VIAMEDIAITALICA · The Scholar, the Jurist, the Priest: Moderation on the Italian Peninsula, 1700-1750
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2020-01-13 → 2022-04-15
- EU contribution
- €224,934
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
The Scholar, the Jurist, the Priest: Moderation on the Italian Peninsula, 1700-1750
VIA MEDIA ITALICA had two main objectives. Firstly, it posed a new interpretation of the intellectual history of the Italian peninsula in the first half of the eighteenth century. Drawing a study across three intellectual personae - the scholar, the jurist, the priest – it used the concept of moderation as an ordering device. This provided a contextualised study of the figure who sat at the heart of this intellectual culture: Lodovico Antonio Muratori. Secondly, it used this historical study to open up the concept of moderation and probe its saliency for the present day. In an age of political polarisation the appeal to centrism, compromise and moderation is, in some quarters of both popular and academic discourse, growing. At the same time, this appeal demonstrates that this moderation a virtue which we understood too little. Through its historical enquiry, VIA MEDIA ITALICA aimed to lay the foundations for a more serious, historically informed, study of the concept of moderation. An enhanced academic grasp of moderation might then feed into popular, and political, discussion, and elevate that discussion to new heights. These two objectives coalesced in an undergirding objective of enhancing the researcher’s academic and professional profile. Central to this was his development of an interdisciplinary and outward facing research agenda, which can harness insights from intellectual history and bring them to bear upon political questions of relevance for the present. This research agenda aligned with the curation of the researcher’s communication skill set, within a higher education context in the form of work with students, within a broader education context through work with schools, and with the wider public.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
As Europe enters the third decade of the 21st Century, moderation is a concept in crisis. Extremism, radicalism and ideological conflict are judged to be in the ascendant, while the moderate middle of political landscapes in a range of European countries has been physically vacated and conceptually hollowed out. This project offers a contribution to the history of moderation as an idea, as a practice, and as a virtue. Modern understandings of moderation were established in the 18th Century, through the fusing of classical and Christian concepts in a new intellectual-religious and political-economic environment. VIA MEDIA ITALICA offers an intellectual historical study of the moderate strata on the Italian peninsula in the first half of the 18th Century, the early Enlightenment. The ambition is to establish moderation as a practice and as a virtue in three different contexts: political moderation; scholarly, or epistemic, moderation; and religious moderation. Each of these contexts will be explored through a networked set of case-studies, founded upon extensive archival research, and orientated around key texts, institutions and thinkers. These three contexts will also be elaborated through a study of Lodovico Antonio Muratori as a religious, scholarly and political thinker, and reinterpreted as a theorist of moderation. This project will offer: a ‘bottom-up’ reinterpretation of the intellectual culture of the Italian peninsula between 1700 and 1750; a new reading of the contributions of L.A. Muratori to the European Enlightenment; and an interrogation of the concept of moderation as a historical and contemporary idea and practice. This project plays an essential role in the researcher’s maturation into an international, independent and interdisciplinary historian of early modern Europe. It also supports his development into a public-facing scholar, through a range of training schemes and the realisation of an extensive programme of public-orientated events.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- UNIVERSITY OF NEWCASTLE UPON TYNE · Newcastle Upon TyneCoordinatorUnited Kingdom
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union