Ceiling and mural paintings are constitutive elements in the design of baroque interiors. Unlike all other forms of pictorial art, these truly three-dimensional artistic media define early modern architecture literally from above, through colourful and complex iconographic programmes: in ecclesiastical as well as secular environments, in residential palaces and ceremonial halls, churches and…
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…
The task of the project “Germania Sacra” is to gain access and to publish the diverse and comprehensive written sources, which give evidence of the history of the Church of the Holy Roman Empire and its institutions. For this purpose, the source material of archives and libraries is published in the form of reference books. The reference books provide an extensive description of the dioceses,…
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) is said to be the last polymath. This is reflected by his diverse and mostly unpublished work. Until today, there is no complete edition which forced researchers to rely on deficient partial editions from the 19th century. The project aims at a complete edition of G. W. Leibniz’ writings and of his letters. The handwritten literary remains are to a large…
Texts from the New Testament are preserved in their Greek original language in approx. 5500 manuscripts. It can be assumed that actually no copy is identical with another. Thus, the most important task of the text research of the New Testament is the reconstruction of the text form, which was the starting point for the transmission.
So far, the science had to use “Große Ausgaben” (big editions)…
The objective of the project is to remedy two of the most serious desiderata from the long history of the research of the German language:
The German dialects have been investigated intensively for 180 years (Schmeller 1821). For the “modern regional languages”, i.e. the linguistic variation areas, which present the spoken everyday language of most of the members of the linguistic community in…
The project “Textdatenbank und Wörterbuch des Klassischen Maya (TWKM)” is funded with 5,42 Million Euros and is set to run for 15 years. It is located at the institute for Archaeology and Cultural Anthropology of the University Bonn. The project manager is Professor Dr. Nikolai Grube, who is an internationally renowned expert in the field of Maya research and a member of the North…