Project title: The Theory of Healing in Ancient Egypt: The Biophysical and Cultural Realities of Healing Practices from the Nile Valley during the Late Second Millennium BCE
Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Tanja Pommerening, Prof. Dr. Jochen Althoff, Prof. Dr. Olaf Kaper (Leiden)
Project title: The Dead Body. Studies on Concepts of the „Corpse“ in Ancient Egypt.
Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Tanja Pommerening, Jun.-Prof. Dr. Claudia Lauer
Project title: Concepts of visual perception in Greek scientific thought from the 5th century BC to the 2nd century AD
Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Jochen Althoff, Prof. Dr. Tanja Pommerening
Project title: Foodways Through the Desert. A Multidisciplinary Approach to the Settlement History of Arabia and Palaestina (2nd to 7th Centuries CE)
Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Heide Frielinghaus, Prof. Dr. Sabine Gaudzinski-Windheuser
Project title: Didactic Nature in Vernacular. Utilization and Instrumentalization of animals, plants and minerals in Middle High German texts of the High Middle Ages
Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Claudia Lauer, Prof. Dr. Marion Gindhart
Dissertation project:
Teaching about nature and with the help of nature are connected very closely: in many mediaeval texts animals, plants and minerals are described and utilized in different ways. Amongst other purposes their characteristics and exegesis are used in particular for moral-didactic purposes. In my dissertation project I study different Middle High German texts from the High Middle Ages, especially from the 13th century, which deal with the relationship between micro- and macrocosms and with the transfer of parts of nature to the human life.
Linked to the analysis of traditions of knowledge, which underlie the texts, and the concepts of nature and humans, that the texts devise, is the question of the strategies, which the different authors use to compose their texts, and of the instrumentalization of parts of nature: How are animals, plants and minerals listed, described and used didactically to exploit the ordo of nature as a regulating system for humans? Which knowledge do they convey and how are they used? Are they used metaphorically or are they part of an aesthetic technique?
These questions arise in different contexts (e.g. sermons or fables) and my text corpus focuses on didaktische Literatur (didactic literature/poetry) – texts which are in terms of content and form very diverse. Since nature is used for a didactic purpose in many texts, both longer and shorter ones, I want to choose examples of both categories and analyse them contrastively: thus I will include an analysis of "Der Welsche Gast" by Thomasin von Zerclaere, "Die Bescheidenheit" by Freidank and "Der Renner" by Hugo von Trimberg on the one hand, and on the other hand I will consider several selected Sangsprüche, which since at least the 12th century have presented themselves as Singen von und über Moral ("Singing from and about moral").
This way, a broad textual base is being provided to ensure the validity and the representativeness of my research. Furthermore, each text’s individual historic background will be included, so the texts will be set in relation to one another as well as to the context of their traditions.
The dissertation project was completed in March 2020 and successfully defended in September 2020.
The work was published as Hofert, S., Didaxe und Natur Darstellung und Funktionalisierung der Natur in Thomasins von Zerklaere ,Welschem Gast‘, in Freidanks ,Bescheidenheit‘ und in Hugos von Trimberg ,Renner‘ (Wissensliteratur im Mittelalter Band: 56 ), Wiesbaden 2021.
Project title: Protector of the herds, opponent of the wilderness, Lord of the animals. An investigation into the figure of the hero with six curls.
Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Alexander Pruß, Prof. Dr. Heide Frielinghaus
Project title: Bronze Age Seascapes. Concepts of the Sea and Marine Fauna in the Eastern Mediterranean.
Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Alexander Pruß, Prof. Doris Prechel
Dissertation project:
In the second millennium BC, the Mediterranean was the theatre of an intense cultural network, connecting the great territorial States of Egypt and Hatti with the city-kingdoms of the Levant and the Mycenaean world, spreading products, people and ideas from across its shores.
Liminal in their position, nested between land and sea, Bronze Age coastal communities played a crucial role in the development of this network, becoming nodes of exchange between the foreign and the local, but also as mediators between the hinterland and the sea, in virtue of their quasi-amphibian experience of both worlds.
The importance of these nodes for the understanding of the interregional as well as the local connectivity is well acknowledged within landscape studies and so is the necessity of moving the scope of the research towards a more sea-centred perspective. In the past decades, this resulted in the coinage of the concepts of seascapes, coastscapes and islandscapes, employed with varying degrees of success and sometimes-ambiguous definitions.
What this work proposes, is to provide an in-depth analysis of these concepts taking the study of the marine environment and of the exploitation of its resources as its starting point. Through the exam of material culture dispersion patterns, textual sources and iconographical evidence, this work will attempt at building an interpretative framework for the concepts of seascapes that takes in consideration both cultural and geographical criteria. Particular attention will be given to insular contexts and to the precautions necessary to their interpretation, as islandscapes are shaped, even more prominently than on the coastal mainland, by their unavoidable and unique relation with the sea and the mainland beyond.
The dissertation project was completed in November 2020 and successfully defended in February 2021.
The work was published as Yamasaki, M., Conceptualizing Bronze Age Seascapes. Concepts of the Sea and Marine Fauna in the Eastern Mediterranean in the Second Millennium BCE. Turnhout, 2023.
Project title: Concepts of night in archaic and classical Greek literature.
Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Jochen Althoff, Prof. Dr. Marion Gindhart
Project title: Origins and development of Ancient Egyptian body concepts in Pre- and Early Dynastic anthropomorphic sculpture.
Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Tanja Pommerening, Prof. Dr. Alexander Pruß
Project title: Dead bodies: Semantics of the mortal / transient in the German Medieval texts.
Supervisors: Jun.-Prof. Dr. Claudia Lauer, Prof. Dr. Tanja Pommerening
