For some years now, research has turned increasingly to the history of the European monarchy. Only recently, the theory of a continuous decline of the monarchy since the French Revolution of 1789 was fundamentally challenged. The monarchies had been a historical phenomenon of previously underestimated flexibility and efficiency, which was able to assert itself in the age of constitutionalism and…
The binational research project “Arthur Schnitzler digital. Digitale historisch-kritische Edition (Werke 1905 bis 1931)” is carried out by scientists of the Bergische University Wuppertal, the University of Cambridge, the University College London, and the University of Bristol in cooperation with the Cambridge University Library, the German literary archive Marbach, and the Trier Centre for…
The Aristotle annotations of Ibn Rušd or Averroes (1126–1198) form a total of the Arabic reception of the Greek philosophy and from the Late Antiquity. As such, they have had a formative influence on the respective discourses of knowledge, especially in their Latin and Hebrew translations over the centuries. The project deals with an yet unexplored part of Ibn Rušd’s natural philosophy, which at…
Through critical editions of authoritative commentaries and sermons on Old Testament texts as well as comparative studies, the Academy's project “Die alexandrinische und antiochenische Bibelexegese in der Spätantike” opens up a central part of the literature of ancient Christianity - namely the interpretation of that part of the Christian Holy Scripture which Christianity shares with its mother…
The research project “Die frühbuddhistischen Handschriften aus Gandhāra: religiöse Literatur an der Schnittstelle von Indien, Zentralasien und China” was established in 2012. On the basis of philological and historical methods, it provides new insight into the early history of Buddhism on its way to becoming a world religion. The project studies manuscripts found in the 1990s in northern Pakistan…
The Coptic-Sahidic Bible is one of the most important literary witnesses of Christianity in the eastern Mediterranean. The Coptic Old Testament, which essentially dates back to the 4th century, is one of the earliest and most extensive versions of the Greek Septuagint (LXX). The translation of the Bible into Coptic was source and inspiration for the entire Coptic-Christian literature of Egypt. In…
Das Forschungsprojekt Johann Caspar Lavater – Historisch-kritische Edition ausgewählter Briefwechsel (JCLB) digitalisiert und erfasst den Bestand der weit über 20'000 Briefe von und an Lavater, um in einer Web-basierten Online-Edition davon ausgewählte Briefwechsel zu edieren und Lavaters gesamte Korrespondenz erstmals synoptisch in ihrer ganzen Komplexität und ihrem Umfang für die Forschung zu…
The project “Johann Friedrich Blumenbach –Online” (www.blumenbach-online.de) aims at making the rise of German science within the European context visible, and at supplying a missing part in accessible primary source material on the cultural history of the time: the publications of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. This is particularly significant with regard to an essential aspect of this period: the…
The name of Dionysius the Areopagite refers to the Athenian, who according to Acts 17:34 was converted by St. Paul’s speech on the Areopagus and then followed him. The name was adopted by a prolific unknown author around 500 A.D., with a vast number of writings based on the tremendous influence of his synthesizing of neo-platonic philosophy and Christian theology. The manuscript tradition is a…
During his lifetime, Richard Wagner (1813-1883) was not only productive as a composer. He also worked literary as an author of dramatic text for his own musictheatrical oevre on the one side and, on the other side, journalistically as “commentator” of his own musical creative work as well as of the events in art, history, philosophy, religion, politics, and society at that time. The oevre - in…
Since 1898 the Law Sources Foundation of the Swiss Lawyers Society edits a collection of law sources which had been created on Swiss territory up to 1798, the Collection of Swiss Law Sources. The Collection contains materials from the early Middle Ages until early modern times (1798). Over 130 volumes, or more than 80'000 pages of source material and comments from all language regions of…
Uwe Johnson (1934-1984) is one of the most important authors of German in the era of two-state identity. His novels tell of German history in a context far beyond Germany. With his essays and articles, Johnson developed the position of a “public intellectual”. His highly literary correspondence is on an equal footing with the literary work, commenting critically on post-war history in an…