Project description
A deeper understanding of textual and sociocultural diversity
The ERC-funded TextDiveGlobal project will explore multiple texts from around the continent and the world to produce an interdisciplinary literary history of Europe and its global connections for the period between the mid-16th and mid-17th centuries. It will draw on a wide range of texts both made and encountered by Europeans – from Mesoamerican codices and Jesuit neo-Latin plays to live speech and popular songs. The project’s overall objective is to understand how textual and sociocultural diversity inform one another in different contexts and regions. Key outputs will include a two-volume publication, a database of information and images relating to the materials, as well as a series of seminars in Europe and the United States.
Objective
This five-year programme of investigation of 52 textual corpora includes Mesoamerican codices, Jesuit neo-Latin plays, popular songs, Kongolese documents in Portuguese, Cervantes’ works, examples of live speech from archives, and many others. It will produce an interdisciplinary literary history of Europe and its global connections for the period between the mid-sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries. The Reformation had fragmented Christendom into differing religious identities. Europeans were multiplying encounters with peoples and cultures in the Americas, Africa, and Asia. TextDiveGlobal challenges the legacy of nineteenth-century European literary-historical scholarship insofar as it durably organised the textual heritage connected with Europe from the perspective of distinct western European national literary canons and histories, and the comparisons and relations between them. Using analytical and linguistic-geographical criteria, it selects a wide and multilingual range of textual objects and forms both made and encountered by Europeans, in relation to spaces from Mexico to China, and events from the Church Council of Trent (1545) to the diplomatic Treaty of the Pyrenees (1659). The objective is to understand how textual and sociocultural diversity inform one another in different contexts and regions of this multifarious world. The methodology is a global-historical anthropology of texts grouped into corpora assembled on four interrelated principles: works, forms, spaces, events. Outputs include a two-volume summa (Oxford University Press), a database of information and images relating to the corpora, and a series of seminars across the USA and Europe. In each of five year-long phases of the research, a sub-team of experts and PDRFs will meet with the PI across the year, in weekly meetings and in two formal workshops. There will be small peer review groups across the phases; all events and draft chapters will be available to the whole group online.
Programme(s)
Topic(s)
Funding Scheme
ERC-ADG - Advanced GrantHost institution
E1 4NS London
United Kingdom