Interregional Academic Award for Trier Historical Linguists

At the ceremony for the Interregional Academic Award of the Greater Region, this year five scientists of the University of Trier have been awarded. The second award, endowed with 25.000 EUR and presented as a foundation price by the SaarLB, goes to the research project “Mittelalterliche Archivalien der Großregion” (Medieval Records of the Greater Region). The jury particularly acknowledged the transboundary dimension and academic quality of the project.

Together with colleagues from Belgium (Université Catholique de Louvain-la-Neuve), France (Université de Lorraine, Nancy), and Luxemburg (Université du Luxembourg), the Trier historical linguists Dr Natalia Filatkina, Dominic Harion M.A., Falko Klaes, Prof Dr Claudine Moulin, and Dr Nikolaus Ruge have located many medieval documents from the Greater Region which give information for example on everyday life and political relationships between Trier and Lorraine or in Luxemburg.

The Trier team behind “Mittelalterliche Archivalien” emerged from a research project of Professor Moulin at the HKFZ (Center for Historical and Cultural Studies) and received a start-up funding by the Center.  Soon, an embedding into the network of the Greater Region and a direct connecting to the project of the Grande Région, initiated by Dr Hélène Schneider at Nancy University, followed. The overall research aim of this interdisciplinary and transboundary research group is the examination of shared characteristics as well as differences of the historical, linguistic, and legal roots and rituals of those countries that today belong to the Greater Region. “The targeted interdisciplinary research of historians and linguists beyond linguistic and spatial boundaries, the consistent integration of young researchers in an international frame, and the connection to new methods in the Digital Humanities have been a major source of motivation for us. This award is a great honour and an even greater incentive for our future work,” Professor Moulin happily says about the acknowledgement of the international research project.

By highlighting the significance of the shared scripted historical heritage, the project offers an important contribution to the idea of the Greater Region; a fruitful interdisciplinary dialogue contributes significantly to the academic quality of the project. Overall, the research works aim at connecting historian’s and linguist’s methods and requests in order to enable an appropriate and multi-facetted access to the medieval sources.

The prize money will be used to enable the further indexing of sources, the development of the portal, and the promotion of young researchers.

Further information on the project:
The concept of the research project goes back to the idea of establishing a shared bilingual methodology for the registration of the chancellery manuscript material of the 13th to 15th century found within the Greater Region – from both a historical and philological perspective.

In order to do so, a shared database for various projects has been established, registering all parameters of the medieval records whilst following mutually set framework conditions – starting with the keywording of documents in dispersed collections, over the description of their physical features (writing materials, measures, seals, etc.), to the analysis of their content, including the identification of names of people and places. After uploading the historical documents into the database, they were published online. Here, the focus first lay on documents of the counties of Barrois, Lorraine, and Luxemburg, written between 1370 and 1430. Until now, about 1500 documents in German could be found in the archives of Lorraine and Barrois, yet, the broad dispersion of the still mostly unpublished documents remains a major challenge. The work on records on French proceeds as well, at this time mainly for the area of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. The records contain information on the working life of carpenters and bakers in the Moselle region of the 15th century or on the power relations between the dukes and their vassals. Furthermore, they depict linguistic dynamics between Germany and Romania that still influence the cohabitation in the Greater Region today.