| 1 | Name: | Dr. Eva Schlotheuber | |
| Institution: | Heinrich Heine University, Düsseldorf; German Historical Association | ||
| Year Elected: | 2020 | ||
| Class: | 4. Humanities | ||
| Subdivision: | 404a | ||
| Residency: | International | ||
| Living? : | Living | ||
| Birth Date: | 1959 | ||
Eva Schlotheuber's enthusiasm for medieval manuscripts, art and literature started at Göttingen, studying with Hartmut Hoffmann, one of the leading scholars of manuscript and archival studies. A year abroad in Copenhagen reading anthropology and experimental archaeology added to this the material side of history and environmental studies. Working at the intersection of these disciplines has never ceased to fascinate her and she has continued working on little known primary material and hidden archival sources from an interdisciplinary perspective. A particular focus has been how religious orders structure and communicate knowledge, particularly looking at how religious women staked out their claim in medieval society; she has worked closely with colleagues around the world, among them Jeffrey Hamburger (Art History, Harvard) and Margot Fassler (Musicology/Liturgy, Notre Dame). Currently, she is editing together with Henrike Lähnemann (German Studies, Oxford) what is probably the largest corpus of medieval writing by women, 1.800 letters collected in a Northern German convent (The Nuns' Network). A second area of research revolves round the influence which poets and humanists such as Dante and Petrarch had on political theory and governance structure in the 14th century, and how new collective norms are formed in times of crisis. The critical evaluation and contextualisation of sources of all kind is a particular strength of medieval studies which is crucial in understanding how systems of knowledge are changing. We can build upon this highly developed source critizism for meeting the challenges of our networked digital age. This is a challenge which can only be met by working together across the Humanities and Sciences and jointly developing a vision for the future which is collaborative. Eva Schlotheuber was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2020. | |||