Last year, 2024, we supported five promising scholars with research scholarships at the MGH Munich institute. Here, we present four of them with their projects (one scholarship cannot be made public).
Beatrice Caterina Bodini is a Ph.D. student at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan/Italy. In Munich, she worked on her Ph.D. thesis on the Chronica Episcoporum Libellus de situ civitatis Mediolani, a chronicle of bishops of the city of Milan consisting of six episcopal biographies. Her project envisages an edition of the text with a commentary. In this context, Bodini analyses the text under philological and historical aspects in order to achieve a better definition of its origins and genesis.
supported with a one-month MGH scholarship
Norbert Hunor Orbán is a Ph.D. student at the Universität Wien (Vienna) writing his thesis on the depictions of the Cumans in medieval chronicles and annals. The Cumans were a nomadic people from the Central Asian Steppe that settled in the Kingdom of Hungary as an armed ethnic group at the middle of the 13th century. Orbán’s project aims not at an ethnological study of the Cumans, but rather at an analysis of the self-images and patterns of understanding and thinking that arose in connection with the steppe nomads and were conceptualised, transmitted and received by the society in which the sources originated.
supported with a one-month MGH scholarship
Maurice Parussel is a postgraduate scholar working at the seminar for classical philology at the Ruhr-Universität in Bochum. He profited from his visit to the MGH to work on a new edition of the Chronica Slavorum by Arnold of Lübeck, a joint project with Oliver Auge and Sebastian Modrow. In Munich, Parussel completed a draft of the edition of the first book and laid a groundwork for the further editorial work including a methodical approach to evaluating the textual variations in individual manuscripts and a concept for dealing with the names of persons and places. In résumé, he emphasised how important the MGH library was for him to efficiently gather material for the commentary: „Its inexhaustible wealth of literature presents such comprehensive information that it never occurred that the books I needed were not right there.“ „Von großer Bedeutung für die effiziente Materialsammlung für den Sachkommentar war die MGH-Bibliothek, deren schier unerschöpflicher Reichtum an Literatur umfassende Informationen darbietet, sodass es während des gesamten Forschungsaufenthaltes nicht ein einziges Mal vorkam, dass Literatur, die ich benötigte, nicht vor Ort war.“
supported by the MGH friends association Pro arte edendi – Freunde der MGH e. V.
Alberto Spataro is a Ph.D. student at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan/ Italy. During his research visit, he was able to complete important preliminary studies for a critical edition of the letters of Cardinal Rainiero da Viterbo († 1250). The need for a systematic edition of the cardinal’s correspondence was voiced at the latest by Matthias Thumser in order to overcome the present state of editorial fragmentation through partial editions in diverse publications and to contextualise the wording of the letters and the compilation of the correspondence in terms of the author’s political and military activities. Taking stock of his visit to Munich, Spataro said that he particularly profited from the comprehensive collection of literature and repertories of charters and letters on the Hohenstaufen period, but also from the opportunity to talk with colleagues in the hospitable atmosphere of the Munich institute, „a place, where the dialogue with books and scholars is always enriching.“ „Mein Aufenthalt in München ermöglichte es mir, die umfangreiche Literatur und die zahlreichen Repertorien von Diplomen und Briefen zur Stauferzeit zu nutzen und mich mit Kollegen in der gastfreundlichen Umgebung des Instituts auszutauschen, einem Ort, an dem der Dialog mit Büchern und zwischen Wissenschaftlern immer bereichernd ist.“
supported by the MGH friends association Pro arte edendi – Freunde der MGH e. V.