While the nation and nationalism in modernity have already been analysed from a gender-historical perspective, medieval community concepts of nationes and gentes ("peoples") have hardly been considered from a gender-historical perspective.
However, the early modern and gender historian Claudia Ulbrich has defined 'gender' as a central "category of social differentiation" (Ulbrich, Geschlecht 2006). Based on this, it is to be expected that gentes and nationes as important categories in the pre-modern period were not gender-neutral either.
Our project will therefore fundamentally examine the extent to which gender and gentes/nationes concept(ions) were mutually dependent. To a greater extent, we will also look at specific gentes and nationes designationsand concepts (such as Franks, Italians, Germans, Saxons, Frisians, Turks, Saracens, Tartars , etc.), but we will also examine smaller-scale communities such as cities. In doing so, we focus primarily on scholarly concepts as well as the social localisation and interconnectedness of scholars.
At the end of project, we relate two fields of research to each other that have rarely entered into an exchange to date and bring them together in a gender history profile: on the one hand, research on gentes and nationes in the Middle Ages and in humanist national and regional narratives on their own past and localisation, as well as on cultural contacts and representations of foreign peoples and cultures in travelogues and ethnographic compendia. For the study of humanism, it seems imperative to consider the "medieval" 15th and "early modern" 16th centuries together; for travelogue research, this cross-epochal approach was frequently practised, as the exponentially increasing number of texts disseminated with the spread of printing brought continuities and change pointedly into focus. With the necessary temporal recourse to early and high medieval developments, the project is based at the Chair of Medieval History in Oldenburg. Furthermore, it is essential for this topic in particular to fundamentally include the tension between pre-modern and modern categories.