Welcome to After Empire: Using and Not Using the Past in the Crisis of the Carolingian World, c. 900-1050!

After Empire was a three year research project running from 2016-2019 which aimed to understand the tenth century on its own terms. Funded by HERA, the project engaged scholars and associated partners from Germany, Austria, Spain and the United Kingdom, researching how people in the tenth and early eleventh century dealt with crisis and change in the political order.  We also aimed to open up the period to a broader audience by providing online resources for researchers, teachers and general readers in collaboration with museums, archives and schoolteachers.

The website consists of two main parts: information about the UNUP project and our research, including news posts and blog articles on tenth- and early eleventh-century history; and resources for those interested in studying and teaching the history of this period.

The Barcelona strand of our project has also created a set of resources documenting the rich Carolingian manuscript culture emanating from Catalonia. This has been hosted on the Transformations of the Carolingian World website: you can find this page here.

Our Research Team

Our team was made up of five Project Investigators, two postdoctoral fellows and three doctoral students from five different higher education institutions in Germany, the UK, Austria and Spain. Each of the PIs designed a research strand based on a particular group of source genres and set of themes. These strands were:

Freie Universität Berlin: Legal Pasts and Normative Orders

PI: Prof. Dr. Stefan Esders (Project Leader)
Postdoctoral fellow: Dr Alice Hicklin

Institut für Mittelalterforschung, Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vienna: Terminologies and Concepts of Group Belonging

PI: Priv.-Doz. Dr. Maximilian Diesenberger
PhD student: Jelle Wassenaar

University of Exeter: Using and Not Using the Past in Liturgical Sources

PI: Professor Sarah Hamilton
PhD student: Lenneke van Raaij

University of St Andrews: Narrated Pasts in the Tenth-Century Present

PI: Professor Simon MacLean
Postdoctoral fellow: Dr Sarah Greer

Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona: From Carolingian Periphery to European Central Region: The Written Genesis of Catalonia

Prof. Dr. Matthias M. Tischler
PhD student: Ekaterina Novokhatko

We were delighted to work with a range of associated partners across Germany, Austria, the UK and Spain, including:

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