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…
“It is only on the step, in the gateway, the entrance, the vestibule, the space between the outside and the inner chamber, between the sacred and the common, that we may ordinarily tarry with our friends.”
With these words Goethe paraphrases the title of his journal “Propylaea”, which he edited from 1798 to 1800. The title is a programmatic statement: the journal is meant to be a place of…
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 foundation of modern Nepal, which until 2007 was styled as the 'only Hindu kingdom (of the world)', goes back to the middle of the 18th century when Pṛthvīnārāyaṇa Śāha, King of Gorkha, started expanding his dominion. Conquering many petty states, such as the rich Malla kingdoms of Kathmandu Valley in 1768/69, the Shah kings soon ruled over a large territory, which subsequently developed into…
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…
The Egyptian-Coptic language is the human language with the longest documented lifetime, clocking at 4,500 years prior to its extinction. Its vocabulary reflects the knowledge and worldviews of one of the formative cultures of the ancient world. In order to explore the linguistic and cultural evidence of this historical episteme, the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BBAW) and…
Three competing Reformation paradigms emerged in the city of Strasbourg, the duchy of Württemberg (with Tübingen university), and the Electoral Palatinate (with the university of Heidelberg) in the second half of the sixteenth century: an “upper German”, a Lutheran, and a Reformed model, respectively. Each of the three emphasized its distinctiveness, but was inevitably influenced by the other two.…
Max Reger (1873-1916) has left us, both in terms of expansiveness and complexity, with a monumental oeuvre. Apart from operas, his works encompasses all contemporaneous genres – chamber music, piano compositions, choirs, orchestral pieces and choir symphonies. Especially remarkable are, for a designated pioneer of new music, his work with organs as well as his revisions of other composers’ works,…