The Research Center focuses on early modern intellectual history. Taking its cue from the an interdisciplinary history of scholarship, the Center aims to throw a spotlight on often neglected areas of early modern learning. These areas enjoyed a high prestige in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth-centuries and were linked by a complex process of intellectual cross-fertilization. (Numbering among these fields were antiquarian studies, philological studies in Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac, scholarship on ancient religion, numismatics, theology, and history). These topics are then subjected to an analysis founded on primary source material but also employing modern methods derived from cultural history and more specifically the study of networks, the history of the book and reading, science studies, and historical anthropology (such as scholarly habitus and symbolic communication). In his inaugural address, Prof. Martin Mulsow outlined this program.

A working group of fellows is currently meeting under the title “Underground Research: Heterodoxy, Dissidents and Subversion 1600-1800” as a component of the graduate school “Religion in Processes of Modernization” based at the University of Erfurt. This group examines clandestine literature in the context of communication circulating in the literary “underground.”

An additional focus of the Center is to be found in the study of early modern court culture, predominantly as it existed in central Germany. Of interest in this regard is the function of the court as a communicative space associated with a culture of knowledge, as well as the role of denominations (especially Protestantism) in representing the dynasty.