Digital Database: Myths of Origin in Medieval Chronicles of Europe

Mentor Areas

I am a scholar of cultural, religious and intellectual history, early modern and medieval literary and linguistic culture. My publications and research are concerned with the cultural space of eastern, central, and southern Europe, particularly, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Bohemia, Poland, Croatia, Hungary, and Rus. In research and teaching, I deal with topics that include the history of and approaches to language, writing, and literacy; historical writing and historical methods; paleography and cryptography; projects and theories of universal language; and medieval and modern literature and culture. My undergraduate courses examine medieval literary and historical topics in the context of modern society and reveal their importance in the development of contemporary culture, politics, and social norms. In literature courses I focus on the study of reading strategies of imaginative texts that leads to the advanced understanding of literature as part of cultural history.

Description:

The project deals with the creation of a digital database to analyze a range of questions about the ‎role of myths of origin in medieval and early modern chronicles and historiographic sources of ‎Europe. “Myths of origin” are legendary stories that describe genealogies of ethnic groups, their ‎social orders, names, and places that they inhabit. The goal of the project is to understand what ‎motivated medieval authors to view myths as “historical material” and how they adopted myth to ‎fit their learned vision of what History should be? Many of these myths are built around ‎etymological interpretations of names of people and objects because medieval historians ‎believed that connections between similarly sounding words provided a mystical link to the ‎otherwise unknowable reality of the distant past. For example, the 15th-century historian Pulkava ‎was convinced of the divine origin of his native Bohemia because he believed its name derived ‎from the Slavic word Boh, which means ‘God’, while his early 14th-century colleague from ‎Poland (anonymous) believed that the unusual sexual attraction of the pagan princess Wanda ‎was intrinsically related to her name, which is derived from the Polish word “hook.” I am ‎particularly interested in the internal mechanism of etymologically motivated stories, in which ‎etymologies function as a method of discovery and as the driving force of the narrative. ‎

Preferred Qualifications

Skills needed: demonstrated interest in history and working with primary sources, strong ‎analytical and writing skills, attention to detail. Advanced knowledge of a foreign language (e.g. ‎French, German, Latin, Spanish, Italian, or other) is a plus. The student research assistant will ‎work with an interface developed at the Price Lab for Digital Humanities, analyze ‎primary sources for data entrance, and assist with database development.  ‎