From the late twelfth and early thirteenth century onwards, against the backdrop of demographic growth and urbanization, a growing number of laypeople started to pursue a religious life without actually ...read more
Roman cities relied on privileged guilds to function. Craftsmen guilds (collegia fabri) took pride of place but remain much debated. We study their spread, membership, organization, influence and impact on ...read more
This project examines the communicative decisions of a high medieval institution under pressure. For centuries, Benedictine monks had enjoyed a virtual monopoly over institutionalized religious life in Europe. From the twelfth century ...read more
This PhD project revolves around the phenomenon of Dutch and French change-of-state semi-copulas (i.e. meaning ‘become’), more specifically those that originate from verbs which typically express physical motion (e.g. (ge)raken, komen, ...read more
This project studies early modern urban discourses on sodomy in the Southern Netherlands. Sodomy was considered as a crime against nature whose origins could be traced to the biblical cities ...read more
This PhD research is a comparative historical anthropology of cross-cultural interaction and local exchange-relations in late 18th-century China (Guangzhou), Japan (Dejima) and India (Bengal & Ganges-delta region).In this research, cross-cultural ...read more
The wider Lower Congo region in Central Africa is home to the Kikongo language cluster (KLC), a vast cluster of regiolects spoken in four neighbouring countries: Angola including Cabinda, the ...read more
The project aims to contribute to the changing perspective on the history of Christian ethics by investigating the way in which economic, political and social developments influenced vernacular renditions of ...read more
This research aims to study how marvelous and miraculous anecdotes were used in a variety of medieval biographical texts of the three Mamluk sultans Baybars (r. 1260-1277), Qalawun (r. 1279-1290) ...read more
The Ghent Database of Roman Guilds(+) will provide a tool for research into institutions for collective actions by professional groups. It will be: (1) a heuristic tool to find data on ...read more