EuroCORECODE_Die visuelle Repräsentation von Heiligen

The individual project "Visual Representations of Saints" deals with the role of images of saints in the Middle Ages, their various levels and their influence on the medieval perception of saints: on communicating with the saints, the power of saints, identifying with the saints` model and the latter`s impact on identifying with one`s own communities, from the local layer to the general level of medieval society. The project analyses the development and changes with regard to the way in which the saints` visual representations were used to transmit messages, with special consideration of the various specifications of space. It concentrates, on the one hand, on the `close reading` as well as the qualitative and quantitative analysis of the visual representations of Central European saints. It is, moreover, particularly interested into comparative approaches and contextualization. Although the main emphasis is put on the analysis of visual images, the latter can only be realized with the application of interdisciplinary methods. The first analyses, at the beginning of the project, are intended for a smaller region (Lower Austria) and individual popular and/or `regional` saints (like, for instance, St. Catherine; St. Coloman; St. Leopold). Based on results out of those introductory studies, the research will then concentrate on larger regions (countries) to receive, at the end, answers for Central Europe to questions like: Which are the differences, if there are any, of the way in which the visual representations of saints are produced, used, and perceived on local, regional, `national,` and `general` levels? Are there developments and changes to be recognised from the twelfth to the sixteenth century? To which extent can the medieval visual representations of saints be seen as sources for the social life of images and image-making? Do Images of Saints have the power to construct identities? Do the comparisons with the evidence and results from other areas of Europe, that is, particularly the research areas of the other individual projects, offer a uniform `European visual image of saints`? To what extent can the medieval situation be compared to the saintly visual culture of post-medieval periods? Which influences can be traced? Thus, the IP will offer, for the first time, a comprehensive, comparative, and interdisciplinary analysis of the visual representations of saints with regard to regional, social and gendered space; the construction of religious identity from local to `international` levels; a `European visual image of saints.`

The Visual Representation of Saints Closeness, Distance, Identification and Identity (12-16th c.), part of the ESF EuroCORECODE collaborative research project Symbols That Bind and Break Communities. Saints' Cults as Stimuli and Expressions of Local, Regional, National and Universalist Identities)The collaborative research project was established on 1 September 2010 under the EuroCORECODE programme of the European Science Foundation. The project was funded by 4 National Research Councils of the Humanities, from Denmark, Austria, Estonia, and Norway, with a Hungarian team supported by the Hungarian Research Council as an associated partner: the project thus involved five self-contained, interrelated subprojects focusing on different European regions and overlapping but different periods altogether spanning the Middle Ages, the Early Modern and Modern periods, the teams from the universities and institutes of Copenhagen (Denmark), Krems (Austria), Tallinn (Estonia), the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (Trondheim, Norway), and the Central European University in Budapest (Hungary). On overall level, basic strategies of the collaborative research project were connected to the idea of cultural memory. The teams asserted that a key to understanding the development of regional identities lies in the tension between specifically formulated regional traditions and trans-regional impulses as also influenced by general concerns of different levels of authority. The project confirmed that cultural memory and its manifestations, such as the cult of saints, are important actors in local, regional and trans-regional identifications and that its cultural changes, revisions or transformations can be studied as local appropriations of materials, patterns or structures transmitted over centuries. The collaborative project was the first to investigate the significance of saints in the interactive context of regional and trans-regional identities.In the Austrian part, the function of cultural memory has been tested on the visual representations of saints, pointing to ways in which various identities and identifications were negotiated in different social groups, in local, regional or trans-regional contexts of Central Europe, and how saints on images were subjected to appropriations or transformations that made them easier to identify with and sometimes simply constructed them in ways to make them function as markers of communities identity. With case studies on Austrian, Bohemian and Hungarian medieval and early modern images, we were able to asset the full relevance of the cultural memory concept and demonstrate the concrete ways of its manifestations to substantiate and nuance the broader ideas which constituted the basis of the project. Used by political and religious authorities, saints became one of principal symbols of regions in Central Europe. Visual representations of saints within a broader framework of cultural memory were used as a disruptive or cohesive, centripetal or centrifugal force in influencing regional development.