The aim of the ‘Fokus romanistische Mediävistik Heidelberg’ (FRM Heidelberg) is to strengthen medieval studies in Heidelberg, focussing on Romance text philology, linguistics and literary studies.
The FRM Heidelberg is based at the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and is closely linked to the two projects Knowledge Networks in Medieval Romance Speaking Europe (ALMA) and Bible Glossaries as Hidden Cultural Carriers, both of which are projects involving historical language stages of the Romance languages dealing with resources from the Middle Ages, making them accessible and investigating them.
The departments of Romance Studies and of History of the University of Heidelberg shall be closely involved in the activities of the FRM.
For almost two centuries, medieval Romance studies in Germany was a internationally leading discipline: text editions of medieval texts were compiled at many research institutions, both at universities and academies; the first scholarly dictionaries in the discipline (Diez; Tobler) came from Germany, as did the first grammars. After the linguistic turn of the 1970s, this medievalist tradition was largely preserved only at the academies.
Over the decades, the former research centre of the HAdW Dictionnaire étymologique de l'ancien français (DEAF), where Stephen Dörr and Sabine Tittel, the initiators of the FRM Heidelberg, received their academic training, has accumulated immense expertise in textual philology and medieval French texts. This knowledge now lives on in the two projects mentioned above, which began their work in 2022 and 2023, respectively. It will be spread as part of university teaching (in Romance Studies and in the Interdisciplinary Master's “Mittelalterstudien”).
With the founding of the FRM Heidelberg, these efforts will profit from a stronger, institutionalised basis.
Lectures or colloquia with national and international guests invited by the FRM will be organised about twice a year. We hope that the academic exchange will be beneficial for the faculties of the institutes, for students and colleagues and, of course, for the ALMA and Bible Glossary projects.
We would like to thank Pia Lorenz for designing and creating the FRM logo.