Sub-Project B4 of the CRC 1391 Different Aesthetics - Second Funding Period
The Aesthetics of Combinatorics: Personifications and Allegories in Medieval Art and Literature
The project understands combinatorics as a key concept of a ‘different’ aesthetics. The idea that pre-modern literature and art are strongly shaped by multi-faceted combinations and compilations applies to many fields of representation: in particular, we will examine late medieval texts and images serving the perception and interpretation of the world and providing orientation to their readers. Devotional prayer books, Minnereden, calendars, and housebooks reflect, each in a different way, the desire to explore what is needed for a successful human life and to convey knowledge for orientation.
These works provide what is needed to position oneself in the world, and they do so in a sophisticated manner, namely in the mode of the indirect, the allegorical. Personification and allegory always point out their ‘made’ character, their artificiality. The particular care with which personifications are assembled into allegorical complexes and composed in meaningful text or image systems reveals the potential of this conceptional strategy, which is central to the aesthetics of the pre-modern era, but has hardly been explored systematically yet. The allegorical mode of representation and argumentation is shared by both texts and images, requiring a close collaboration between the research fields of literary studies and art history: they are both concerned with related objects of investigation, with combinatorics as a model, and with a praxeological approach to the research material that takes into account contexts, actors (producers and recipients), and the functions of individual manuscripts.
Principal Investigators: Prof. Dr. Sandra Linden and Prof. Dr. Andrea Worm