This project aims to re-evaluate education in monastic contexts of 11th and 12th century Western Europe by relying on the concept of "communities of practice", a notion borrowed from the social sciences. ...read more
From the late twelfth and early thirteenth century onwards, against the backdrop of demographic growth and urbanization, a growing number of laypeople started to pursue a religious life without actually ...read more
This project examines the communicative decisions of a high medieval institution under pressure. For centuries, Benedictine monks had enjoyed a virtual monopoly over institutionalized religious life in Europe. From the twelfth century ...read more
This project studies early modern urban discourses on sodomy in the Southern Netherlands. Sodomy was considered as a crime against nature whose origins could be traced to the biblical cities ...read more
The project aims to contribute to the changing perspective on the history of Christian ethics by investigating the way in which economic, political and social developments influenced vernacular renditions of ...read more
This research aims to study how marvelous and miraculous anecdotes were used in a variety of medieval biographical texts of the three Mamluk sultans Baybars (r. 1260-1277), Qalawun (r. 1279-1290) ...read more
The novel is today the most popular literary genre worldwide. Its early history has not been written yet. In order to enhance our understanding of this history (both conceptually and ...read more
This research is part of the ERC-project 'Novel Saints: Ancient novelistic heroism in the hagiography of Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages'. This project aims to trace and interpret ancient novelistic material ...read more
This project aims at tracing and interpreting ancient novelistic influences in late antique and early medieval hagiography from different linguistic traditions. Traditionally, scholarship concerning the history of the novel deals with the ancient love novel (1st-4th centuries) and ...read more