Call for Applications

ERC AGRELITA (2025)

Visiting Researchers

Project: The reception of ancient Greece in pre-modern French literature and illustrations of manuscripts and printed books (1320-1550): how invented memories shaped the identity of European communities

Due by 15 February 2025

Until now the reception history of ancient Greece in pre-modern Western Europe has focused almost exclusively on the transmission of Greek texts. Yet well before the revival of Greek teaching, numerous vernacular works, often illustrated, contained elaborate representations of ancient Greece. AGRELITA studies a large corpus of French language literary works (historical, fictional, poetic, didactic ones) produced from 1320 to the 1550s in France and Europe, before the first direct translations from Greek to French, as well as the images of their manuscripts and printed books. The AGRELITA project, “The reception of ancient Greece in pre-modern French literature and illustrations of manuscripts and printed books (1320-1550) : how invented memories shaped the identity of European communities”, directed by Catherine Gaullier-Bougassas, opens guest researchers residencies in 2025 in the University of Caen Normandy (France). Stays at the University of Caen Normandie may be 4 to 6 weeks length, and during the year 2025 may take place in May/June/early July.

This call for applications is open to anyone, of French or foreign nationality, who holds a PhD in literature, art history, or history, whose work focuses on the history of books, cultural and political history, visual studies, or memory studies, wherein the competence and project are deemed to be complementary to the ones of the AGRELITA team. These residencies indeed aim to open the reflections carried out by the team, to enhance its scientific activity through interactions with other scholars and other universities. The guest researchers will have the exceptional opportunity to contribute to a major project, to work with a dynamic team that conducts a wide range of activities at the University of Caen Normandie and within the research laboratory CRAHAM where many Antiquity, Medieval and Renaissance times specialists work, as well as to publish in a prestigious setting.

In 2025, the AGRELITA project will focus on these lines of research:
- “The new lives of Greek divinities (14th-16th centuries)”, “Images of Nature and beings in the reception of Greek myths (14th-16th centuries)”, “The political exploitations of Greek Antiquity (14th-16th centuries)”;

- A broader line of research: “Uses and exploitations of Antiquity memories, from the beginning of our era until the 21th century”.

For more information, please see: https://agrelita.hypotheses.org/5997