Benjamin Scheller | University of Duisburg-Essen (original) (raw)

Papers by Benjamin Scheller

Raimund Schulz (Hg.), Maritime Entdeckung und Expansion. Kontinuitäten, Parallelen und Brüche von der Antike bis in die Neuzeit. (Historische Zeitschrift, Bh. 77.) Ber-lin/Boston, 2019

Dieser Beitrag analysiert zwei spätmittelalterliche Berichte über italienisch-iberische Seeexpedi... more Dieser Beitrag analysiert zwei spätmittelalterliche Berichte über italienisch-iberische Seeexpeditionen entlang der westafrikanischen Küste auf ihren ethnographischen Gehalt. Im Zentrum steht die Frage, welche
Aspekte der Fremdbeobachtung diese Berichte prägen und inwieweit ihr Blick auf die Landschaft und Küstenvölker durch die Herkunft und die Ziele der Reisenden als Kaufleute gelenkt wurde. In diesem Kontext
geht es auch darum, die Bezüge auf antike Autoren (Plinius) mit der zeitgenössischen Empirie abzugleichen und zu klären, inwieweit „Kaufmannsethnographie“ neue Interessen und Modelle entwickelte, die
sich aus den pragmatischen Zielen des Fernhandels ergaben. Eine Schlüsselfunktion kommt dabei offenbar dem Sklavenhandel zu. Die seefahrenden Händler benötigten ein Kontaktsystem, welches das instrumentelle Wissen des Kaufmanns mit dem kategorialen Wissen des Diplomaten verband.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Annales Mercaturae 6, 2020

The article scrutinizes the practice of marine insurance in 15th century Venice highlighting the ... more The article scrutinizes the practice of marine insurance in 15th century Venice highlighting the interplay of different approaches to deal with maritime hazards. At the core was the concept of risk and its particular logic of financial compensation. Since the end of the 14th century at the latest, the merchants of Venice could transfer the risk of their ventures to other merchants by the means of marine insurance. Assuming the risk, insurers received the insurance premium. In the case of loss due to piracy, shipwreck and the extremely rare instances of ships catching fire, the insurers had to compensate the insurance taking merchants financially with the sum insured.
Yet, as a business marine insurance could only function as long as insured hazards materialized rarely and earnings from insurance-premiums where higher than expenses for the financial compensation of damage. The logic of financial compensation could thus only evolve in maritime spaces of security. Ever since the beginning of the fourteenth century the Republic of Venice equipped a squadron of three or four galleys to surveil the Adriatic and the sea routes of the Romania, a means of prevention that succeeded in reducing the danger for Venetian merchants and their ships of being seized significantly. At the same time the convoys of the state galleys of the Republic of Venice formed a mobile space, that was distinguished from its marine environment by its high level of security. Holding pirates and corsairs at bay, the galley squadrons and the convoys of venetian state galleys lowered danger levels and allowed the merchants of Venice to make the residual hazards objects of their financial calculations.
Enabling merchants to transfer sea risks, marine insurance brought up the new risks of insurance fraud and default of payment of the sum insured. This is shown by 275 lawsuits from late 14th to late 15th-century Venice, in which insured merchants had legal disputes with insurers over the payment of the sum insured. Yet marine insurance was extremely resilient to these consequential risks. Insurers spread the risk of default of payment by virtually always letting their insurance policies sign by a high number of underwriters. At the same time, the network of insurers in late medieval Venice exhibits a high density. Geodesic distances from one insurer to another in the network were remarkably short, ensuring fast flow of information about the payment behavior of participants in the insurance market.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Zukunft im Mittelalter. Zeitkonzepte und Planungsstrategien (Vorträge und Forschungen, Bd. 110), hg. von Klaus Oschema und Bernd Schneidmüller, Ostfildern 2021, 185-208, 2021

Experience, Expectation, and Salvation: The Foundations of the Middle Ages as a Practice to Envis... more Experience, Expectation, and Salvation: The Foundations of the
Middle Ages as a Practice to Envision and Shape the Future

Like the foundations of other periods, those of the Middle Ages were institutions through which one or several persons dedicated the revenues of her, his or their estate to an enduring purpose. Created to last for an unspecified length of time, they had to have their own administration to be able to perpetually fulfil the purpose set by the founder(s).
Yet, medieval foundations were also orientated towards the salvation of the soul, which could be supported, as people thought, through the prayer and charitable works of other individuals. The founders’ pious works thus had to be exercised after his death by those he had appointed to administer the foundation in his own name and by the foundation’s beneficiaries so that they could perpetually serve the salvation of his soul. The foundations of the Middle Ages can thus be interpreted as a particular social practice that aimed at shaping future circumstances – thereby revealing the underlying perceptions and conceptions of the future their founders presupposed.
Through the analysis of medieval foundations’ temporalities, three notions of the future and their complex intersections can be observed (as well as the underlying general concept of future times, i. e. eternity). Medieval founders aimed at securing eternal life and eternal joy for their souls in an endless and thus timeless future after the Last Judgement. Until then (and thus eternally in the sense of cyclically recurring acts of commemoration and charity) they wanted the future of their foundations to continue in this
world. At the same time, they assumed that a transitional future lay before them, that would begin with their death and last until the Last judgement at the longest. This future was neither eternal in the sense of being endless and timeless, nor was it thought of as eternal in the sense of eternal, cyclical recurrence. In fact, it was rather imagined as a process, i. e. the process of a continuous purgation of their souls from sin that was propelled by the periodically recurring acts of their foundation’s trustees and beneficiaries. Although the current state of research does not allow us to estimate how often founders of the Middle Ages envisioned the future of their foundations in this world not as cyclical but as a process, too, and thus as an »open future«, the example of the Ceppo, that was founded in 1410 by Francesco Datini, the famous merchant of Prato, shows that
this was by no means unthinkable, at least in the later Middle Ages.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Irgendwann gegen Ende Juni/Anfang Juli des Jahres 1455 kam es auf dem Gambia in Westafrika zu ein... more Irgendwann gegen Ende Juni/Anfang Juli des Jahres 1455 kam es auf dem Gambia in Westafrika zu einer Begegnung neuer Art. Die Expedition des venezianischen Kaufmanns Alvise Cadamosto hatte gerade die Mündung des Flusses in den atlantischen Ozean erreicht und war etwas flussaufwärts gesegelt. Dort sandte Cadamosto zwei Boote mit einigen Männern aus, die den Fluss weiter stromaufwärts erkunden sollten. Als diese bereits beidrehten, um zu ihrem Schiff zurückzukehren, sahen sie auf einmal aus einem kleinen Fluss, der in den Gambia mündete, drei Einbäume kommen: »Und als unsere Boote die Einbäume sahen, fragten sie sich, ob jene sich nicht vielleicht näherten, um sie anzugreifen, denn die anderen Schwarzen hatten uns gewarnt, dass in diesem Land Gambia alle Bogenschützen wären, die mit Giftpfeilen schössen. Und obwohl sie zahlreich genug waren, um sich verteidigen zu können [...], warfen sie sich in die Riemen und ruderten so schnell sie konnten zum Schiff. Doch waren sie nicht so schnell...

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Ambiguität und die Ordnungen des Sozialen im Mittelalter, 2018

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Ordnungsformen Des Hofes Ergebnisse Eines Forschungskolloquiums Der Studienstiftung Des Deutschen Volkes, 1997

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Histoire Urbaine, Jun 28, 2010

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Die Stadt der Neuchristen, 2013

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Marian Füssel / Philip Knäble / Nina Elsemann (Hg.), Wissen und Wirtschaft Expertenkulturen und Märkte vom 13. bis 18. Jahrhundert, Göttingen, 2017

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Historische Anthroplogie, 2018

(Un-)safe harbours. Ports as hotspots of maritime risks and risk-communication in the 15th-centur... more (Un-)safe harbours.
Ports as hotspots of maritime risks and risk-communication in the 15th-century mediterranean

Although authors of contemporary portolanos define the late medieval port by virtue of its capacity to shelter ships from the dangers of the sea it cannot simply be characterized as a safe space. Unique evidence from 15th-century Venice gives a deep glimpse at the complex intersections of spaces of danger, security and risk in the late medieval Mediterranean and beyond and highlights the late medieval ports as hotspots of maritime risk and risk communication. It was here, where ships usually
wrecked and were seized and where maritime hazard was observed and conceptualized either as risk or danger allowing the contemporaries different strategies to cope with it.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Space of Experience and Space of Contingency: West Africa in Alvise Cadmostos navigazioni atlanti... more Space of Experience and Space of Contingency: West Africa in Alvise Cadmostos navigazioni atlantiche

One of the most important protagonists of the exploration and construction of a new oicumene in the 15th century was Venetian patrician Alvise Cadamosto (1426/1432-1483). In the service of Portuguese infant Henry the Navigator he embarked on two expeditions to Africa in 1455 and 1456. Exploring the West-African he and his men reached the mouth of the Gambia River in 1455 and the Geba River and the Bissago Islands in 1456.
Sometime after his return to Venice in 1463 he composed a detailed account of his voyages. This account, the so called navigazioni atlantiche, is the only contemporary travelogue of a protagonist of the Portuguese expansion into Africa in the period of Henry the Navigator and must be regarded as one of the milestones in the history of ethnography in the Middle Ages and beyond.
Scrutinizing the navigazioni it becomes clear that even in those regions that had already been discovered by previous Portuguese expeditions Cadamosto only to a very limited extent could draw on the experiences made by these. The West African coast line down to Cape Roxo as already represented in the nautical chart of Venetian map maker Andrea Bianco of 1448 obviously was not mapped in the chart Cadamosto had with him which meant he had to discover it for himself.
In the regions south of the Sine-Saloum delta Cadamosto entered a space of even higher contingency because her he encountered peoples who had not yet had any contact with European explorers and whose attitude towards the strangers from the north he had to asses all by himself accurately observing the customs of “a different world” as he labeled it in the prologue of his account. Cadamostos often noted highly nuanced hermeneutics of the “other” must thus be explained with him having to come to terms with a particular space of contingency constituted of geographical sites and people completely unknown.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

A close reading of travelogues by merchants who travelled the Atlantic ocean in the 14th and 15th... more A close reading of travelogues by merchants who travelled the Atlantic ocean in the 14th and 15th century shows that a merchant ethnography at this time existed only on a limited scale. Just two of the existing travel stories contain categorical knowledge about strange worlds and peoples and can thus be regarded as ethnography:
1. ‘De Canaria et insulis reliquis ultra Ispaniam in Oceano noviter repertis‘ from the middle of the 14th century, which is based on letters that Florentine Merchants in Seville sent to their hometown in 1341 reporting the results of a recent voyage of exploration to the Canary Islands.
2. The account of two expeditions to the coasts of Senegal and Guinea in 1455 and 1456 by the Venetian Patrician Alvise Cadamosto (1432-1483), his so called ‘Navigazioni Atlantiche’.
The former, however, can be considered as a testimony of a mercantile perception of strangeness only in a limited sense. Similar to Marco Polo’s ‚Divisament dou Monde‘/’Il Milione’ it was to considerable extent reworked by a man of letters, in this case Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375). Nevertheless, the knowledge produced by ‘De Canaria’ about strange worlds and peoples did manage to transcend the limits of the mercantile system of communication.
Of all the surviving late medieval travelogues of the shores of the Atlantic this was achieved solely by Cadamostos ‘Navigazioni’, which was the only one that was received already by his contemporaries and must be considered as the only substantial contribution by a merchant to the contemporary European discourse about strangeness.
Cadamostos ‘Navigazioni’ reveal that in the Atlantic world of this time knowledge on strangeness was produced in a new way. Their exceptional rank as an ethnographical account is largely to be explained by the particular structure of the system of communication in which Cadamosto operated. The contemporary Atlantic slave trade was based on diplomatic relations. Europeans engaged in it thus had to combine the merchant’s instrumental knowledge with the diplomat’s categorical knowledge about strange countries and peoples if the wanted to be successful. Moreover the stranger now had become a merchandise that was acquired directly by European merchants travelling to its regions of origin.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Auf der Suche nach ihren Gemeinsamkeiten und Unterschieden in religiösen Grundlagen, praktischen Zwecken und histroischen Transformationen, 2005

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Essays zur Geschichtsschreibung und Beiträge zur Forschung, 2013

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Raimund Schulz (Hg.), Maritime Entdeckung und Expansion. Kontinuitäten, Parallelen und Brüche von der Antike bis in die Neuzeit. (Historische Zeitschrift, Bh. 77.) Ber-lin/Boston, 2019

Dieser Beitrag analysiert zwei spätmittelalterliche Berichte über italienisch-iberische Seeexpedi... more Dieser Beitrag analysiert zwei spätmittelalterliche Berichte über italienisch-iberische Seeexpeditionen entlang der westafrikanischen Küste auf ihren ethnographischen Gehalt. Im Zentrum steht die Frage, welche
Aspekte der Fremdbeobachtung diese Berichte prägen und inwieweit ihr Blick auf die Landschaft und Küstenvölker durch die Herkunft und die Ziele der Reisenden als Kaufleute gelenkt wurde. In diesem Kontext
geht es auch darum, die Bezüge auf antike Autoren (Plinius) mit der zeitgenössischen Empirie abzugleichen und zu klären, inwieweit „Kaufmannsethnographie“ neue Interessen und Modelle entwickelte, die
sich aus den pragmatischen Zielen des Fernhandels ergaben. Eine Schlüsselfunktion kommt dabei offenbar dem Sklavenhandel zu. Die seefahrenden Händler benötigten ein Kontaktsystem, welches das instrumentelle Wissen des Kaufmanns mit dem kategorialen Wissen des Diplomaten verband.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Annales Mercaturae 6, 2020

The article scrutinizes the practice of marine insurance in 15th century Venice highlighting the ... more The article scrutinizes the practice of marine insurance in 15th century Venice highlighting the interplay of different approaches to deal with maritime hazards. At the core was the concept of risk and its particular logic of financial compensation. Since the end of the 14th century at the latest, the merchants of Venice could transfer the risk of their ventures to other merchants by the means of marine insurance. Assuming the risk, insurers received the insurance premium. In the case of loss due to piracy, shipwreck and the extremely rare instances of ships catching fire, the insurers had to compensate the insurance taking merchants financially with the sum insured.
Yet, as a business marine insurance could only function as long as insured hazards materialized rarely and earnings from insurance-premiums where higher than expenses for the financial compensation of damage. The logic of financial compensation could thus only evolve in maritime spaces of security. Ever since the beginning of the fourteenth century the Republic of Venice equipped a squadron of three or four galleys to surveil the Adriatic and the sea routes of the Romania, a means of prevention that succeeded in reducing the danger for Venetian merchants and their ships of being seized significantly. At the same time the convoys of the state galleys of the Republic of Venice formed a mobile space, that was distinguished from its marine environment by its high level of security. Holding pirates and corsairs at bay, the galley squadrons and the convoys of venetian state galleys lowered danger levels and allowed the merchants of Venice to make the residual hazards objects of their financial calculations.
Enabling merchants to transfer sea risks, marine insurance brought up the new risks of insurance fraud and default of payment of the sum insured. This is shown by 275 lawsuits from late 14th to late 15th-century Venice, in which insured merchants had legal disputes with insurers over the payment of the sum insured. Yet marine insurance was extremely resilient to these consequential risks. Insurers spread the risk of default of payment by virtually always letting their insurance policies sign by a high number of underwriters. At the same time, the network of insurers in late medieval Venice exhibits a high density. Geodesic distances from one insurer to another in the network were remarkably short, ensuring fast flow of information about the payment behavior of participants in the insurance market.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Zukunft im Mittelalter. Zeitkonzepte und Planungsstrategien (Vorträge und Forschungen, Bd. 110), hg. von Klaus Oschema und Bernd Schneidmüller, Ostfildern 2021, 185-208, 2021

Experience, Expectation, and Salvation: The Foundations of the Middle Ages as a Practice to Envis... more Experience, Expectation, and Salvation: The Foundations of the
Middle Ages as a Practice to Envision and Shape the Future

Like the foundations of other periods, those of the Middle Ages were institutions through which one or several persons dedicated the revenues of her, his or their estate to an enduring purpose. Created to last for an unspecified length of time, they had to have their own administration to be able to perpetually fulfil the purpose set by the founder(s).
Yet, medieval foundations were also orientated towards the salvation of the soul, which could be supported, as people thought, through the prayer and charitable works of other individuals. The founders’ pious works thus had to be exercised after his death by those he had appointed to administer the foundation in his own name and by the foundation’s beneficiaries so that they could perpetually serve the salvation of his soul. The foundations of the Middle Ages can thus be interpreted as a particular social practice that aimed at shaping future circumstances – thereby revealing the underlying perceptions and conceptions of the future their founders presupposed.
Through the analysis of medieval foundations’ temporalities, three notions of the future and their complex intersections can be observed (as well as the underlying general concept of future times, i. e. eternity). Medieval founders aimed at securing eternal life and eternal joy for their souls in an endless and thus timeless future after the Last Judgement. Until then (and thus eternally in the sense of cyclically recurring acts of commemoration and charity) they wanted the future of their foundations to continue in this
world. At the same time, they assumed that a transitional future lay before them, that would begin with their death and last until the Last judgement at the longest. This future was neither eternal in the sense of being endless and timeless, nor was it thought of as eternal in the sense of eternal, cyclical recurrence. In fact, it was rather imagined as a process, i. e. the process of a continuous purgation of their souls from sin that was propelled by the periodically recurring acts of their foundation’s trustees and beneficiaries. Although the current state of research does not allow us to estimate how often founders of the Middle Ages envisioned the future of their foundations in this world not as cyclical but as a process, too, and thus as an »open future«, the example of the Ceppo, that was founded in 1410 by Francesco Datini, the famous merchant of Prato, shows that
this was by no means unthinkable, at least in the later Middle Ages.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Irgendwann gegen Ende Juni/Anfang Juli des Jahres 1455 kam es auf dem Gambia in Westafrika zu ein... more Irgendwann gegen Ende Juni/Anfang Juli des Jahres 1455 kam es auf dem Gambia in Westafrika zu einer Begegnung neuer Art. Die Expedition des venezianischen Kaufmanns Alvise Cadamosto hatte gerade die Mündung des Flusses in den atlantischen Ozean erreicht und war etwas flussaufwärts gesegelt. Dort sandte Cadamosto zwei Boote mit einigen Männern aus, die den Fluss weiter stromaufwärts erkunden sollten. Als diese bereits beidrehten, um zu ihrem Schiff zurückzukehren, sahen sie auf einmal aus einem kleinen Fluss, der in den Gambia mündete, drei Einbäume kommen: »Und als unsere Boote die Einbäume sahen, fragten sie sich, ob jene sich nicht vielleicht näherten, um sie anzugreifen, denn die anderen Schwarzen hatten uns gewarnt, dass in diesem Land Gambia alle Bogenschützen wären, die mit Giftpfeilen schössen. Und obwohl sie zahlreich genug waren, um sich verteidigen zu können [...], warfen sie sich in die Riemen und ruderten so schnell sie konnten zum Schiff. Doch waren sie nicht so schnell...

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Ambiguität und die Ordnungen des Sozialen im Mittelalter, 2018

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Ordnungsformen Des Hofes Ergebnisse Eines Forschungskolloquiums Der Studienstiftung Des Deutschen Volkes, 1997

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Histoire Urbaine, Jun 28, 2010

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Die Stadt der Neuchristen, 2013

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Marian Füssel / Philip Knäble / Nina Elsemann (Hg.), Wissen und Wirtschaft Expertenkulturen und Märkte vom 13. bis 18. Jahrhundert, Göttingen, 2017

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Historische Anthroplogie, 2018

(Un-)safe harbours. Ports as hotspots of maritime risks and risk-communication in the 15th-centur... more (Un-)safe harbours.
Ports as hotspots of maritime risks and risk-communication in the 15th-century mediterranean

Although authors of contemporary portolanos define the late medieval port by virtue of its capacity to shelter ships from the dangers of the sea it cannot simply be characterized as a safe space. Unique evidence from 15th-century Venice gives a deep glimpse at the complex intersections of spaces of danger, security and risk in the late medieval Mediterranean and beyond and highlights the late medieval ports as hotspots of maritime risk and risk communication. It was here, where ships usually
wrecked and were seized and where maritime hazard was observed and conceptualized either as risk or danger allowing the contemporaries different strategies to cope with it.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Space of Experience and Space of Contingency: West Africa in Alvise Cadmostos navigazioni atlanti... more Space of Experience and Space of Contingency: West Africa in Alvise Cadmostos navigazioni atlantiche

One of the most important protagonists of the exploration and construction of a new oicumene in the 15th century was Venetian patrician Alvise Cadamosto (1426/1432-1483). In the service of Portuguese infant Henry the Navigator he embarked on two expeditions to Africa in 1455 and 1456. Exploring the West-African he and his men reached the mouth of the Gambia River in 1455 and the Geba River and the Bissago Islands in 1456.
Sometime after his return to Venice in 1463 he composed a detailed account of his voyages. This account, the so called navigazioni atlantiche, is the only contemporary travelogue of a protagonist of the Portuguese expansion into Africa in the period of Henry the Navigator and must be regarded as one of the milestones in the history of ethnography in the Middle Ages and beyond.
Scrutinizing the navigazioni it becomes clear that even in those regions that had already been discovered by previous Portuguese expeditions Cadamosto only to a very limited extent could draw on the experiences made by these. The West African coast line down to Cape Roxo as already represented in the nautical chart of Venetian map maker Andrea Bianco of 1448 obviously was not mapped in the chart Cadamosto had with him which meant he had to discover it for himself.
In the regions south of the Sine-Saloum delta Cadamosto entered a space of even higher contingency because her he encountered peoples who had not yet had any contact with European explorers and whose attitude towards the strangers from the north he had to asses all by himself accurately observing the customs of “a different world” as he labeled it in the prologue of his account. Cadamostos often noted highly nuanced hermeneutics of the “other” must thus be explained with him having to come to terms with a particular space of contingency constituted of geographical sites and people completely unknown.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

A close reading of travelogues by merchants who travelled the Atlantic ocean in the 14th and 15th... more A close reading of travelogues by merchants who travelled the Atlantic ocean in the 14th and 15th century shows that a merchant ethnography at this time existed only on a limited scale. Just two of the existing travel stories contain categorical knowledge about strange worlds and peoples and can thus be regarded as ethnography:
1. ‘De Canaria et insulis reliquis ultra Ispaniam in Oceano noviter repertis‘ from the middle of the 14th century, which is based on letters that Florentine Merchants in Seville sent to their hometown in 1341 reporting the results of a recent voyage of exploration to the Canary Islands.
2. The account of two expeditions to the coasts of Senegal and Guinea in 1455 and 1456 by the Venetian Patrician Alvise Cadamosto (1432-1483), his so called ‘Navigazioni Atlantiche’.
The former, however, can be considered as a testimony of a mercantile perception of strangeness only in a limited sense. Similar to Marco Polo’s ‚Divisament dou Monde‘/’Il Milione’ it was to considerable extent reworked by a man of letters, in this case Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375). Nevertheless, the knowledge produced by ‘De Canaria’ about strange worlds and peoples did manage to transcend the limits of the mercantile system of communication.
Of all the surviving late medieval travelogues of the shores of the Atlantic this was achieved solely by Cadamostos ‘Navigazioni’, which was the only one that was received already by his contemporaries and must be considered as the only substantial contribution by a merchant to the contemporary European discourse about strangeness.
Cadamostos ‘Navigazioni’ reveal that in the Atlantic world of this time knowledge on strangeness was produced in a new way. Their exceptional rank as an ethnographical account is largely to be explained by the particular structure of the system of communication in which Cadamosto operated. The contemporary Atlantic slave trade was based on diplomatic relations. Europeans engaged in it thus had to combine the merchant’s instrumental knowledge with the diplomat’s categorical knowledge about strange countries and peoples if the wanted to be successful. Moreover the stranger now had become a merchandise that was acquired directly by European merchants travelling to its regions of origin.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Auf der Suche nach ihren Gemeinsamkeiten und Unterschieden in religiösen Grundlagen, praktischen Zwecken und histroischen Transformationen, 2005

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Essays zur Geschichtsschreibung und Beiträge zur Forschung, 2013

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Das Buch untersucht die Stiftungen Jakob Fuggers des Reichen (1459-1525) - unter ihnen die berühm... more Das Buch untersucht die Stiftungen Jakob Fuggers des Reichen (1459-1525) - unter ihnen die berühmte Grabkapelle bei St. Anna und die noch berühmtere "Fuggerei" - und analysiert dabei die Interdependenzen von Stiftungen und historischem Wandel. Gliechzeitig bietet es eine Gesamtdarstellung des bedeutendesten Stiftungskomplexes der Wendezeit von Mittelalter und Neuzeit.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Seit der Wende von 1989/90 haben sich die Erkenntnisinteressen der internationalen Mediävistik ra... more Seit der Wende von 1989/90 haben sich die Erkenntnisinteressen der internationalen Mediävistik radikal gewandelt. Unter dem Eindruck aktueller politischer Prozesse gerieten die lange Zeit dominierenden nationalgeschichtlicher Debatten immer weiter in den Hintergrund. An ihre Stelle trat zum einen die Frage nach der Integration und Desintegration der Kulturen im europäischen Mittelalter, zum anderen die Suche nach den Akteuren, Anlässen und Folgen weltumspannender Interaktionen während des mittelalterlichen Jahrtausends. Prof. Dr. Michael Borgolte hat diese Paradigmenwechsel seit mehr als zwei Jahrzehnten mit großem Engagement vorangetrieben. Aus Anlass seines 65. Geburtstags versammelten sich deshalb im Mai 2013 zahlreiche Forscherinnen und Forscher aus dem In- und Ausland zu einem interdisziplinären Colloquium, auf dem nicht nur eine Zwischenbilanz des bislang erreichten gezogen wurde, sondern auch neue Ansätze vorgestellt und diskutiert wurden. Die aus den Vorträgen erwachsenen Aufsätze lassen sich drei verschiedene Themenfelder zuordnen: Europa als historisches Problem, Globalgeschichte des Mittelalters als methodische Herausforderung und Transkulturalität als heuristisches Konzept.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Europa im Mittelalter 22, Oct 2013

Verfolgt von der Inquisition, traten im Königreich Neapel in den Jahren um 1292 tausende von Jude... more Verfolgt von der Inquisition, traten im Königreich Neapel in den Jahren um 1292 tausende von Juden zum Christentum über: die einzige Massenkonversion von Juden zum Christentum außerhalb der iberischen Halbinsel und der spanischen Herrschaftsgebiete während des Mittelalters. Bis Mitte des 16. Jahrhunderts sind die konvertierten Juden aber auch ihre Nachkommen in verschiedenen Regionen des süditalienischen Festlandes unter Bezeichnungen wie „Neofiti“ (von griechisch: „Neophytos“ = „Neugepflanzter“) „Christiani Novi“ bzw. „Cristiani Novelli“ belegt. Auch Generationen später wurden die Abkömmlinge der Konvertiten also als Neuankömmlinge in der christlichen Gesellschaft markiert. Sie gehörten dazu und gleichzeitig doch nicht. „Die Stadt der Neuchristen“ behandelt die Geschichte der konvertierten Juden des Königreichs Neapel und ihrer Nachkommens erstmals monographisch und nimmt die spannungsreichen Prozessen von Inklusion und Exklusion im Verlauf von über 200 Jahren in den Blick. Dabei verbindet die Studie die Makroperspektive auf das ganze Königreich mit der mikrologischen Untersuchung der Geschichte der Neuchristen in einer Stadt: dem apulischen Trani, der „Metropole“ der Neuchristen im italienischen Süden während des Spätmittelalters. Multiperspektivisch analysiert sie politische Stellung, Netzwerke, Räume, Karrieren sowie religiöse Lebensführung der konvertierten Juden und ihrer Nachkommen ebenso wir ihren Ort in der zeitgenössischen Wissensordnung des Königreichs Neapel. Gleichzeitig fragt das Buch danach, warum die Neuchristen 1495 aus Trani vertrieben wurden, Versuche, sie aus dem Königreich zu vertreiben, jedoch 1510 und 1514 scheiterten. Ein Epilog verfolgt die Gegenwart der Neuchristen von Trani in der Erinnerung bis in die unmittelbare Gegenwart.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact