Project description
Reconstructing the lost rituals of medieval Christians under Islamic rule
Christian communities living on the Iberian Peninsula continued to practice rituals for many centuries under Islamic rule. The ERC-funded REMMINIS project aims to find out how. It will bring together historians, musicologists and archaeologists as well as experts in Arabic to study liturgical manuscripts, Arabic translations of Christian religious texts and archaeological findings from churches and cemeteries across al-Andalus. Making use of digital tools and an interdisciplinary approach, the project will integrate a variety of sources to find out how Christian religious rites evolved in relation to the surrounding Muslim and Arabic cultures.
Objective
Ritual is a powerful means for minority religious communities to express and preserve their collective identities. This has traditionally been said of Christians in al-Andalus, the area of the Iberian Peninsula that was under Islamic rule for half a millennium in the middle ages. The idea that minority Christians in this area continued to practice the same religious rites as before the Arab conquest is thought to show their resistance to Islamic rule. But can we assume this without establishing what their rites were? A lack of direct sources means little is known about the Andalusi Christian tradition. We must revisit the resulting assumptions about Christian ritual practice in al-Andalus, not least because of their use in modern political discourse to support the idea of Spain's 'Christian identity'.
REMMINIS sets out to reconstruct what can be known about Christian ritual in al-Andalus. Through an innovative interdisciplinary approach that integrates history, musicology, Arabic studies and archaeology, we aim to recover this important cultural heritage. Digital methods (corpus analysis, sequence alignment, handwritten text recognition) will provide new insight into a series of complex and diverse sources, including 1) liturgical manuscripts containing instructions for worship from diaspora Andalusi communities (text and music), 2) Arabic translations of biblical and canonical works, some with many hundreds of Arabic notes in the margins, and 3) the remains of churches, cemeteries and objects in which and with which Christians conducted their ritual lives. These sources hold great promise for revealing the extent to which Christians in al-Andalus followed unique ritual practices and engaged with Arabic and Islamic culture. Close collaboration between disciplines will allow us to gain a holistic picture that does justice to the multimodal nature of ritual and to the potential for diversity, hybridity and entanglement of religious identities in medieval Spain.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- humanities history and archaeology history
- humanities history and archaeology archaeology
- humanities arts musicology
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
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Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2025-COG
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6525 XZ Nijmegen
Netherlands
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