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Project A2:
Rituals of Conflict and Peace in the Late Middle Ages
| Abstract |
Project A2 studies rituals of power and rulership in the high and late Middle Ages, with particular regard to the conditions in which they emerged, were carried out, and changed. Its research subject is as much the claims of these rituals in establishing and maintaining order as the limits of their capacities. The work is based mainly on historiographical and fictional texts. The project investigates, on the one hand, acts of symbolic communication associated with the establishment of the rank of elector. At the centre of the investigation are the reactions of the margrave of Brandenburg on becoming elector as well as the reactions of the Hapsburgs on being excluded from this honour. Another research subject is the increasingly common phenomenon of spoliation, its origins and its meaning, to explain the provenance of the agonal in this ritual. A further focus concerns the symbolic arrangement of proxy proceedings - acts of representation, placeholding, or substitution - in the reflective medium of medieval literature.
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