• Polycentricity and Plurality of Premodern Christianities (POLY)

  • We are a research group housed at Goethe University in Frankfurt

  • We are interested in premodern Christianities around the globe

  • We investigate dynamic plurality as a driving force of change across and within communities of belief

  • Our primary goal is to decentralise religious history before 1800

  • Together, we hope to understand the formation of religious communities

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Polycentricity and Plurality of Premodern Christianities (POLY)

The purpose of the POLY Research Group Polycentricity and Plurality of Premodern Christianities (circa 700–1800 CE), housed at Goethe University Frankfurt and funded by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft), is twofold. First, we aim to facilitate and support comparative interdisciplinary research into preindustrial or premodern Christianities around the globe. Second, we will investigate the ways in which dynamic plurality works as a driving force of change across and within communities of belief.

 

Our primary goal is to decentralise religious history before 1800. We will also historicise and question the unitary and universalist self-images nurtured by institutional churches, as well as the corresponding models of religious culture or transformation found in modern scholarship. This ambitious intellectual agenda is supported by an international and interdisciplinary team of scholars. Together, we hope to more deeply understand the formation of religious communities by local and global forces, as well as the myriad connections among them.

Upcoming Events

POLY Lecture Series on Space and Religion II: “Religious Marking of Disaster Spaces: Late-Medieval Processions and Inscriptions in Erfurt and Frankfurt as Memory Strategies for Climate-Induced Natural Extreme Events”

Start
12.12.2023
Time
18:15 Central European Time
Location
Campus Westend (Seminarhaus, SH 1.108) and Zoom Meeting
Speaker
Martin Bauch (Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe, Leipzig)
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POLY Lecture Series on Space and Religion II: “Concepts of Space and Orthodoxy beyond Byzantium”

Start
19.12.2023
Time
18:15 Central European Time
Location
Campus Westend (Seminarhaus, SH 1.108) and Zoom Meeting
Speaker
Johannes Pahlitzsch (University of Mainz)
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Latest News

An Interview with Andreea Badea and Alexandra Walsham

Coping with religious plurality in the early modern age: This could be the title of a dialogue between Andreea Badea, Alexandra Walsham and Louise Zbi...

Conference Report “Embodying Reformation”

Between the 19th and 20th of May 2023, the POLY Research Group held its annual conference in Bad Homburg. The symposium aimed to trace the role of the...

Project Presentation: “Kabbalah as a Paradigm of Transfer between Judaism and Christianity”

In the latest issue of UniReport, the journal of Goethe University Frankfurt, POLY Fellows Elke Morlok and Níels Eggerz shared some of the insights fr...

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