Visualising Semantic Landscapes in Early Medieval Europe (250 CE - 1250 CE)

From the world of Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, numerous ethnic names (such as Goths, Huns, Lombards or Franks) have been handed down to us. Especially in the course of the early Middle Ages (5th–11th centuries), ethnic identity played an important role in the development of new political and religious communities and the legitimation of political power. However, ethnic attributions were not all firmly defined – even more obvious indications of different origins such as language, clothing or weapons were not reliable criteria for the assignment to a particular people. What can these names tell us about medieval peoples, their communities and the space they inhabited? What did they mean for the scholars who recorded them in Latin, Greek or Syriac texts, and for their audience?

The aim of MMP is to reconstruct the mental maps of medieval authors and thereby to elucidate how ethnic identifications helped readers to perceive the medieval social world, and thus, how attributions to peoples and perceptions of space were intertwined. This touches on questions of the creation and appropriation of territory, the construction of otherness, and the influence of religious ideas and terminology on conceptions of space and peoples, as well as the circumstances under which perceptions of peoples and space changed over the course of time.

MMP includes ca. 5500 passages from 1150 different texts from 440 different authors, covering a broad range of medieval source material (including historiography, hagiography, exegesis, charters, geographical works, legislative texts, conciliar acts, homilies and annals). We have identified 690 keywords, organised into four categories: 1. Keywords (which include a wider range of ethnic terminology such as gens, patria, then attributes, titles, stereotypical traits); 2. Ethnonyms; 3. Personal names (such as important political players); 4. Regional and geographical names (which include spatial terms, such as mountains, rivers, as well as abstract concepts like East and North, and geographical regions that also designated political communities). All keywords and passages from Latin and Greek texts have been selected are in some way relevant for the significance of the terms and contribute to a better understanding of ethnic terminology.