Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Chair of Early Modern European History

Lavinia Gambini received the Humboldt Award for her Bachelor's thesis entitled „Heaven on their minds. Zur ‚vernünftigen‘ Epistemologie des Jenseitswissens in der Aufklärung“, in which she examined how Enlightenment thinkers attempted to gain 'uncertain' knowledge about the afterlife in a scientifically tested way. Based on the works of the Enlightenment scholars Thomas Burnet (1635-1715), William Whiston (1667-1752) and Charles Bonnet (1720-1793), the study reconstructs the methods and sources used in each case to obtain knowledge of the afterlife. Gambini shows that Burnet, Whiston and Bonnet were not 'on the fringes' of the Enlightenment, but belonged to an enlightened mainstream that wanted to make metaphysical knowledge generally accessible. Their preoccupation with the afterlife brought the three authors social prestige and involved them in the most prominent scientific discussions of their time. In the moderate Enlightenment, seeking afterlife knowledge was a consensual and plausible pursuit. (more)

Arndt Wille was awarded the special prize „Judentum und Antisemitismus“ for his master thesis  „Gefährdete Grenzen. Über Gestalt und Funktion von Ekel, Abscheu und Horror im christlich-antijudaistischen Diskurs im Alten Reich (1475–1550)“. Wille explores the function and context of motifs and statements within Christian-anti-Jewish discourse around 1500, which operated intensively with feelings of disgust, revulsion and horror and staged early modern Jews (more rarely also Jewish women) as detestable "others" within the Christian dominant society. These wholly fictional and demonising defamation narratives were closely tied to disturbing body images and, in particular, the transgression of skin boundaries. In the phantasmatic scenarios and narratives, the body and especially the skin became projection surfaces on which - so the leading thesis of the work - the fears and insecurities of the Christian dominant society, its fragile identities and ideas of order (for example in relation to the Lord's Supper and the doctrine of transubstantiation) could be negotiated and stabilised particularly effectively. On the one hand, Jewish communities were made into a negative mirror image of the Christian dominant society, but on the other hand, they also functioned as fantasised agents of an enjoyment that was tabooed for the Christian majority (sadism, cannibalism, blasphemy, etc.) and, furthermore, as witnesses of miraculous phenomena, they finally authenticated the religious convictions of Christianity. The work is also intended as a contribution to research into powerful (partly anti-Semitic) contemporary conspiracy narratives that aim to generate fears of body-invasive attacks. (more)