Description du projet
La modération dans l’Italie du XVIIIe siècle
Comme l’a souligné le poète grec ancien Hésiode, il convient de garder de la modération en toute chose. Des milliers d’années plus tard, notre interprétation de la modération s’est construite à partir de la fusion de concepts classiques et chrétiens dans un environnement intellectuel, religieux et politico-économique donné. Aujourd’hui, au regard de la montée de l’extrémisme et de la radicalisation en Europe, il semble que ce soit un concept en crise. Le projet VIAMEDIAITALICA, financé par l’UE, fournira une étude historique des couches de la population considérées comme modérées dans la péninsule italienne au siècle des Lumières. Il analysera la modération comme une pratique et une vertu dans divers contextes: politique, académique, épistémique et religieux. Le projet examinera ces différents aspects à la lumière d’études de cas qui reposeront sur la recherche archivistique de textes, d’institutions et de penseurs clés, tels que Lodovico Antonio Muratori, un théoricien de la modération.
Objectif
As Europe enters the third decade of the 21st Century, moderation is a concept in crisis. Extremism, radicalism and ideological conflict are judged to be in the ascendant, while the moderate middle of political landscapes in a range of European countries has been physically vacated and conceptually hollowed out. This project offers a contribution to the history of moderation as an idea, as a practice, and as a virtue. Modern understandings of moderation were established in the 18th Century, through the fusing of classical and Christian concepts in a new intellectual-religious and political-economic environment. VIA MEDIA ITALICA offers an intellectual historical study of the moderate strata on the Italian peninsula in the first half of the 18th Century, the early Enlightenment. The ambition is to establish moderation as a practice and as a virtue in three different contexts: political moderation; scholarly, or epistemic, moderation; and religious moderation. Each of these contexts will be explored through a networked set of case-studies, founded upon extensive archival research, and orientated around key texts, institutions and thinkers. These three contexts will also be elaborated through a study of Lodovico Antonio Muratori as a religious, scholarly and political thinker, and reinterpreted as a theorist of moderation. This project will offer: a ‘bottom-up’ reinterpretation of the intellectual culture of the Italian peninsula between 1700 and 1750; a new reading of the contributions of L.A. Muratori to the European Enlightenment; and an interrogation of the concept of moderation as a historical and contemporary idea and practice. This project plays an essential role in the researcher’s maturation into an international, independent and interdisciplinary historian of early modern Europe. It also supports his development into a public-facing scholar, through a range of training schemes and the realisation of an extensive programme of public-orientated events.
Champ scientifique
Mots‑clés
Programme(s)
Régime de financement
MSCA-IF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF)Coordinateur
NE1 7RU Newcastle Upon Tyne
Royaume-Uni