Soundscapes of the Middle Ages

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Harald Müller
• Subject Area: Medieval History
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 503851652

The volume investigates the generation of spaces by sounds in the middle ages in a systematical way. It uses the conception of modern Sound studies and puts it into perspective for an era which was still lacking techniques of measuring or even reproducing sound. Medieval sounds can only be recognized in their lingual (and very scarce figurative) wrapping; sounds became text. These wrappings hint to the functional, emotional, and regulatory attitudes of the contemporary listener. Thus, words inform us about the meaning of sounds in their variable social and cultural settings. For example, the ringing of a bell was initially a mere tone, but it worked as an request or an order too, and it tagged the geographical and social sphere in which this ringing caused action and effect. In short, this volume broadens the idea of symbolic communication which is prominent for using signs and gesture, by adding sounds as a feature of nonverbal interaction.In this item principal approaches give structure to a multiperspective survey of the topic, particularly (a) sounds of different living environments, goups and cultures, (b) regulation of sounds and (c) generating and structuring of spaces by and with sounds. Methodological questions concerning cultures of hearing and imagination in the Middle Ages, about the ways of wrapping sounds in words and pictures and about semantics of these lingual constructions lay the ground for these considrations.Contents: Karl Kügle (History of music, Oxford) presents medieval thoughts on hearing and its order, while Mirko Breitenstein (Dresden) explores the cloister as a spot of silence and alternatie draft of a soundscape. Björn Renko Tammen (Art history, Vienna) hints to the sphere of iconology of music. Jean Marie Fritz (German studies, Dijon) explains the sound wrapping in vernacular literatures, while Harald Müller (Aachen) focuses on epistemological aspects of this wrapping. Pierre Monnet (Paris/Frankfurt a.M.) scetches an sophisticated panorama of the medieval city as a soundscape with its single subdivions, and Hiram Kümper (Mannheim) develops acoustics of german legal history. Nonverbal communication and performance are combined in the papers of Martina Giese (Würzburg) on medieval chase as well as in Michael Grünbart‘s (Byzantine studies, Münster) on the emperor’s court in Constantinople. Specific jewish, muslim and christian heraring cultures are the subject of a comparative study of Alexandra Cuffel (Jewish religion) and, with special regard to the Iberian peninsula, of Nikolas Jaspert (Heidelberg).Marin Clauss (Chemnitz) underlines in his impressive conclusion that the book ist not a mere collection of single observations. It is a broad survey of medieval soundscapes with interdisciplinary and international importance, whose outstanding quality derives from a coordinated interdisciplinary perspective and a sensitive use of the methodological framesetting.

• DFG Programme: Publication Grants
• Participating Person: Professor Dr. Nikolas Jaspert