The second half of the 6th century AD marks a significant epoch in the history of Chinese Buddhism. In the years 577/578, the faithful suffered persecution under the secular state of Zhou. Concurrently, monks made great strides in translating the writings of the Buddha, resulting in a completely transformed appreciation of his teachings. Originally hailing from India, this religion was now adapted…
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…
Headed by Prof. Dr. Christian Leitz, Institute for Ancient Near Eastern Studies (IANES), Department of Egyptology, this research project’s aim is the analysis of the contents of the so-called temple texts which form ancient Egypt’s largest and (regardless of chronological and geographical differences) cohesive textual corpus. Most striking about this corpus besides its extent and frequently…
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,…
The research project is supervised by an institution of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Its objective is the establishment of a tripartite analytic-semantic handbook, which essentially provides a new foundation for the history of towns and urbanization during the premodern period. Additionally, it constitutes an important instrument for a multitude of historically oriented…