New Publication: The Playing God of the Middle Ages. A cultural-historical approach

PD Dr. Jörg Sonntag's monograph "Der spielende Gott des Mittelalters. Eine kulturhistorische Annäherung" has been published in the series "Mittelalter-Forschungen" by Thorbecke Verlag.

This study is the first to examine the equally complex and powerful motif of the playing god from a cultural-historical perspective for Latin-Christian Europe in the Middle Ages. Across time and space, it examines how and why God was also identified as a dancer, chess, card, dice or even tennis player and what implications resulted from this truly omnipresent playfulness for the lifeworlds of the Middle Ages. In doing so, the study not only reveals the playing god as a hub of internal social communication cycles, but also a generally deeply rooted code of European concepts of God, which allows the structures of medieval culture to be further deciphered in a new way through play.

The book at the publisher