Termin:
13.12.2005
19:00 c.t.
Thirteen Ways of Looking at St Boniface
The historical imagining of a saint
Stuart Airlie (Glasgow). This is not a comprehensive summary of the history of the cult and image of St Boniface; P. Kehl and M. Mostert have covered this ground already. Instead, it is a survey of some of the images of Boniface that have been constructed in the historical imagination. That imagination is a "public" one, as illustrated by some popular British historians and in historical fiction, as well as in the shifts in the public commemoration of Boniface in Germany. But that imagination is also an academic one and even academic writing on Boniface has sometimes been strangely emotional in tone. How valid is such emotional writing as a form of historical representation? Why has Boniface "inspired" such writing? The relationship between Bonifatian sources, the genre of biography, the conceptual challenge of paganism and popular, public and academic representations of the past will be explored.
Stuart Airlie: lehrt mittelalterliche Geschichte an der Universität Glasgow. Sein Forschungsgebiet ist die politische und kulturelle Geschichte der Karolingerzeit. Zur Zeit arbeitet er an einem Buch über die Struktur der Politik im Karolingerreich.
Kontakt:
Univ.-Doz. Dr. Walter Pohl
Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften
Institut für Mittelalterforschung
Prinz-Eugen-Str. 8
A-1040 Wien
T +43 1 51581-7240