This is the website of the project Cuius Regio. An analysis of the cohesive and disruptive forces destining the attachment of groups of persons to and the cohesion within regions as a historical phenomenon.
This project is part of the EuroCORECODE programme of the European Science Foundation.
- qualifications and expertise of the principal supervisors/investigators The CRP-team consists of a central group of senior scholars, who all have ample experience in initiating and supervising PhD-projects, other research projects, both at a national and at an international level and in cooperative research. Most of them represent their craft in (inter)national scholarly boards. Next to them, a group of younger scholars is included, mainly coming from countries that in the more recent past joined the ESF (Estonia, Latvia, Rumania), representing fresh approaches and the promise of a quick academic rise in these countries. The composition of the group, and the ‘invention’ of the project has followed the lines of assembling bi- and multi-lateral scholarly contacts, leading to a joining hands of a substantial group of scholars. All members are qualified by their experiences with the studied regions and/or specific source material, and/or methodological issues.
Members of the team met several times during the process of preparation of this project at brain-storm-sessions. The members of the nuclear teams of the CRP, IPs and AP, taken together, number 22 persons, 10 of them specializing in medieval history, 8 in (early)modern history, 3 in archival studies and 1 in human geography. As such they offer the mix of capacities that is elementary for this project. For their individual track records see the CV, added as an attachment to this proposal. The individual teams already have developed valuable contacts with several highly qualified scholars from adjoining countries. They will be mentioned under the individual projects. For the Guelders project, these are several scholars from Germany, for the Portuguese project several scholars from Spain, for the Livonian project one scholar from Latvia, for the Transylvanian project two scholars from Hungary, for the Silesian project one scholar from Germany. For some of these scholars is already secured that they will be involved on an autonomous financial basis, others are still working on a financial support. They will in no way weigh upon the project’s budget. - position and justification of the IP’s and AP within the CRP The design of the project is such, that all IP’s and the AP are integrated parts of the central concept of the CRP. They may vary in such specific aspects as size, shape, languages, geography, economic dynamics, social and cultural composition, dynastic fate etc., that are either lacking in other IP’s, or also present in other IP’s, but in such a way that together they contribute to the intended longitudinal comparison.
The justification for the different regions is as follows:
The other associated partners, included in the proposal do not add new regions to the project, but aim to ‘repair’ the lack of formal commitments (Germany, Hungary, Spain) and to allow cooperation across borders. Therefore they are mentioned in the respective IP’s. The main instruments to enhance the integration of the IP’s an AP’s in the CRP are, as demonstrated in section A.1., the methodological approach with the application of the key-elements and benchmark-periods, and the integrative workshops. Collaboration will bear fruit in the production of analyses using the same conceptual framework and the same questionnaire for all regions.
There will be a close cooperation between all teams to develop and operationalize the analytical toolkit, in close discussion with invited specialists from the fields of regional and cultural geography, regional studies, etc. Regular workshops for all teams, with sessions organized along the thematic backbones, will help to work out the topics and to compare preliminary results.
When indicated by methodological discussions and by the results, during the whole project, it is the aim of the project to involve colleagues from non-sponsored countries and/or institutions - both (regional) historians and sociologists, ethnographers, anthropologists, literary historians etc.
- as (invited or paying) participants to the workshops and conference, and to include them in the separate activities per IP/AP in order to generate synergetic power. This should lead to the creation of a substantial group of scholars that after the closing of the project may contribute to the dissemination of the methodological discussions and the analytical results among historians and scholars of other disciplines. The Department for Border Region Studies at the University of Southern Denmark, and the Urban and Regional Research Centre Utrecht at the University of Utrecht (Netherlands) will take the lead in refining the theoretical approaches.
- the management of the CRP The CRP because of its size needs a clear and effective management-structure. In this management-structure responsibility (financial and scholarly) and communication are the key words. Although the EUROCORECODE-program as such will be coordinated in Strassbourg, the CUIUS REGIO-project will need an internal coordinator as well. It seems logical to entrust the internal coordination to the coordinator of the application – prof.dr. Dick E.H. de Boer – and to reserve part of the budget to the necessary practical support, next to the sums reserved for the administration per project.
The CRP-coordinator reports annually to the ESF about the progress of the project, based upon reports presented by IP/AP-coordinators. In a bottom-up structure one supervisor per IP shall be appointed as the responsible coordinator for this IP. He or she controls the payments made out of the granted IP-budget, of which the financial administration will be entrusted to the financial department of his/her home-institution (University). This IP-coordinator is the main responsible person for the selection of the scholar(s) that will be appointed for research-position(s), or will be selected to spend part of their formal research-time to the project.
The IP-coordinator communicates the choice of the scholars, and the practical and scholarly decisions taken during the operationalization of the IP with the other IP-coordinators. As the AP finances are not included in the budget, the AP-coordinator formally is not required to report on financial affairs, however in cases of common investments (in the organization of workshop, building and maintaining the website etc.) he has to respond to the IP-coordinators as well. In the practical and scholarly sense his role of is the same as of the IP-coordinators. The IP-coordinators, together with the AP-coordinator form the board of the project, consisting of 8 members and chaired by the CRP-coordinator. This board meets in conjunction with the workshops and conference, i.e. in month 1, 12, 20, 28 and 36; and in order to safeguard the start and initial progress also in months 3 and 6. Next to this the IP-teams and the CRP may choose to present the project and its components to international fora, like the European Social Science History Conference, the International Medieval Conference in Leeds, the annual CARMEN-meeting. If so, meetings of the board may be connected to these presentations.
To reduce time- and money-consuming travelling, the website, which shall be built to serve the CRP (see A.1.d) shall be used as well as a means of communication both between all scholars, and between the members of the board, to exchange data and opinions. For the total budget this means that part of the travelling budget shall be commuted into a budget for web-building and web-mastering. As the Dutch team coordinates the project, a general support-function is included in that sub-project, to be located at the Gelders Archief.
The project aims at a synthesizing historical analysis of a substantial group of seven regions representing a morphological, typological and historical variety of territorial entities, spread over Europe, and allowing comparison of the cohesive and disruptive dynamics of regions over a period of about seven centuries in a ‘Braudel-ian’ way. It follows essentially the development of the regions from the moment when primary sources in such a way increase in number and variety that they allow the analysis of the process of regional clustering (roughly the 12th century), through its maturing and its interaction with the (mainly) supra-regional state, until the end of the Ancien Régime.
As the CRP and its IPs/AP have the medieval and early modern period as a central focussing point, the composition of the team of principal investigators mainly of medievalists and early modernists is a central and essential strength of the project. These medievalists and early modernists, as specialists of the pre- and proto-national phase of European history, are used to apply modern notions and methods derived from social sciences to their periods, and to bridge the gap to modern times. Their ambition is thus to combine thorough historical research with theoretical insights about regional formation processes. Exactly this aspect is one of the main innovative elements focussing the project. The application of a common same set of parameters will enhance this comparative approach, and facilitate to determine the relative importance of the different factors involved in regional cohesion and identification processes. At the end of the project, when the fundamental study of this long period has offered a new understanding of regional articulation and dynamism in interaction with the larger dynastic and political power-blocks, the project aims to evaluate these results by confronting them with the ways in which over the last two centuries – roughly between the Congress of Vienna (1815) and the fall of the Berlin Wall – regions obtained new meaning. A particularly interesting aspect of this confrontation is the role of historically deeply rooted regional formations – especially in the cultural sense and often neglected in the modern state formation process – in post-1815 (inter-) national and regional development. In the evaluation, existing studies will be used, and the discussion with contemporary historians will be stimulated. Next to this it is our ambition to involve policy-makers and scholars from the social sciences in a discussion about the consequences of the new understanding of regional cohesion as a historical phenomenon for heritage-policy, regional revivalism, and analysis of multi-layered territorial identities in Europe. In the field of the historical disciplines, the project aims to develop a paradigm for the historical analysis of regions as territorial entities to which people attach, to which they attribute and from which they derive their identities. Especially the careful choice of regions with different sizes, geophysical characteristics, cultural and ethnic composition, dynastic and political fate etc. is instrumental in developing a theoretical and methodological toolkit that may enhance the maturing of regional history (as an interdisciplinary craft) from an evenemential to a more analytic level. Especially new insights will be gained into the factors that allowed regions to grow and cluster, to build and preserve cohesion and the factors that prevented them from falling apart, or made them fall apart. In short, a theory for ‘regio-genesis’ may sprout out of the project.