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 systematic research into the Ethiopian manuscript culture is the aim of the long-term project “Die Schriftkultur des christlichen Äthiopiens und Eritreas: Eine multimediale Forschungsumgebung” (“Beta maṣāḥǝft: Manuscripts of Ethiopia and Eritrea”). Ethiopia and Eritrea are situated, from the perspective of cultural history, both at the periphery of the so-called Christian Orient and in the…
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…
The “Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi Deutschland” (CVMA) is part of the international “Corpus Vitrearum”, which was founded in 1952 to document and scientifically develop the entire inventory of medieval stained glass in Europe as well as in museums in the USA and Canada. The project's tasks are to set up an inventory and to document the medieval as well as the post-medieval glass paintings and their…
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…
Medieval and early modern inscriptions crafted before 1650, in Latin and German language, situated in German-speaking areas are at the heart of this project. Inscriptions are significant and unique historical sources because they are often preserved in an authentic state and in their original setting. For the premodern era, script which was affixed to stone, wood, metal, glass as well as textiles…
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…
Since 2004, the long-term project, which had previously been funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), has been supervised by the Academy of Sciences and Literature, Mainz, and continues to be carried out in close cooperation with the National Museum in Copenhagen and the Archaeological State Museum of the Schleswig-Holstein State Museums Foundation in Schleswig.
The art historian Heinrich Wölfflin (1864-1945) is one of the most influential international authors in the field to this day. On the occasion of the centenary of the principles (Grundbegtriffe) of art history, Heinrich Wölfflin's collected works are published under the direction of Prof. Dr. Tristan Weddigen and Prof. Dr. Oskar Bätschmann. The fourteen-volume edition will be published by Schwabe…
The Swiss Inventory of Coin Finds (SICF) is an information and documentation centre which records and documents the numismatic sources – coin finds and relevant documents – from Switzerland and the Principality of Liechtenstein.
The Swiss Inventory of Coin Finds (SICF) was founded in 1992 by the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences (SAHS). We have been located since 2015 at…
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…
During the project period of six years, it is planned on the one hand to publish the complete edition of Albrecht von Haller's reviews (including more than 9'000 in the leading German-language review organ Göttingische Gelehrte Anzeigen) as a central, but still largely unknown part of his oeuvre. On the other hand, a well-founded selection of approximately 8,000 letters related to the content of…
“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…
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 Swiss Idioticon is an institute for the research and documentation of the German language and its dialects in Switzerland. Its main task is the development of the dictionary of the Swiss-German language (Swiss Idiotikon) in printed and digital form. This work describes Alemannic vocabulary in Switzerland from the late Middle Ages to the 21st century. It is the largest regional dictionary in…
Human evolution is a story of expansions. During the last two million years the genus Homo spread from Africa into Asia and Europe in several waves of migration. New species developed and old groups became extinct (range expansions). As early as three million years ago, hominins had established new ways of dealing with their specific environment through culture. Stone tools produced with the help…