In the Middle Ages, Old Occitan (formerly “Old Provençal”) was a literary and cultural language, the influence of which extended far beyond the frontiers of Southern France. It was also the language of the troubadours, whose songs had a decisive impact on the love poetry of the European literatures during the Middle Ages.
The only comprehensive portrayal of the Old Occitan vocabulary to have…
Within the framework of the project, the works of Averroes (1126 - 1198) translated into Latin are to be critically edited. Averroes is Ibn Ruschd, an Arabic-speaking Hispanic Muslim who studied and edited the scientific literature of his time available to him. In particular, his commentaries on Aristotle were translated from Arabic into Latin (later also into Hebrew) from the first half of the…
The Jewish diaspora in medieval northern France mastered Hebrew and Aramaic, since their main knowledge resources (Bible, Talmud, and Responsa literature) were written in these languages. However, Old French was their vernacular as it was for the Christian population. This medieval Judeo-French literacy is documented in various literary, scientific, and religious texts dating from the 11th to the…
With its scope and diverse subject matter, Arabic literature is one of the richest in the world. Beginning in the 7th century CE, it blossomed within a civilization characterized by a vast network of cultural traditions and ties that were shaped by Islam. Like the Akkadian and Chinese literatures, Arabic literature is an ancient and erudite archive of knowledge. Until well into the 19th century,…
The “Codex diplomaticus Saxoniae” (CDS) is the authoritative edition of the medieval documents of the margraves of Meissen, electors of Saxony and landgraves of Thuringia, the documents of the cities and religious institutions of Saxony as well as the papal documents handed down in Saxony. This wide-ranging collection of documents now comprises more than 30 volumes with a total of over 11,000…
In addition to Roman and canonical law, the Sachsenspiegel (reported in the Eastern Harz foreland between 1220 and 1235) and the famous town charter of Magdeburg (developed in the town of Magdeburg and decisively shaped by the spellings of the local court chair between the 13th and 15th centuries) form the common foundations of Central and Eastern European legal systems. Simultaneously with the…
In international collaboration with researchers from the USA, Canada, and Austria, the project produces the critical edition of the sentence commentaries of the Dominican theologian Richard Fishacre (founded in Oxford in the 1240s) and the Franciscan theologian Robert Cowton (founded about 1309-1311 in Oxford). The edition of the Sentences Commentary of the Franciscan Wilhelm de la Mare (written…
In 13 volumes, the Early New High German dictionary provides a lexicographic description of the Early New High German, i.e. the High German vocabulary from the middle of the 14th to the middle of the 17th century. This is a historical dictionary of language stages, which was conceived in the 1980s by Oskar Reichmann and has already been published in half.
Written sources are – like art and buildings – integral parts of the cultural heritage, whose preservation, indexing and provision are central social duties. The knowledge of the past is principally based on texts, that more or less accidentally escaped destruction. These records preserve the knowledge, the faith, the tales, the visions and dreams of the people. They give testimony of past…
The project “Katalogisierung der Orientalischen Handschriften in Deutschland (KOHD)” is a research project of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen. It is funded in the context of the Academies’ Programme by the Joint Science Conference by means of the federal union and the federal states. The creation of a Union Catalogue of Oriental Manuscripts in German Collections was suggested in 1957 by…
The task of the project is to publish the “Monumenta Germaniae Historica - Constitutiones et acta publica imperatorum et regem. Dokumente zur Geschichte des deutschen Reiches und seiner Verfassung.” As the German subtitle shows, the aim of the research work is an extensive source work on the constitution of the medieval Roman-German Empire, a politically highly complex structure that extended far…
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 Old High German Dictionary (Althochdeutsches Wörterbuch) fully describes the vocabulary of the earliest stage of the German language, supported by illustrative citations from corpus material. Designed to be edited in ten volumes, it provides a comprehensive analysis of the entire lexical material preserved in texts, glosses, and glossaries, covering a period of eight centuries from 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…
Until the 17th century, the astronomical and astrological works of Claudius Ptolemaeus (2nd century CE) were central source texts for the scientific understanding of the world of Arabic-Islamic and Latin-Christian cultures. The project studies the Arabic and Latin versions of Ptolemy’s major works, the Almagest and the Tetrabiblos, the minor works and pseudepigrapha, as well as the extensive…
The aim of REGESTA IMPERII is to record all documented and historiographically documented activities of the Roman-German kings and emperors from the Carolingians up to Maximilian I. (approx. 751-1519) as well as of selected popes in the form of German “Regesten” (abstracts).
The starting point of the undertaking is strongly connected with the name of the Frankfurt municipal librarian Friedrich…
The repertory "Historical Sources of the German Middle Ages" lists the narrative sources which originated from the time of Charlemagne to Emperor Maximilian I (i.e. approx. 750 to 1519) in the territory of the medieval Frankish and German Empires or which concern German medieval history. To date, the catalogue contains more than 5,300 works in Latin and German, including the "Carmina Burana" and…
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…
The research project “Runische Schriftlichkeit in den germanischen Sprachen / Runic Writing in the Germanic Languages (RuneS)” investigates the oldest writing system in the Germanic languages, the runic script. As a means of communication this script was used in different variants in large regions of Europe (with centres in what is now Germany and the Netherlands, in Great Britain and…
The Diccionario del espanol medieval (DEM) aims to provide a complete inventory, lexicographical editing and linguistically and historically annotated presentation of the entire Old Spanish vocabulary from the first records in the 10th century to around 1400. It is the first comprehensive period dictionary of the Spanish language. In addition to Hispanic Studies and Romance Linguistics, the…