Research projects

Alms Collectors between Charity, Commerce and Denominationalisation

Project management
Prof. Dr. Vasilios N. Makrides Duration
06/2019 - 05/2020 Funding
Gerda Henkel Stiftung:
30 000 €

Vasilios N. Makrides: The immigration of Eastern Orthodox alms collectors from the Ottoman Empire into the Old Empire is the focus of the project. It pursues interwoven questions of migration, knowledge and denominational history. In order to clarify these questions, archives from different territories of the empire will be compared and insights into the history of other types of migrants (traders and students), but also of other charitable groups active in the same field, will be drawn upon.

Catholic Women Writers as Products and Producers of "Catholic Femininity"?

Project management
Prof. Dr. Jörg Seiler Duration
09/2016 - 09/2023 Funding
Several donors
300 000 €

Jörg Seiler: The anti-modernist phase of Catholicism was characterized by normative Catholic ascriptions of femininity, which mostly obscured the pluralization dynamics of these decades. Persistence, change and (un)simultaneous emancipative ideas about a Catholic gender order should therefore be reconstructed in church history on the basis of biographical sources and literary works of Catholic women writers. As representatives of a liberal profession, they represented an unbound heterogeneous…

Eastern Christians and the Republic of Letters between the 16th and 18th centuries

Project management
Prof. Dr. Vasilios N. Makrides Duration
01/2019 - 12/2021 Funding
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG):
45 000 €

Vasilios N. Makrides: The Republic of Letters, a wide network of intellectuals, also has an Eastern side with numerous actors communicating in Greek, Latin, Arabic or Slavic languages (especially on religious issues). Despite the existence of extensive sources, this topic has rarely been studied interdisciplinary and from an "entangled history" perspective. In order to enable a more complete cartography of this East-West exchange (16th-18th century), this project will bring together scholars of…

Educational Landscape and Knowledge Culture

Project management
Several Duration
07/2014 - 05/2017 Funding
Several donors
290 000 €

Gotha was one of the most important centres of innovation in early modern European educational history. In the project, collections-based research will be carried out using the educational history sources collected in the 17th and early 18th centuries with the aim of making the hitherto almost unknown holdings accessible to science and the public and demonstrating their potential for international research in educational history.

Expansion of the Gotha Research Library into a Research and Study Centre for the Cultural History of Protestantism in the Early Modern Period

Project management
Dr. Kathrin Paasch Duration
03/2015 - 02/2018 Funding
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG):
534 000 €

The Gotha Research Library preserves an outstanding collection of sources on the cultural history of Protestantism in the early modern period. This is the basis of the six-year infrastructure project funded by the DFG (German Research Foundation), in which the library combines coordinated activities for the cataloguing and preservation of this important and hitherto largely unexplored material with the further development of its digital services and transfers the results of its work to science…

Forgotten Bauhaus Women. Fates of life in the 1930s and 1940s

Project management
Prof. Dr. Dr. Patrick Rössler Duration
10/2021 - 01/2022

Patrick Rössler: The exhibition project "Forgotten Bauhaus Women" by the University of Erfurt and the Klassik Stiftung Weimar is dedicated to researching these fates, of which more than thirty will be presented at the Bauhaus Museum Weimar from October 2021.

Globalisation and Local Knowledge

Project management
Prof. Dr. Susanne Rau Duration
09/2012 - 02/2016 Funding
Several donors
300 000 €

The research project is to be understood as a pilot project, which is intended to comprehensively demonstrate the research potential of the cartographic-geographical "The Gotha Perthes Collection" acquired by the Free State of Thuringia in 2003 for the first time. In addition, it is intended to contribute to the further development of the collection and to establish a virtual map laboratory, the "GlobMapLaboratory".

Jacopo Stradas Magnum ac Novum Opus

Project management
Prof. Dr. Martin Mulsow Duration
11/2015 - 05/2022 Funding
Several donors
1 263 000 €

Jacopo Strada (ca. 1515-1588), antiquarian, architect and antique dealer, created a corpus of 30 volumes, the Magnum ac Novum Opus, for his patron Johann Jakob Fugger in the mid-16th century. The project is intended to bring together the entire corpus for the first time, analyse it in its historical and artistic context, research its sources and work out its significance for the history of numismatics and antiquarian research in the 16th century.

Paths and Works of Michael Kosmeli (1773-1844). A forgotten key figure in the trans-Ottoman corridor and context

Project management
Dr. Dirk Sangmeister Duration
03/2021 - 02/2024 Funding
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG):
300 000 €

The versatile writer, polyglot translator and virtuoso Jew's harp player Kosmeli, who travelled restlessly for decades in the space between Germany and Eastern Europe on the one hand and the Ottoman Empire together with Persia on the other, was acquainted with prominent contemporaries such as Adelbert von Chamisso, Jean Paul and the Orientalist Joseph (von) Hammer(-Purgstall), also told Goethe "much about Constantinople and the Orient" in Jena in 1809, but is today a completely forgotten figure.…

Property and habit. On the political anthropology of ownership in Western modernity

Project management
Several Duration
01/2021 - 12/2024

Subproject in the SFB TRR294 "Structural Change of Property". The project is dedicated to the political anthropology of ownership between the eighteenth and early twentieth century. It investigates an assumption that is widespread in the humanities: that ownership structures bring about the formation of specific habits.

Reaching for Atlantis

Project management
Dr. Bernhard Schirg Duration
03/2018 - 02/2023 Funding
VolkswagenStiftung:
1 000 000 €

In his project, the historian wants to investigate the history of objects that were the subject of a fundamental reinterpretation of material culture at the time of the Swedish Empire (1650-1720).

The Historical Sources of the Reformation and Historiography of the Early 18th Century at Friedenstein Castle Gotha

Project management
Dr. Kathrin Paasch Duration
05/2014 - 04/2017 Funding
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG):
270 000 €

The Gotha Research Library preserves a top-class collection on the cultural history of Protestantism in the early modern period, which was compiled by the Dukes of Saxony-Gotha. An essential component of this unique handwritten tradition, which reaches far beyond the Central German cultural area, is the estate of the theologian and church historian Ernst Salomon Cyprian (1673-1745), which is to be catalogued in the project.

The birth of rights universalism from reformed international law. The natural law of Heinrich and Samuel Cocceji and its controversial reception in the European Enlightenment

Project management
Dr. Stefanie Ertz Duration
02/2024 - 01/2027 Funding
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG):
317 000 €

The aim of the project, which at the same time further strengthens the focus on natural law at the Gotha Research Centre, is to explore the natural law teachings of Heinrich Cocceji (1644–1719) and his son and editor Samuel Cocceji (1679–1755). In a monograph, Cocceji's natural law, which centres on a theocratic-voluntarist concept of inalienable liberties, will be presented in its political and ideological-historical contexts and in its controversial reception in the European…

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