Mission, Conversion and Martyrdom on the Periphery of Christendom
The Many Worlds of Bruno of Querfurt
This project is devoted to the life, career, works, and sainthood of Bruno of Querfurt (974–1009), a monk and archbishop, who lived at the turn of the first Christian millennium. Together, Bruno’s writings bear witness to his enormous productivity and to his many talents as a hagiog-rapher, writer, and missionary. His works, assembled in many manuscripts, shed a unique – and neglected – light on Bruno’s capacities as a missionary. Thanks to the unique collection of works that Bruno left behind and that are also dedicated to him, it will be possible to reconstruct in great detail the development of Bruno’s career and the events of his last days, and to suggest several major revisions to the general picture held by current historiography. It will therefore be to investigate five key areas: the assessment of the sources, methods, and agendas of Bruno’s narratives and writing mission; Bruno’s imaginary worlds, the metaphor of mission; and the cre-ation of Christian myths on the periphery of Christendom; the practice and resources of Bruno’s missions; Bruno’s last mission and death in the medieval sources: versions, geography, and cir-culation of knowledge in eleventh-century Europe; and the making of a saint along with the memory of St. Bruno in late medieval Europe.
The project addresses the central idea of how knowledge of the last mission was distributed throughout eleventh-century Europe. Specifically, it will clarify the understanding of Bruno’s death within the literary network of the medieval West, the controversies surrounding the loca-tion of Bruno’s death, the creation of the hagiographic legend of Bruno, and the formation of Christian myths on the fringes of Europe. Dr. Oleksandr Fylypchuk
Funded by:
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Projektnummer: 572655540 / Walter Benjamin-Programm Stelle
Duration:
Affiliated Persons
