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Origins of the Vernacular Mode. Regional Identities and European Networks in Late Medieval Europe

Final Report Summary - OVERMODE (Origins of the Vernacular Mode. Regional Identities and European Networks in Late Medieval Europe)

The project aimed at a comparative study and a European contextualization of late medieval vernacular religious literature in Eastern Central Europe. It advanced methodological reflection in order to explore the full range of research questions for which vernacular texts can be used as evidence. It made a large body of sources accessible to the international scholarly community and it re-wrote some of the key historical narratives of Eastern European historiography. On the project Austrian Academy of sciences and the Czech Academy of Sciences collaborated. It laid a valuable basis for further collaboration in a research field the project helped to define for the future. The focus of the project on the political dimension of vernacular religious literatures in Eastern Central Europe proved to be very fruitful, especially for research on the dynamic of the Hussite reformation in the first half of the 15th century, and for research about the character of this revolt as a supra-regional phenomenon. Due to the project the research tasks pursued at both institutions were embedded in dense international scholarly network of research projects on late medieval religious education and on medieval translation. The output of the individual sub-projects has the potential to re-formulate several deadlocked research strands – on vernacular biblical translations, on the multilingual character of society in medieval Bohemia, on ideal rulership and the organization of power relations, on the dynamic of the Hussite revolt, on the character of the participation of the laics in it, on the reform propaganda, on eschatological expectations, as well as on the strategies of social and religious identifications in the Eastern Central Europe. The members of the project team gained a number of follow-up projects and positions on academic institutions which allows continuing the research on topics formulated in the project in the future.