A history of cultural diversity

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Gaining access to language and texts: This has always been and remains the preserve of those who have dedicated themselves to a culture of diligence and accuracy with the written word. In Europe, these kinds of cultural techniques are known as “philology” – but in truth, people from all the world’s cultures have been engaged in this for five millennia.

The new Cross-Cultural Philology Cluster of Excellence at LMU Munich will be adopting a cross-cultural approach to research these practices and at the same time will be rewriting the history of scholarship: the approach will no longer be Eurocentric but will be transcultural and global.

The cluster incorporating 25 disciplines from eight faculties and 27 international partners started its work in January, and JMU Würzburg is also involved. It will be officially inaugurated on 8 June 2026. Beate Kellner, Professor of Medieval German Literature and spokesperson for the cluster, reports on the initial phase and the goals for the years ahead.

A global approach to research

What’s the basic idea behind the cluster that incorporates so many very different disciplines?

Beate Kellner: We’ll be researching and comparing philological practices all over the world and over a period of around 5,000 years. This is a new approach that’s unique in this form. In the past – and this is still the case today – the humanities were often shaped by Eurocentric ideas.

What do you mean by that?

Philological research was often confined to Europe and European history. And if people looked beyond this horizon to focus on other cultures, this was usually done with an engrossing perspective based very much on European standards. The history of philology has often only been traced back to the Renaissance period. That’s much too restrictive.

We come across philological practices as early as 5,000 years ago in Mesopotamia and Egypt, and later we also encounter them in China, in India, in Tibet, in ancient Egypt, in Judaism, in the Arab world, in Africa and the Americas. These traditions have been the subject of far too little research hitherto.

Cross-cultural research

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So is breaking down these established practices your stated aspiration for this big project?

Yes, in the cluster we’ll be studying the history of our cultural heritage or large parts of cultural heritage from multiple perspectives, across different cultures and with a relevance to the present day. Our aim is to contribute to a deeper understanding of cultures and better communication between cultures. We believe there’s a pressing need to promote respect for cultural diversity. And we also want to help strengthen critical thinking in philology, which is important for everyone in society.

The whole world of philology – that’s a pretty broad spectrum.

It really is. Geographically, it spans from Europe to Asia, Africa and the Americas; in historical terms, it extends from its origins in Mesopotamia and Egypt to the modern day. Then there’s also the breadth and depth of content. It’s about identifying the systems and inherent logics of the diverse range of philological traditions. This entails very different practices – writing, compiling and translating, editing, conveying and archiving, canonizing and commentating, and the migration of texts and genres across different cultures. We’ll be examining and comparing all this across language and cultural boundaries – and we’ll be doing so from a global perspective.

Interdisciplinary work, international collaboration

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How do you intend to go about this given the size of the program?

Of course, we’re not claiming that we want to fully map and research every single tradition. We need to work with examples, that’s clear. But in the assessments that preceded the approval of the funding for the cluster, it became evident that there are only a few places in the world where a cluster like this can be created. The conclusion was that Munich, with its incredible diversity of relevant subjects, is the ideal place to do this. Where else can teams from disciplines as diverse as Indology and Egyptology, German Studies and Ancient Oriental Studies, Sinology and Arabic Philosophy or Musicology and Romance Studies all work together to solve a problem in a major project? These very pairings will be presenting their joint projects at the opening ceremony.

We already have a large number of collaborationsin place. And we’re receiving more interesting requests. For example, we’re currently embarking on a cooperation with the Global Humanities Initiative at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge/USA. We will also soon be taking part in a big international conference in Boston.

Which topics illustrate the value of this global approach particularly well?

Let’s consider the process of canonization, in which a collection of texts is enshrined as authoritative, standard-setting and precious. Sometimes people think there’s something static about a canon. But the processes by which it forms, and also disintegrates again, are each highly dynamic. A process like this will sometimes last for centuries and may be subject to cultural change, geopolitical shifts, fractures in society or be a vehicle for strategies of power. Which texts and traditions are actually candidates to be a canon and why? Is it because they’re considered to be relevant by a certain group? Or because they serve hierarchical, economic, religious, or other cultural and social interests?

These questions can essentially be opened up for all types of canon formation – from the canonization of the Old and New Testaments, which spanned centuries, through to the formation of canons in legal history, literary history, or philosophy and music history.

Unlike almost any other topic in philology, canonization is also linked to questions of power and dominance.

It accompanies the rise and fall of empires, such as the history of the ancient Near Eastern empires or the Roman Empire. And you only have to consider the flip side of canonization – censorship. In ancient China, for example, new rulers sometimes not only destroyed the canon of writings of the previous dynasty, but also had the representatives of the old intellectual elite killed. And of course, the Church in the West has also engaged in a great deal of censorship, as we all know.

What other dynamics will you be studying across cultures and epochs? For example, which traditions will you be basing your work on?

Commentary traditions are a good example. In philology, they’ve often been disregarded because people were fixated on understanding the original as the actual text. To quote just one example, let’s take Petrarch, the Italian poet and scholar who’s widely regarded as the co-founder of Renaissance humanism. His texts have been studied, very precisely and comprehensively, whereas the commentaries, which were very important at the time they were written, were subsequently deemed to be of secondary importance. The same applies to other cultures. There are extremely wide-ranging traditions of commentary, for example in Chinese culture or the Arab world, and of course on the Bible as well, on Greco-Latin authors and on the law. And the commentaries are often much more detailed than the texts to which they apply.

You yourself are leading a project focusing on medieval poetry that originated in Romance and German courts. You want to show that there was actual interaction between the two and not just the influence of Romance on the German courts. What did such patterns of text migration look like?

Most of the work done so far has focused on the idea of dominant cultures. One culture gives something to another culture, which in turn is merely a recipient of ideas. In the case of medieval poetry, the assumption was that everything originated from the Romance sphere, and the German states adopted this. We can now see in our research that we should instead base our thinking on the idea of networks. The courts were absolutely centers for different languages, for exchanging knowledge, traditions, and documents. We now know that these phenomena are comparable to those seen in other parts of the world. This is why in our research group we’re studying not just examples from the European High and Late Middle Ages, but also from southern India in the early modern period.

One of the key topics for the cluster to explore is how writing systems developed and spread in different cultures. What questions are associated with this?

Examples of the kinds of questions we’ll be asking are: In what way were they linked to different forms of knowledge? For instance, how did Aramaic and its writing system manage to evolve to become a world language? Which constellations in society promoted this? How was it able to spread along trade routes? My colleague Holger Gzella, co-spokesperson for the cluster, is a world-leading expert on such questions.

It’s also important for us to link writing to orality. Which oral traditions are thought to have preceded the versions of writing that have survived for us to study? And maybe this will even enable us to establish a link to the present day, a current situation in which written records are often once again heavily linked to orality, in chats and short messages, for example.

Talking of technological leaps: One interdisciplinary topic for the cluster is the use of digital humanities. What analytical possibilities do AI methods present for research in this area?

In analyzing the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the oldest poems known to humankind, AI can be used for example to calculate the probabilities of how to fill in the gaps and expand the passages for the text, which has been passed down in highly fragmented form.

And this means today we can also process and scan much larger corpora of texts, including those that really could not be handled by reading them, to answer certain questions. This offers a possible way to gain fresh insights and then create statistics based on very large amounts of text. For example, how have certain developments in text genres spread out over time? Criticism and reflection from the field of philology can be combined with mathematical thinking from the digital humanities. In addition, we’ll be creating editions in digital form right from the outset or establishing digital publication strategies. This is another way we can use these new technologies – for our own philological practice.

About the person

Professor Beate Kellner is Chair of Medieval German Literature at LMU Munich and spokesperson for the Cross-Cultural Philology Cluster of Excellence.