Research
The Leibniz ScienceCampus Mainz/Frankfurt explores the diverse processes of cultural transfer, exchange, and reception from antiquity to modern times and at the same time from Europe to the Orient, originating from Byzantium or in which Byzantium was involved. Aspects of cultural change and continuity, cultural contacts, and cultural transfer as well as impact and reception are of particular interest.
The overarching theme of the work programme for 2019-2025 is the question how knowledge, ideas and objects circulated in the Euro-Mediterranean area, to which cultural processes of translation they were subjected, and finally, what was the role played by Byzantium and its agents as interlocutors and cultural brokers, first diachronically between Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period, and second transregionally between Europe and the Islamicate Near East. Reasearch on these questions is clustered in the Key subject area Byzantium between Orient and Occident: Appropriation, translation and dissemination of knowledge, ideas and objects . Viewing the cultural history of the Euro-Mediterranean Area with Byzantium as the focal point opens an entirely new perspective on these complex cultural processes that aids in overcoming the dichotomy between the stereotypical concepts of Orient and Occident, and thus avoids a Eurocentric point of view concentrated on Latin Europe.
The research programme is grouped together in larger interdisciplinary key subject areas, study groups and individual projects
Key subject area
Byzantium and the Euro-Mediterranean Martial Cultures
