Konrad Petrovszky
Orthodox historiography in Ottoman Southeastern Europe in the 16th and 17th Centuries. A study of its formative conditions and forms of expression
Through a systematic investigation of Orthodox history writing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this project uncovers a lesser-known chapter in the intellectual history of early modern Europe. It adopts an integrative, comparative perspective on texts and writing practices that were, until recently, treated within the competing national and disciplinary traditions of research in Southeastern Europe. By doing so, it highlights cultural and intellectual ties within this geographic area as well as diverging processes and regional differences. The project’s combination of close textual analysis with broader study of writing culture, along with its social, communicative and intellectual implications, illuminates the hermeticism and slow pace of change characteristic of Orthodox historiography until the beginning of the eighteenth century. Through this approach, the writing of history in Southeastern Europe of the pre-national era appears in a new light, free of the cliché of cultural decline "under the Turkish yoke," but also beyond the complacent deconstruction of nationalist discourse.
This project has been made possible with the generous support of the Gerda-Henkel-Foundation (Düsseldorf), the Schroubek-Foundation (Munich), and the Elsa-Neumann-Scholarship (Berlin).
Elsa-Neumann-Stipendium