• 2014-2017: bachelor’s degree in history with minor in sociology at the University of Kassel
  • 2016-2017: tutor in the Department of Sociological Theory, University of Kassel
  • 2016-2020: student assistant and tutor in the Department of Medieval History, University of Kassel
  • 2017: internship at the Deutsches Historisches Institut Rom
  • 2017-2020: master’s degree in ‘Geschichte und Öffentlichkeit’ (Public History) at the University of Kassel
  • 2018-2019: semester abroad at the Università degli Studi di Firenze
  • since April 2020: research associate in the Department of Medieval History, University of Kassel

Telephone consultation by individual arrangement via email.

"Cultural techniques of reception. Burchard of Mount Sion’s travel account in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries"

The doctoral project centres on the manuscript tradition of Burchard of Mount Sion’s Descriptio, which will be examined as evidence of the reception process from the early fourteenth century to about 1500. With around one hundred extant manuscripts, the Descriptio is one of the most popular and influential accounts of the Holy Land in the late Middle Ages. At the same time, the work is a milestone in the development of medieval travel accounts, since Burchard not only incorporated the holy sites into his narrative of the Other, but also compared his multifaceted textual sources with on-site observations. The Descriptio is traditionally divided into a long and a short version, but recent research has suggested that even within these versions it can be subdivided into different families. Its content transitioned from a (practical) guide for pilgrims to a reservoir of religious, geographic and historical knowledge. The aim is not to analyse this shift as a ‘classic’ history of the textual tradition, but to use methods from media studies research on cultural techniques. This is the only way to detect traces of editorial revisions and use, which make it possible to understand the development of the text as a process of sociocultural practices and processes in interaction with technical media. Using selected text media, the dissertation will begin by examining the reasons for the early division into textual families, and the effects of this division. The second step will be to review the processes of compilation and excerption among scholars, religious orders and pilgrims in the fifteenth century, and the third will be to analyse the complex relations between the text and graphic representations (in some cases inserted later).