In this framework we would like to explore the cultural history of the Carolingian and post-Carolingian world. The Carolingian reforms of language, script and education before and after 800 have been studied intensively as an important period for the formation of the social, political and cultural horizons of Latin Europe in the Middle Ages. This is, however, much less true for the period after the first two Carolingian emperors from the mid ninth century to the beginning of the twelfth which is still often regarded as a time of cultural decline and political fragmentation: a new Dark Age after the short ‘renaissance’ of learning, education and cultivation of knowledge in the time of Charlemagne and Louis the Pious (768 – 840 CE). It is, however, precisely this later and post-Carolingian period after the 840ies, from which the main bulk of the manuscripts attesting to and reinforcing the intensified efforts to establish new standards in Latin Europe have come down to us. What we observe is not only a new cultural base line in the Carolingian world, but also new standards to organize knowledge in books and libraries and the formation of a cultural convergence that held together the increasingly diverse and politically fragmented world of Latin Europe. Therefore, we are aiming for a more comprehensive comparison of different texts, contexts as well as trajectories, various cultural topographies and degrees of convergence in the late and post-Carolingian world – from the Atlantic, to Central and Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean world.

The framework started with series of seminars at which members of this group have presented their approaches, ongoing work, or future research. It now serves as a platform for several projects and for the organisation of conferences as well as lecture series, such as the HIT Online Seminars. Histories in Transition currently consists of four individual projects. The project The Case of Freising & Salzburg studies two major centres of historical writing between the 9th and 12th centuries, Salzburg as well as Freising, and builds a comprehensive relational database that enables future users to analyse the connections between historiographical manuscripts, its textual elements, their scribes and possible stratigraphic layers. In Histories of a History, the project team is using new digital and computational tools to analyse the (post-)Carolingian versions of Gregory of Tours' Decem libri historiarum. The project The Getica and its Histories is preparing a detailed study of the usage of Jordanes in the early and high Middle Ages. Finally, Embedded Histories provides a substantial analysis of Walahfrid Strabo's Vademecum.

The overall coordination of the framework Histories in Transition is carried out by Leon Pürstinger and Maximilian Diesenberger in close collaboration with the project teams and the cooperation partners.

The HIT Online Seminar Series is organized by: Helmut Reimitz, Maximilian Diesenberger, Steffen Patzold, Leon Pürstinger and Ksenia Borisova.