Medieval Visions of the ´Social´

This interdisciplinary project aims to investigate the complex relationship between knowledge, those who produced it, the strategies of conveying it and the impact it had on reality during the process of knowledge transfer in the later Middle Ages. The project emphasises this process by studying the interrelation between various (and sometimes competing) religious discourses and various modes and types of transfer of knowledge (manuscripts and their circulation, textual, from one genre to another, from Latin to the vernacular). Although the focus is on Dominican friars in a local, inter-cultural and multi-religious area Catalonia and Aragon, the project aims to make larger points and discuss the local from a larger, European perspective. Dominican preachers not only were experts whose sermons were a medieval form of public outreach. They were also part of wider European intellectual networks. The approach is that of medieval history and implies interpretive work. The research involves work on unedited and understudied primary sources (mostly in manuscript) and systematic analysis of various texts: sermons, theological works (academic or pastoral), other religious works destined for wider audiences or those stemming from non-scholastic/non-religious milieus. Sermons will be at the core of the investigation though, since they constitute some of the best testimonies to gain insight into the production, transmission, circulation, and negotiation of knowledge in the Middle Ages. I will apply readings from a variety of fields within medieval studies, such as sermon studies, historical semantics, cultural and social history, intellectual history (broadly construed). Further, the project also draws on and critically engages with a number of disciplines across the humanities and social sciences: New Cultural History, Social History and Social Theory, Intellectual History (Conceptual History included). The project is novel as it takes the concept of the social as a category of analysis instead of the more circumscribed unit society, which will allow for a more dynamic explanation and understanding of social life and action, including religious, social, or political aspects usually treated in isolation. This will allow to shift the more traditional focus on visions of society, e.g., on certain schemata and hierarchies (the usual domain of intellectual history and/or political history), to the relational, to what makes communities and identities. Secondly, the focus area (Catalonia and Aragon) still lags behind in a number of scholarly fields sermons studies, intellectual and cultural history to a certain extent.

The project Medieval Visions of the Social set out to investigate late medieval visions of the 'social' in the discourses of the mendicant friars (members of the religious orders dedicated to preaching and communicated doctrine to wider lay audiences), particularly the Dominicans from Catalonia and Aragon, a multi-cultural, multi-confessional area of late medieval Europe. The project proposed the concept of 'the social', borrowed from social theory and social history, as an epistemic category of analysis that was meant to better capture and explain perceived realities than the concepts of society or religion. Its main focus was on sermons, the most important medieval instruments for religious communication, which were examined as evidence of how medieval Dominicans used discourse and language to shape publics. By utilizing unpublished sources in manuscripts and by analyzing discursive patterns from various perspectives, the project contributed new, unstudied, primary material and expanded the scholarship in the disciplines/fields of sermons studies, Iberian history, religious history and cultural and social history. The research done during the fellowship has thus far resulted in a number of international conference papers, a peer-reviewed article, as well as two other publications that are in preparation (one journal article and a catalogue of sermons for an online database of medieval Iberian sermons), and a research piece for a larger, non-specialist, public published on the Historical Identity Research Blog of the Institute for Medieval Research, Austrian Academy of Sciences. In the papers delivered at conferences, I discussed subjects like multilingualism in manuscripts and in theological texts for the education of future preachers (at a virtual conference at Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies). Multilingualism was also the subject of an article in which I showed that bilingualism (Latin and Catalan) was an editorial strategy of preachers with two audiences in mind (lay and religious) and that vernacular was used in the learning and teaching practices of the Dominicans. Also on how the Dominicans were trained in various disciplines, such as philosophy and logic, in order to be eloquent preachers, I presented a paper at the virtual conference of the International Society for Medieval Theology annual meeting in Copenhagen. Conversion as a moral or immoral change was another topic, which I discussed at the biannual symposium of the International Medieval Sermons Society. Last, how social issues were informed by theology was exemplified in the above-mentioned blog post in which I showed how medieval preachers dealt with the subject of domestic violence in their sermons, at 'She was not made to be the servant of man' (oeaw.ac.at).