Subproject C06 [B01]

Women and men, aristocrats and commoners: A socio-biographical view of metaphor

Subproject C06 investigates how metaphor use is shaped by the social backgrounds and life experiences of the people who produce, receive, and circulate religious texts. Building on the former subproject B01, which explored metaphor in historical religious language, the project now focuses on the relationship between metaphor and socio-biographical factors such as gender, social status, education, and life trajectory.

To address these questions, C06 examines a range of historical sources, including Early Modern High German funeral sermons, autobiographical writings of members of the Moravian Church, and texts by female and male authors from the Middle Ages. Many of these sources contain unusually rich information about their authors or intended audiences, making it possible to connect patterns of metaphor use with specific social and biographical contexts.

Combining close reading, manual annotation, corpus linguistics, and computational methods, the project investigates how metaphors vary across different groups and communities. Particular attention is paid to the role of biblical imagery and the ways religious metaphors are adapted, reused, and transformed over time. By linking metaphor analysis with social history, C06 offers new insights into how religious meaning is shaped by lived experience and social position.