RELEVEN – Re-evaluating the Eleventh Century through Linked Events and Entities

The project “RELEVEN – Re-evaluating the Eleventh Century with Linked Events and Entities”, led by Tara Andrews, is supported by the European Research Council under the Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement #101002357) and hosted at the University of Vienna in cooperation with the ACDH-CH.

The aim of the project is twofold. On the one hand to cast a clearer light on the events of the “short eleventh century” (c. 1030–1095) and specifically to get a better understanding of the ways in which the Christian world was perceived by its inhabitants at the time, particularly in the eastern half of Christendom but also to the north, where the faith had rapidly been expanding. On the other hand, to achieve this, the main methodological challenge of the project  is to find ways to link and connect large amounts of disparate sorts of data and express the data in a that allows us to incorporate different, and even conflicting, perspectives.

The proposed approach is to re-frame both existing and new historical data as assertions, allowing to state explicitly their source and authority, and also allowing assertions themselves to be put in relation, depending on whether they corroborate, depend on, or conflict with each other. The novel aspect of this methodology is that it takes to its logical conclusion something that historians all readily acknowledge and that is especially apparent for pre-modern history: that there are very few, if any, simple and undisputed facts.

The method is tested by taking a broad trans-regional view on the history of the late 11^th century (c. 1030–1095), centred broadly in the eastern half of Christendom but incorporating developments elsewhere, especially in the newly Christianized kingdoms of central Europe. By drawing upon the plethora of digital resources that have emerged for this period in sub-disciplines such as prosopography, textual scholarship, corpus-based research, and archaeology, and by framing this scholarship in terms of assertions whose authority is traceable, it will become possible to look at the history not just from “the eastern perspective”, but from several.

The ACDH-CH is contributing to the modelling task, and is responsible for implementing the technical underpinnings of the project, as well as for transforming existing data from external sources.