The Research Training Group (RTG) aims to investigate truth production and truth enforcement between the 13th and 17th century. It targets a period that is characterized by social, political, and religious dynamics as well as by transformations of knowledge cultures, by media change, and by altering public spheres. In this period, symbolically generalized media of communication evolve, while at the same time rhetorical or moral arguments and well established institutional or ritual ways of securing truth remain effective. A multitude of new and established practices of asserting and enforcing truth existed simultaneously – ignoring, supporting, negating, or copying each other. The RTG wants to attract doctoral projects that, on the one hand, investigate how truth is claimed, asserted, enforced, and made acceptable to guide speech, thought, action and decision-making. On the other hand, the projects should explore how processes of ‘making truth’ are observed and reflected in images, plays, and texts. The focus on Europe and its early colonial contact zones will be supplemented by a contrasting perspective on China and Korea, which are particularly suitable for a comparative study due to their highly differentiated written cultures and their specific dynamics. By conceiving truth as something that is made or produced, we acknowledge the fact that even though truth can be conceptualized as ontological, unattainable, or eternal, it only becomes tangible in the mode of its mediation. Truth must be declared or claimed, its status must be asserted, inscribed, or embodied – it always appears within media. Complementing existing research on the history of sciences, on institutional claims of validity, or on the role of the expert, the RTG focuses on practices and processes of making truth and explores their dependence on bodies, natural things, and artefacts. It observes truth production as a bundle of practices and material arrangements in which humans, media, things, and spatial arrangements interact. Bodies, instruments, tools, natural and artificial objects, texts, images, diagrams, architectures, workshops, court sites, or stages all participate in the assertion of truth.
DFG Programme
Research Training Groups
