«Reversed Migration»
The Walloon Settlers in Medieval Transylvania and their Cultural Identity (12th – 14th century)
PN-III-CEI-BIM-PBE-2020-0024
MIGRATION 1.0 Project Partners Partner Teams Activities and Objectives Outputs
The current mobility project (MIGRATION 1.0) represents a joint effort of TRANS.SCRIPT. The Centre for Diplomatic and Medieval Documentary Palaeography, a research unit of the Babeș-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca [=UBB], Romania, and H37 – History and Graphic Cultures /Histoire et cultures graphiques, a research group of the Catholic University of Louvain [Université catholique de Louvain = UCL], Belgium, working in close collaboration with the research centre Pratiques médiévales de l’écrit / Medieval Writing Practices at the University of Namur [Université de Namur = UNamur], Belgium (https://paths.unamur.be/pram).
The main objectives of TRANS.SCRIPT revolve around the triad: Teaching – Research – Cooperation, by providing an up-to-date approach to the study of the disciplines which support the unmediated analysis of written historical sources through the close collaboration with experts in the history of law, philology, historical geography, digital humanities, computer science etc. The main direction of investigation of this research unit focuses on the reconstruction of the “Cultural Identities in Medieval and Early Modern Transylvania”, a programme that had as previous targets the Hațeg region (mainly inhabited by Romanians) and the city of Cluj, home during the 13th-16th centuries, to a mixed, German and Hungarian, population. Under such circumstances, the current research proposal concerning the Walloon cultural identity in medieval Transylvania would make a welcome addition to the scholarly profile of TRANS.SCRIPT.
Since their creation in 2008 and 2017, the interdisciplinary research centres H37 – History and Graphic Cultures, and Medieval Writing Practices, comprising medievalists at the UNamur and the UCL, have developed a strong and recognised expertise in the wide-ranging field of medieval literacy and written artefacts. H 37 research group counts seven PhD students and post-doctoral fellows, while the PraME team currently comprises eight full-time permanent staff members and sixteen PhD students and post-doctoral fellows. The teams are accustomed to working together. Most of the researchers are trained historians. Their research deals with the entire medieval and early modern period (450-1550) and includes diverse themes (institutions, economy, culture, religion, etc.). Consequently, they specialize with broad spectrum of written source ranging from library books to administrative records.