How Monstrosity and Geography were used to Define the Other in Early Medieval Europe

My thesis deals with texts that are either often not investigated in their entirety or that have large portions of their narratives overlooked in favour of more traditionally popular sections. The stories and descriptions of monstrous races included in these texts, many of which are cornerstones of western myth – cynocephali, amazons, cyclopes, giants, dragons, etc. – were inherited by the Early Middle Ages from its Greco-Roman past and redeployed in response to shifting frontiers, both literally and metaphorically in order to make sense of their new world. My thesis is very much an inter-disciplinary study, making use of anthropological and literary theory concerning social identity and the conceptions of the fabulous, miraculous, and the monstrous and combines a close textual analysis of primary source material with a detailed reconstruction of the context in which these texts were created and transmitted. What was it about these particular texts that resulted in their widespread transmission? How were these descriptions of the monstrous used to define the other? How were these same descriptions used to define barbarian groups? Was there a geographical link between where these texts placed their monsters and real geographical frontiers? How were texts like this used to shape a Christian identity in such a way that it was distinct from a non-Christian one? These questions and others like them will lie at the heart of my thesis

Dictionaries in the European Enlightenment: a testimony to the civilization of its time and the foundations of modern Europe

The text presents a plan for an international and multidisciplinary research project that is under preparation now and which is looking for collaborators from other universities or research centers. It aims to investigate the role that played monolingual, bilingual, and multilingual dictionaries published in the 18th century in the constitution of modern Europe as we know it now. It is well known that in the 18th century there appeared many dictionaries in various European countries. These dictionaries were mainly monolingual but there appeared many bilingual or plurilingual ones as well. They had a wide range of functions: linguistic (to write and understand texts), but also symbolic, representing the development and the level of civilization and prestige that a given language of culture had in times previous to 19th-century European linguistic nationalisms. Another aspect is text-oriented and text-based: the 18th-century dictionaries used to be built on relatively large sources of contemporary texts and they reflected the level of knowledge in various subjects. Therefore, they can be considered testimonies of contemporary linguistic thinking and the applied linguistics, but at the same time, they resume the development of science, legal thought, political science, etc., illustrating how knowledge spread in the Enlightenment at the international level. The project seeks to unite researchers dedicated to the linguistic historiography of philologies of European languages, historians of natural sciences, law, and social and political history, among other disciplines. It aims to offer a map of the intellectual and political globalization that began to take place in the 18th century as it is reflected in its dictionaries. The project currently counts with a small group of researchers from linguistic historiography of Romance languages. Researchers of the historiography of other European philologies are welcome and needed, and so are historians of natural and social sciences specialized in the 18th century. The main aim of the project is to stop working in parallel, horizontal and vertical, tunnels and to form a network, necessary for this type of transdisciplinary research