From the Single Piece to Serial Production: Processes of Change in Medieval Crafts

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Sabine von Heusinger
• Subject Area: Medieval History
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 530544978

Craftsmanship is a universal historical phenomenon: at any time, every society has its own craftspeople. This project assumes that a fundamental change in crafts took place in Europe before 1200. This change can be captured when looking at the close intersections of the three areas of raw materials, serial production and global exchange: (1) Raw materials: Precious, imported materials, which had previously been used for the production of individual pieces, were now replaced by cheaper raw materials. This concerned, for example, ivory, which was replaced by bleached bone, or large marine pearls, which were replaced by small river pearls or glass beads. The cheap materials were a prerequisite for (2) serial production to emerge, which was accompanied by increased productivity and falling prices. Thus, for the first time, new groups of buyers (e.g., lower nobles and urban elites) had access to objects of art and devotion that had previously been reserved for the high nobility and high clergy. (3) At the same time, there was an increased global exchange of trade goods, knowledge and technology around 1200. In the West, for example, know-how from the Mediterranean region and the Near East was increasingly received, and transformative and appropriative processes took place in crafts. Therefore, this project will combine the studies on new raw materials and serial production with the approach of global history in order to analyze the global influence on local products and their production. For this purpose, objects and written sources from the Empire north of the Alpes from the period ca. 1150-1550 will be examined. The project consists of two exemplary case studies: the applicant investigates "pearls and beads", a doctoral student investigates "bone". The research methods used are: (1) a historiographical evaluation of art-historical, art-technological and archaeological findings on objects utilizing approaches of the "material turn"; (2) a historical-critical analysis of archival documents; (3) a classification of the results taking into account global perspectives. Both case studies have a clear regional focus on the cities of Cologne and Basel with their respective surrounding areas. The two subprojects are linked by the three thematic fields (raw material, serial production, global influences on the local) and the methodological approaches. This research design allows a high degree of comparability of the results while maintaining the autonomy of the respective research project. Finally, the results will be situated within the larger context of cultural studies.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants