Steuerung durch serielle Verfahrensabläufe. Eine historische Analyse der organisatorischen Praxis mittelalterlicher Orden
Project lead: Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Gert Melville
The project, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), seeks to answer the question of how the organisational operation of medieval orders worked in concrete terms. Orders required continuous control to ensure the best possible use of their spiritual and material resources and to prevent or compensate for disturbances, deviations or deficits. As a result, the supporting bodies of the orders (general chapter, visitatorship) continually made decisions on individual cases on the basis of the normative framework of statutory law and produced texts for documentation and archiving year after year.
The project will take up these serial texts on the basis of Cluniac, Cistercian and Dominican findings from the 12th and 13th centuries and subject them to a systematic examination for the first time. The project will use micro-historical methods to make the recorded events accessible. Since these are formalised procedures in which the main aim was to reduce complexity, one will come across a broad and diverse range of routine cases which can be recorded by cataloguing all the elements and by this the efficiency of control systems can be measured to integrate the individual or singular into ordering schemes. The cases beyond routine, which are nevertheless not rare, will, however, reveal the concrete performance limits of process technologies by analysing their remaining complexity. The spectrum of regulatory elements and co-ordinates thus determined can then be typologically recorded - also with the help of suggestions from governance research - in order to arrive at a reconstruction of those control mechanisms of the orders that were actually far ahead of their time in rational stringency and elaborate technology.
Contact
Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Gert Melville:
Phone: +49 (0) 351 4793 4181
Email: gert.melville(at)tu-dresden.de