Research projects in Research Area B

Topics of Editorial Interventions II: The Parallel Passage Method

Department: German Studies
Project Description: This project examines the “parallel passage method” as a fundamental philological technique in which text passages are systematically compared with one another. Despite theoretical emphasis on the uniqueness of works, practices of creating parallels have dominated philological labour from antiquity to the present. This project will use a praxeological take on historical case studies to analyse how these comparative practices have developed.
Doc: Beer Albers
Responsible PI: Prof. Dr. Carlos Spoerhase
Research Area: B (Practices in the Layout, Preservation, and Archiving of texts)

Department: Early Modern History (with a focus on Spanish and Latin American history); History of Humanities and/or German Philology
Project Description: The project examines methods of text abbreviation and summarization in the Spanish imperial administration (16th-18th centuries) and in the philologies of the European Republic of Letters (17th-19th centuries). We are interested in how texts were compressed and expanded, as well as in the historical development of such practices. This also includes media-related and layout aspects, such as blank spaces and tables. The project employs Digital Humanities methods to determine the relationships between long and short versions of texts with greater seriality.
Postdoc: Dr. Ricard Torra-Prat
Responsible PIs: Prof. Dr. Arndt Brendecke; Prof. Dr. Carlos Spoerhase
Research Area: B (Practices in the Layout, Preservation, and Archiving of texts)

Department: Legal History
Project Description: Owing to the importance of “ancient” rights within medieval legal practice, both historical-critical and philological-critical methods gradually emerged in the course of the High and Late Middle Ages as part of the scholarly discussion on the law of evidence. As these methods were annually discussed in legal teaching and increasingly gave rise to methodological debates, the studies of law developed what may be regarded as a form of historical scholarship avant la lettre. This project is the first to trace the intellectual trajectories of this learned discourse in a systematic manner. It also situates these developments within the broader history of the emergence of the historical disciplines of philology and history. To this end, the project examines not only legal commentaries, but also the historical and philological practices of medieval jurists, focusing in particular on dorsual notes on early medieval charters, the prefaces to cartularies, and historiographical works authored by graduated doctores iuris.
Postdoc: Dr. Dario Binotto
Responsible PIs: Prof. Dr. Susanne Lepsius
Research Area: Research Area B: Practices in the Layout, Preservation, and Archiving of Texts