WHAT: Discourses of Weakness and Resource Regimes, PHD/POST DOC POSITION in the field of late medieval /early modern history, legal history, or ecclesiastical history
WHEN: starting July 1, 2015 (3-year contracts)
WHERE: MPI, Max-Planck Institut fur europaische Rechtsgeschichte
The Max-Planck-Institute for European Legal History and the Goethe University Frankfurt am Main are partner institutions of the Collaborative Research Centre 1095 ‘Discourses of Weakness and Resource Regimes’. In this framework, the Max-Planck-Institute for European Legal History offers
Two PhD / Post-doctoral Positions in the field of late medieval / early modern history, legal history or ecclesiastical history (starting July 1, 2015, or later; 3-year contracts)
Research project
A Collaborative Research Centre / CRC (‘Sonderforschungsbereich’ / ‘SFB’ in German) is an institution established at German universities for a period of up to twelve years that enables researchers to pursue an outstanding research programme, crossing the boundaries of disciplines, institutes and faculties. Financed by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), it facilitates scientifically ambitious, complex, long-term research by concentrating and coordinating the resources available at a university.
The CRC 1095 ‘Discourses of Weakness and Resource Regimes’ at the Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, employs a transepochal and comparative approach in order to deal with the question of how discourses of weakness had an impact on the use of resources. These discourses can be observed in the history of all cultures at all times. Changes in the use of both material and immaterial resources constitute a special and important aspect of processes of historical transformation which will be addressed by historians, historians of science, anthropologists, philosophers, sinologists and legal historians within the framework of the new CRC 1095.
CRC sub-project C 01 ‘Knowledge of the pragmatici. Presence and significance of pragmatic normative literature in Ibero-America in the late 16th and early 17th century’, led by Prof. Dr. Thomas Duve, reflects upon the significance of normative texts which addressed themselves primarily to practitioners – especially those who would nowadays be seen as part of moral theology or confessional literature. The respective texts were ‘weak’ insofar as they lacked theoretical complexity compared to erudite treatises; they were ‘strong’, however, in terms of pragmatic usefulness because they offered the reader adaptable bases of normative knowledge. There are some indications that these resources helped to establish, even minimally, conceptions of normative order in early modern empires such as the Spanish one. It is the objective of the sub-project to bring to light not only the practical significance but also the intellectual weight of a literary genre which has received little attention for a long time. Characteristic of this genre are condensation processes which might constitute a considerable achievement in abstraction.
