Projects
Multilingual encounters in the late medieval town. Rewriting history in multilingual social and political contexts in late medieval Flanders and Brabant (1380-1500) Ghent University
This project deals with the various multilingual social networks in the commercial towns in the County of Flanders and the Duchy of Brabant during the Late Middle Ages (1380-1500). The Burgundian Low Countries were multilingual in their speaking and writing culture. So far, literary and historical scholarship has been rather one-dimensional in its approach towards multilingualism in literature, focusing predominantly on place or cultural ...
Painting/Mapping the Medieval Landscape. A Landscape-archaeological analysis of the medieval landscape around Bruges as depicted by Pieter Pourbus Ghent University
Aortic dissection is a local tear in the aortic wall that leads to a parallel blood flow within the wall, a so-called “false lumen”. The disease is asymptomatic and may result in sudden death if the degraded aortic wall ruptures. Recently, we used high resolution synchrotron imaging to demonstrate that small side branches play an important role in the initiation and propagation of aortic dissections in mice. These findings were confirmed in ...
The Romance between Greece and the West. Heroes and Heroines in French, Anglo-Norman and English medieval narrative." Ghent University
Medieval romance is arguably the most influential secular literary genre of the European Middle Ages. Its history has not been written yet. In order to enhance our understanding of this history (both conceptually and cross-culturally), this project offers the first reconstruction and interpretation of the persistence of (ancient) novelistic and (late antique and medieval)hagiographical traditions in French, Anglo-Norman and English medieval ...
Mind Your Words! The Role of Medieval Translations in the History of Concepts KU Leuven
The proposed project aims to use language studies to better understand medieval translations of philosophical treatises. It therefore wants to investigate whether the combination of a philological study (‘close reading’) and computational data (‘distant reading’) can succeed in objectively ascribing certain currently anonymous translations to known medieval translators, or at least in grouping them as the works of one unnamed scholar. If this ...
Breaking the Lines: Geometrical Reasoning and Medieval Atomism KU Leuven
The proposed research is centered on one fundamental issue in the history of philosophy and science, namely, the debate about atomism. Regarding this debate, late medieval thinkers made a remarkable contribution with long-lasting influences on Modern thought. The aim of the project is to shed new light on the mathematical approach by which the medievals questioned a central problem in natural philosophy, i.e. the nature of continuum.
In ...
Medieval urban agricultural land use in Flanders and Brabant (6th-13th centuries AD): phytolith research as a novel tool for the understanding of cultivated soils in towns Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Flanders and Brabant. The overarching goal is to answer longstanding questions on the role and practice of agriculture in medieval
town development. On the one hand, the project aims to investigate
the cultivated crops on urban medieval fieldson one hand, and soil
intensification processes on the other. In addition, the spatial
evolution of these ...
The Magna Moralia and its Contribution to Medieval Moral Philosophy KU Leuven
The aim of my research project on the Aristotelian treatise Magna Moralia is twofold. In the first phase of the research, I will make a critical edition of the medieval Latin translation of Magna Moralia. This edition, which will appear in the renowned Aristoteles Latinus series and will also be made available online via the Aristoteles Latinus Database, is an important prerequisite before studying the content of the text: it is of essential ...
Sharp tongues. Contentious speech and urban politics in the late medieval Low Countries KU Leuven
This project offers an innovative perspective on medieval insurgency. An in-depth analysis of the 'illicit speech' of commoners will reveal whether the role of urban commoners in sustaining and spreading contentious beliefs was an essential one. Instead of considering protestors as violent rebels whose collective actions were harmful to political progress, as scholarship has often done in the past, this project sees citizens as creative ...
Early medieval farming communities in northern Francia. Rural settlement, domestic space and material culture from Clovis to the Counts of Flanders. Ghent University
The central objective of the research is to study the daily life, culture and socio-economy of the farming communities living in northern Francia during the Early Middle Ages (ca. AD 450 – ca. AD 1000). This will be tackled using a varied set of archaeological, historical and ecological sources, set in a wider comparative framework. The research will focus on settlement forms, house-building traditions, local domestic ceramics and the ...