratic discourse and an organisational configuration based on parentage, implementing wide reaching and holistic analysis. The approach adopted in the research incorporates a clear overstepping of the traditional boundaries, focusing on study of the 14th to 17th centuries and the continental and Atlantic contexts; and also including comparative perspectives, such as studying the future social reconfigurations of entailment.
The project extends to extensive documental surveys, both of public archives and private family archives that were opened to research by the ARQFAM program, led by Maria de Lurdes Rosa since 2008. The gathering of data shall enable the construction of a major database, bringing together all the documents relating to each entailment, following a theoretical model that seeks to reconstruct the past information systems, thereby testing a new methodology developed in research pre-dating this proposal. The database will bring together around 7,000 entailments and allow for organised and systematic research of the new conceptual proposals made by the project. The research is highly interdisciplinary, deploying historical anthropology and archive sciences with the objective of building a theoretical model appropriate to understanding the crucial legal and social phenomena underpinning entailment.
In terms of its internal articulation, VINCULUM features four phases, implemented through means of six projects: 1) questioning, analysing and describing the structure of sources, involving an extensive document survey leading to the establishment of a database on the foundations of entailment and their archives (project 1); 2) thematic analysis of the social agency of entailment (projects 2, 3 and 4, dedicated respectively to “Parentage”, “Power”, “Identity”; 3) thorough and comparative analysis of entailment societies in the Atlantic space (project 5); 4) an interpretative summary of the overall project results (project 6).
This also considers the dimensions of diffusion and scientific training, increasingly important within the core of European research. The project foresees two types of events for dissemination: the VINCULUM Project Days, destined to the public in general and schools, and undertaken in four sites across Portugal, including Madeira and the Azores, and incorporating grants for the participation of Cape Verdean students; and a workshop on heritage protection for the owners of family archives. Furthermore, this maintains a post-graduate study seminar within the framework of the programs available at the FCSH, between years 2 and 5.
