Women and the Feminine in Mediaeval and Early Modern Glagolitic Culture

 

Funded by: Croatian Science Foundation

Home institution: Old Church Slavonic Institute (Zagreb, Croatia)

Acronym: FEMIGLA

Research period: December 2024 – December 2027

 

The current status of women as an important indicator of societal progress is impossible to fully understand without first understanding its past. The Middle Ages are the earliest Croatian historical period. Throughout that period, the Glagolitic Culture had a major impact on Croatian history.

Croatian literacy in Glagolitic and Cyrillic script forms the essence of Glagolitic culture as the Croatian offshoot of the Cyrillo-Methodian heritage. Glagolitic script was more prestigious than Cyrillic script, especially in literary and liturgical practice. Croatian Glagolitic written culture has marked more than a millennium of Croatian history, but it played its most important role in the Middle Ages and early Modern era.

Research on women and the feminine in the corpus of mediaeval and early modern Glagolitic texts is the focus of the project. This includes linguistic, literary, liturgical, cultural-historical, and art-historical studies. In particular, the project will examine how women were spoken about in the grammatical, onomastic and onomasiological sense; women as main and supporting characters; marriage rites and marriage; women participating in the production and consumption of Glagolitic culture; and iconography of female figures on miniatures in Croatian Glagolitic books.

Women and the feminine have not yet been systematically researched in Glagolitic culture. The project will contribute to better knowledge of the women in pre-Modern Croatian history, as well as of Croatian Glagolitic culture, pre-Modern Croatian literature in general, the history of the Croatian language and books, the overall mediaeval Croatian history and the European context that conditioned it.