In historical and art historical disciplines of recent medieval studies, the Mediterranean region has established itself as a heuristic model. It facilitates the examination of transcultural interconnections that transcend common dichotomous parameters such as 'East and West' or 'Orient and Occident'. The Mediterranean comes into view as a contact zone that favors processes of exchange and transfer. Especially for cultural practices of the nobility, research has shown a 'shared culture' (Oleg Grabar) of spatially distant as well as linguistically and confessionally heterogeneous, but nevertheless interconnected groups.

Sharon Kinoshita has taken up and further developed this new perspective on cultural history with her concept of "Mediterranean literature" from the perspectives of literary studies and Romance studies. The workshop will explore the productivity of this model for understanding German-language texts of the premodern period. For the objects of Germanic medieval studies are also linked to literary and epistemic traditions, settings, actors, and institutions of the Mediterranean. The aim of the workshop is to bring colleagues from the field of German Medieval Studies, whose research is concerned with postcolonial studies, with questions of transculturality, and with references to the Mediterranean, into conversation with Sharon Kinoshita and with each other. The central and starting point here is the observation of a tension within the research field of transculturality or the 'Global Middle Ages' itself: On the one hand, the criticism that the reconstruction of processes of entanglement tends to harmonize and to hide asymmetries; on the other hand, the accusation that a concentration on the investigation of constructions of the 'other' leads to neglecting historical interconnections.
 
The workshop is held with the support of the Dahlem Humanities Center in connection with a project within the Dahlem Junior Host Program.

Programme