European Borderlands and Contested Spaces in the Early Modern Period

Early modern borders, before the rise of European nation states, were highly permeable and fluid. People of different faiths and political allegiances encountered one another across these borders, practicing a form of coexistence which histories of religious toleration have largely ignored. As the work by Christoph Duhamelle and Etienne François has shown, sacred spaces were as much contested as they were shared in pragmatic arrangements. Fugitive peasants, transnational noble families, social, political and religious networks and kinship across official borderlines created a complex picture that is hard to pin down with modern national or confessional criteria and have confounded historians who need to come to terms with the complexities of early modern categories such as loyalty, patronage and ritual. This project invites PhD candidates who want to work on an interdisciplinary basis on early modern borderlands and the definition, construction and use of public and private space in the period c.1500-1800. Following on from the debate between Leibniz and Newton about defining space as something ‘beyond the material world’, as imaginary construct, the projects will draw on sociology and anthropology of early modern spaces and borders, supporting a particular focus on (1) multi-ethnic and multi-cultural borderlands, (2) the debate between sacred and secular spaces, and (3) the creation of newly-formed ‘hybrid’ spaces, which emerge from the clash or cooperation between different cultures and conventions. The chosen candidate will be supported by early modern historians with a successful track record in world-leading research and doctoral supervision.