Projects

Duration: January, 2021 to January, 2031

Poetics before Modernity is a collaborative project aimed at rethinking the history of early literary theory and literary criticism in the West, broadly understood, from its ancient beginnings to the eighteenth century CE.

Duration: March, 2014 to December, 2027

The primary purpose of this a network is to keep scholars and students working on the medieval (c. 800-1550 a.d.) history and culture of the region (“between the Baltic and the Adriatic”) informed of research projects, publications, meetings, queries, etc. It will consist of researchers from both the region and beyond, open to all interested persons. Joint research projects will be initiated and monitored, occasionally joint applications for funding composed. The Network is joining CARMEN thus establishing contacts with medievalists in general.

Duration: January, 2018 to December, 2022
Funding: The National Research, Development and Innovation Office

This international research project supported by the Hungarian National Research Support Scheme is carrying out a complex program examining one of the most important events in medieval European history, the Mongol invasion of Hungary from 1241-1242. The scholarly interpretation of this period is not only crucial for the understanding of Hungarian history; it is also part of a significant historical process, the expansion of the Mongol Empire and its impact in an Eurasian context.

Duration: June, 2018 to June, 2021
Funding: EU Horizon 2020

OpenHeritage: Organizing, Promoting and ENabling HEritage Reuse through Inclusion, Technology, Access, Governance and Empowerment

Duration: September, 2015 to August, 2020
Researcher: Tijana Krstić
Funding: EU Horizon 2020 - ERC Consolidator Grant
How and why did the Ottoman Empire evolve from a fourteenth-century polity where “confessional ambiguity” between Sunnism and Shiism prevailed into an Islamic state concerned with defining and enforcing a “Sunni orthodoxy” by the early sixteenth century? How did the Ottoman Sunni notions of "orthodoxy" subsequently evolve during the 17th century? Recent historiography attributes the growing concern with “orthodoxy” in the Ottoman Empire to the rise of the rival Shii Safavid Empire beginning in the first decade of the sixteenth century.
Duration: June, 2011 to June, 2019
Funding: CEU

MAD was conceived as a way of addressing the manifold ways humans related to and depended on animals for physical and spiritual existence in medieval Europe. A database is being compiled around a number of data categories including textual data, images, archaeological topographic data, artifacts, and archaeozoological evidence. Above all, the network is intended to create truly inter¬disciplinary tools for research.

Duration: March, 2015 to December, 2016
Funding: MÖB - DAAD

Previous academic research has identified various areas, types of contacts and forms of interaction, where monastic orders played a significant role in communication and knowledge transfer. Their internal organization and networks were essential in the dissemination of ideas and complex “information packages.” The eight main types of information exchange covered in this research project are as follows:

Duration: June, 2011 to June, 2015
Researcher: Katalin Szende, Dr. Istvan Bariska, Dr. Laszlo Blazovich, Gyorgyne Busi, Tamas Fedeles , Eva Gyulai, Orsolya N. Meszaros , Katalin Simon , Anna Szemerey , Istvan Tringli
Funding: OTKA

The European Atlas of Historic Towns is one of the longest-running serial projects on history in Europe. Initiated in 1968 and taken up by 18 countries so far, it has produced atlases of more than 460 smaller or larger towns following a theoretically uniform plan. A new wave of interest in participating swept across East-Central Europe after 1989, the latest element of which was the joining of Hungary in 2004 and the publication of its first atlas (Sopron) in print in 2010.

Duration: November, 2010 to January, 2015
The project aims to develop a new set of ‘model curricula’ covering the thematic field of the Caucasus and Byzantium from Late Antiquity through the Middle Ages, applicable not only to certain specialized institutions in the participating countries or CEU, but to a wide range of western institutions currently offering courses in medieval and/or Byzantine history and interested in expanding their areas of teaching.
Duration: November, 2010 to October, 2014
Funding: OTKA

The group project funded by OTKA, led by Gábor Klaniczay, represents a comparative overview of the Central European region, including specific research on cults of saints in Poland, Bohemia, Hungary, and Croatia. In line with the larger project we treat the cults of medieval saints and their modern appropriations as a vehicle for studying changing cultural values related to social cohesion and identity, to the interactions between centre and periphery, between the medieval Latin culture and regional interests, political and cultural agendas.

Duration: January, 2012 to December, 2013
Researcher: Katalin Szende, Krisztina Arany, Veronika Csikós , Cristian Daniel, János Incze, Gerhard Jaritz, Andor Kelenhegyi, Tamás Kiss, Márta Kondor, Tijana Krstić , József Laszlovszky, Christopher Mielke, Mihail Mitrea, Roman Shlyakhtin, Halil Evren Sünnetcioglu, László Veszprémy, Carsten L. Wilke, Daniel Ziemann, Lajos Berkes, Univrsity of Heidelberg, Julia Burkhardt, University of Heidelberg, Christ Georg, University of Manchester, Andrea Jordens, University of Heidelberg, Patrick-Antoine Sanger, University of Heidelberg, Leonie Silberer, university of Heidelberg
Funding: DAAD-MOB
Duration: September, 2011 to September, 2013
Funding: CEU

 

Duration: September, 2009 to August, 2013
Researcher: Anna Somfai
Funding: MAG Zrt

The main question I ask is in what way people think differently by means of images than through words or numbers. I explore visual thinking by a close study of medieval manuscripts and approach the material through cognitive science, bringing relevant insight from recent neurobiological discoveries related to vision and cognition. I address the central question by examining manuscript page layouts, diagrams, diagrammatic images and the visual language formed through the process of manuscript transmission.

Duration: June, 2013
Researcher: Magdolna Szilágyi, Viktor Lagutov, József Laszlovszky, Zsuzsa Pető, Judith Rasson, Katalin Szende, András Bödőcs, Eötvös Loránd University, Noemi Pazinova, Constantine the Philosopher University, Mihailo Popovic, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Oana Toda, Babeş-Bolyai University

This research network was set up to bring together scholars in East Central Europe who are interested in the field of historic routes research (dromography) between c. 300 and c. 1600. Initiated and hosted by the Medieval Studies Department of Central European University, this is an expressly interdisciplinary project covering themes ranging from medieval history, through archaeology, geography, place-name studies, and art history to spatial information technologies. The themes addressed by the research network include but are not restricted to:

Duration: May, 2012 to September, 2012
Researcher: Irene Barbiera, Gianpiero Dalla Zuanna, Maria Castiglioni

 

 

Introduction

Duration: September, 2009 to August, 2012

The project explores visual thinking through a close study of medieval manuscripts asking in what way people thought differently by means of images from thinking through words or numbers. It addresses the question by scrutinising page layouts, diagrams and diagrammatic images and image-text relation. By doing so the project offers a novel approach toward examining manuscripts and links that with research in contemporary cognitive science.

Duration: September, 2011 to June, 2012
Researcher: Judit Majorossy
Funding: Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung, Return Fellowship

 

 

 

Duration: June, 2011
Researcher: Gerhard Jaritz
Funding: CEU

In various social settings, powerful groups have always sought to handle conflicts and crimes through the force of legislation, but they have also been ready to grant exceptions and treat special cases in a more permissive way within the same administrative framework. Such an institution par excellence in medieval Latin Christianity was the Office of the Holy Apostolic Penitentiary (Sacra Poenitentiaria Apostolica), which resulted directly from the papacy reserving the right to exercise supremacy over all disciplinary matters from the second half of the twelfth century on.

Duration: June, 2011

The main aim of this project was to carry out interdisciplinary research in the field of economic history in the Carpathian Basin and to contextualize the Hungarian economic activities in the European system of production between the eleventh and the sixteenth century. The first part of the project focused on the collection of relevant sources and on the critical re-evaluation of the secondary literature. As a result of this we have produced a textbook for university students dealing with the aspects of economic history in their studies in different fields.

Duration: June, 2011
Researcher: Ottó Gecser
Funding: OTKA

The aim of the research project is to explore the interrelatedness of medical and religious discourse about pestilence in the period between the Black Death and the end of the Middle Ages. One group of sources to be examined is constituted by sermons and legends related to the cult of certain saints who were closely associated to protection against the plague, as well as by sermons about the plague as such. The other group consists of popular manuals of cures and preventive measures which circulated in a high number of exemplars already before the printing press.

Duration: June, 2011
Researcher: Judith Rasson
Funding: CEU

How long have shepherds been driving their flocks up to the mountains to graze in the summer and down to lower elevations to graze in the winter? Opinions vary among archaeologists and historians. Did this practice start some 6000 years ago during the Neolithic? 2000 years ago during the Bronze Age? or later, after the development of complex state societies? A small start on an answer to this question took the form of an ethnoarchaeological landscape study of sheepfolds in two national parks in western Macedonia.

Duration: June, 2011
Researcher: Gerhard Jaritz

With a leading role of the department, an international network of scholars has over the last years been focusing on matters related to the margins, peripheral areas and outer borders of the medieval world. The overarching perspective has been comprehensive in the sense that the idea of margin, periphery, liminality, borders and outskirts has been understood and treated in a wide sense.

Duration: February, 2011
Researcher: Carsten L. Wilke
Funding: CEU

While a corpus of Jewish inscriptions from Antiquity exists since 1936, the absence of a similar research instrument for the subsequent period is widely deplored by medievalists. The long-term goal of this project is a collectively edited, openly accessible and interactive database of all known Hebrew stone inscriptions in the time frame of 700-1520.