SPP 1173: Integration and Disintegration of Civilisations in the European Middle Ages

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The guiding idea of the Priority Programme is the presumption that Europe has never been made up of one monolithic culture. Thus, the programme rejects the widespread opinion that the European Middle Ages were characterised almost exclusively by only one culture, the Latin Christian culture. This opinion is clearly based on a contemporary and time-bound search of identity that fails in the face of the present complexity and is not able to cope with current and future challenges. Therefore, one purpose of the research programme is not to discover or even affirm a European identity at all, but rather to ask, in a strictly scientific way, for the dialectics of integrating and disintegrating processes. We believe that these contradicting processes, that have always conditioned one another and continuously alternated with each other, marked European history all along and made up its specific character.