GRK 1507:  Expert Cultures from the 12th to the 16th Century

• Subject Area: Literary Studies ; History ; Theology
• Term: from 2009 to 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 56357900

As a social type, the expert makes his first appearance around 1200, beginning to exert an immense influence on occidental societies. It is his emergence as a provider of socially relevant specialised knowledge that the Research Training Group is exploring. The approach is decidedly not aiming to contribute to a history of modernisation in the traditional sense. Instead, it takes its starting point from the observation that the more important such specialised knowledge becomes, the more its proxies - the experts - are criticised. As individuals and social groups feel increasingly compelled to rely on the functioning of administrative, technical and scholarly inventories of knowledge, scepticism, critique and enmity of experts are also on the rise (i.e. the dialogical relation of trust in the system and critique of experts).
This critique is not just seen as a deplorable but inevitable epiphenomenon of processes of rationalisation. Rather, our research assumes it to be culturally productive in itself, e.g. in that such critique leads to the conceptualisation of utopian, “better”, less complex worlds with a simple and unitary body of knowledge. Based on this central supposition we are going to examine (1) the institutionalisation of the expert as a social institution between c. 1100 and c. 1600, (2) those practices of self-representation and external evaluation which produce social knowledge about expert groups, (3) critical reactions to their role in society. Currently the Research Training Group consists of a range of research projects in the fields of history, legal and ecclesiastical history and the philologies of German, the Romanic languages and medieval and modern Latin.

• DFG Programme: Research Training Groups
• Applicant Institution: Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
• Participating Researchers: Professor Dr. Udo Friedrich; Professor Dr. Martin van Gelderen; Professor Dr. Thomas Kaufmann; Professorin Dr. Franziska Meier; Professorin Dr. Hedwig Röckelein; Professorin Dr. Eva Schumann; Professor Dr. Michael Thimann
• Spokesperson: Professor Dr. Frank Rexroth, since 8/2017