Kategorija: Sodelujoči

The Homeric Changes to the Traditional Image of Odysseus

Comparative studies allow us to reconstruct Odysseus’ image and the role in the oral pre-Homeric tradition. He is not a protagonist of the epic there but, representing the trickster type, rather the antagonist of the hero-protagonist. Both polarized characters represent two types of behavior assessed by the audience in terms of their usefulness for the survival of the community. In his readiness for sacrifice, the hero displays an altruistic attitude, positively valorized as moral behavior. The trickster’s egoistic behavior moves away from moral principles, but it can also ultimately bring benefit to the whole community. Similarly to the behavior of the trickster-antagonist, that of the hero-protagonist is also ambivalent, as it can likewise bring harm to the community, which – though temporary – often takes on the dimension of a disaster. Odysseus’ similarities to the god Hephaestus have been recognized previously by some scholars, and they do not seem to be coincidental: both characters reveal traits of crafty and dangerous dwarves, who are also excellent craftsmen and have magic at their disposal. The author(s) of the Odyssey and, to some extent, also of the Iliad reconfigure and transform this traditional character in a manner typical of oral tradition, which has always been open to reinterpretation.

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Karol Zieliński is a classical philologist and professor at the Institute of Classical, Mediterranean and Oriental Studies at the University of Wrocław, Poland. He is the head of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on the Relationship between Oral and Written Culture and editor-in-chief of Quaestiones Oralitatis, a journal that deals with the issues of orality and its relationships with literature. He specialises in Greek literature of the archaic period, especially with a view to its links with oral tradition. His publications include monographs: Słońce w rozpaczy. Liryka miłosna Safony w aspekcie oralności (The Sun in Despair: Sappho’ s Love Lyric Poetry in the Aspect of Orality, 2006), Worldview in Narrative and Non-narrative Expression: The Cognitive, Anthropological, and Literary Perspective (2021, co-editor) and The Iliad and the Oral Epic Tradition (2023).

E-mail: karol.zielinski@uwr.edu.pl

The Hagiography and Hagiographers as the Precursor of the Cultural-Historical Value of the Sanctity’s Virtue

The present paper aims to re-evaluate the prosopographical research in the field of medieval hagiography, with particular reference to the nomenclature and identities of the hagiographers themselves. These writers, translators, and transmitters of saints’ lives functioned as a transregional community of textual agents whose shared philological, theological, and manuscript practices had a significant impact on medieval (biographical) cultural-historical consciousness. Rather than treating hagiography as merely devotional, the study argues that it constituted the central intellectual and cultural matrix from which medieval life writing emerged across the Latin West and the Orthodox East.

Approaching hagiography as a mode of culturally embedded textual production, the paper examines the vita as a narrative facility where language, theology, and cultural memory converge. The characteristic lexicon of sanctity was grounded in biblical intertextuality and patristic conceptualisations, while the creative differentiation (partly formalised) of virtues (intra-lingually and paraphrasically) shaped the content of the hagiographical genre. In the absence of copyright legislation and the concept of exclusive ownership of written compositions, unacknowledged citations, borrowings and copying of patristic authorities constituted a significant element of hagiographic rhetoric and style. In this context it is important to not discard the metaphrasis (not only in Metaphrastic hagiography of 9th century) as the (Byzantine) concept of rewriting and its meaning for the new chapter of the textual (and in-tangibly material) transformation. Self-authorship remains largely submerged yet is discretely enhanced through the individual response to the challenges of the (one’s, divine) destiny and the ultimate (ascetic height) goal of (spiritual) production.

Methodologically, the paper adopts a prosopographical lens to reconstruct hagiographers as historically situated actors embedded in networks of monastic culture, translation, and intellectual exchange. The transmission of vitae – from Greek into Latin, from Byzantine Greek into Old Church Slavonic, and within multilingual monastic environments – formed a sub-European textual network in which hagiographers functioned as theologians, philologists, and cultural mediators; St Maximus the Greek (1469–1555/6) exemplifies this composite role, demonstrating how individual agents navigated and unified multiple cultural and intellectual traditions while preserving and rearticulating hagiographical content in the evocating metamorphic treats, rearticulated across languages.

By analysing shared narrative strategies (such as expressed humility, the vocabulary of humbleness, the encyclopedia of miracles, and intertextual layering of creating the ascetic path) juxtaposed by cultural-historical examination of the reviewed terms, the functioning of the (im-personal) names (cf. Keats-Rohan 2007: 151, 155) in the relation to the differentiated sense of impersonal identity, but with the attention on the written records and their precise reference (as the primary anthroponymic function of the names), the study shows how hagiographical techniques became uncatalogued foundational for medieval biography and continued to shape early modern conceptions of holiness and personal identity/personhood.

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Neža Zajc’s research specialisation is centred on the phenomenon of St Maximus the Greek (1469–1555/6), to the legacy of whom she has been devoting her research for the past twenty years. Furthermore, the scope of her specific research extends to the subsequent historical moments of the periods that are traditionally considered as well-known.

E-mail: neza.zajc@zrc-sazu.si

Prosopography and Fiction: Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg, 1924)

Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain (1924), a renowned work of world literature, self-identifies as a “Zeitroman”, a portrait of an era. By narrating all aspects of everyday life at a sanatorium for pulmonary diseases frequented by middle-class patients in the Swiss Alps within a precise timeframe (from 1907 to 1914), the text identifies this bourgeois microcosm as a bygone and thus historical phenomenon obliterated by First World War. In doing so, The Magic Mountain reconstructs the “collective biography” of this social class (Broady, 13; Verboeven, Carlier, Dumolyn, 39) and thus opens itself to an approach through prosopography.

This paper proposes an experiment in interdisciplinary analysis and methodology situated between historical research and literary interpretation: it will examine The Magic Mountain in a prosopographic vein and reflect on the interdisciplinary benefits of this approach. I will analyze a set of significant textual elements that correspond to the parameters of a prosopography, such as the novel’s historically accurate geographical and chronological settings or its design of the main protagonist as an “individual type” in Max Weber’s and a “constructed individual” in Pierre Bourdieu’s senses, i.e., as an average figuration of late 19th-century middle-class characteristics. I will further discuss how the biographies and onomastics of several characters are woven together with historical information about the era’s material culture, medicine, and popular culture. The result of this investigation will reveal the novel as a sociography of the international capitalist bourgeoisie and its internal, social and ethnic divisions and power struggles in the economic context of their lifestyle.

This analysis regards itself as a case study on the usefulness of modern fictions with realistic ambitions such as The Magic Mountain for prosopography in particular and historical research more generally. When literary authors might consciously or unconsciously use methods close to or of prosopography to compose the subject matter of their fictions, their novels become documents fit for historical examination; but the literary qualities of their narratives offer additional advantages,  especially helping to avoid two pitfalls of prosopography: One, according to Weber, is the trap of “objectivity” – of mistaking scientific concepts for everyday-life ones; another, according to Bourdieu, is a lack of reflection on how power struggles within a social field continuously shape this field. Obviously and unmistakably “fictional”, literary texts leave no doubt that their mode of language use is located somewhere between empirical reality and imagination. But precisely this creative language also connects directly to emotional and psychological truths (rather than reporting about them), thus illuminating how human tensions and conflicts, not only empirical factors, shape socio-historical phenomena.

Ultimately, The Magic Mountain’s prosopographic analysis offers an instructive example for the mutual benefits of interdisciplinary cooperation between prosopography and literary research, benefits that reach beyond the unquestionably valuable cataloguing of fictional characters (cf. Soldevilla et al.) into forays into the immaterial depths of fictionalized social worlds with benefits for historical understanding.

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Dr. Alina Dana Weber is an Associate Professor of German at Florida State University (FSU) and serves as the Chair of the International Society for Cultural History. She is the author of the ethnographic and cultural-historical study Blood Brothers and Peace Pipes (2019) and the editor of two essay volumes. Weber has published in Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift, German Studies Review, Seminar, and elsewhere. She has won several fellowships and awards and is currently working on new cultural-historical contextualizations of two German texts of world literature, E. T. A. Hoffmann’s novella Nutcracker and Mouse King (1816) and Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain (1924).

E-mail: aweber@fsu.edu

Institutional Memory and Social Networks in the Benedictine Cartulary of St Nicholas of Oltra (1072–1569)

The Cathastico de scritture de S. Niccolo d’Ultra Diocesi Justinopolitana (1072–1569), preserved in the Central Library of Koper, represents the only known surviving cartulary of the Benedictine monastery of St Nicholas of Oltra near Capodistria/Koper. Although compiled in the late sixteenth century, the manuscript preserves copies, summaries, and references to documents dating from 1072 onwards. The source contains records of donations, leases, purchases, exchanges, testaments, legal disputes, exemptions, papal privileges, and economic transactions connected to the monastery and its landed possessions across northern Istria. Despite its exceptional historical value, the manuscript has remained largely unexplored within both Slovenian and broader Adriatic historiography.

This paper approaches the Cathastico as both an instrument of institutional memory and a prosopographical source for reconstructing social and economic networks in medieval and early modern Istria. Particular attention is devoted to the recurring appearance of noble families, clerics, notaries, tenants, benefactors, and communal officials whose interactions reveal long-term continuities in landholding, patronage, and monastic administration. Through the analysis of personal names, legal formulas, property relations, and documentary patterns, the paper examines how the monastery functioned as a nodal institution connecting the urban elite of Capodistria with its agrarian hinterland and with wider ecclesiastical and political structures linked to the Patriarchate of Aquileia, the Holy Roman Empire, and later the Venetian Republic.

The contribution further explores the methodological value of cartularies as prosopographical corpora. Although the Cathastico was primarily intended to preserve legal memory and property rights, its structure simultaneously produced a layered record of collective identities and institutional relationships extending across several centuries. The repeated preservation of certain names, places, and legal relations demonstrates how monastic communities constructed continuity and authority through documentary practice. In this sense, the manuscript provides important insight into the mechanisms of institutional self-representation, the preservation of social authority, and the transformation of regional networks between the High Middle Ages and the early modern period.

Finally, the paper reflects on the broader interdisciplinary potential of the source, particularly for future prosopographical and digital-humanities approaches, including relational databases, spatial mapping, and network analysis of historical actors and places within the northern Adriatic region.

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Peter Štoka is a graduate theologian, Master of Theology, and a doctoral student in Humanities at the University of Primorska, where he researches the Benedictine cartulary of the monastery of St Nicholas of Oltra (1072–1569). He is Head of the Department for Local History and Book Heritage at the Central Library of Koper and co-editor, together with Gregor Pobežin, of the scholarly series Bibliotheca Iustinopolitana. He co-organises the international symposium Divina: Days of Andreas Divus of Justinopolis and edits the series Rara Iustinopolitana, dedicated to editions of Koper humanists and Neo-Latin authors from the northern Adriatic region.

E-mail: stokapeter@gmail.com

Edvard Kocbek and the Magazine Esprit: Anatomy of an Encounter

Edvard Kocbek (1904–1981) was a distinguished poet, storyteller, essayist, diarist, translator, and politician. He is well-known for his views on Christian socialism and the active role he played in the Slovenian Liberation Front (Osvobodilna fronta, OF) during the Second World War, as well as in post-war, socialist Yugoslavia. Kocbek was also at the centre of political controversies when, in the late 1930s, he came into conflict with the leading Catholic circles in Slovenia, as well as in the early 1950s, when he fell out of favor with the Yugoslav communists. At the root of these disputes were some of the key issues of his intellectual biography, as well as the fact that in the actions of this left-wing Catholic, one can also discern elements of existentialist poetics, rooted in a philosophy of freedom and responsibility, authentic life and constant rebellion, which shaped the intricate interplay between this intellectual’s engagement with politics, literature, and history. In this regard, Kocbek’s connection with the French intellectual scene, which nevertheless played a formative role in his development, has remained insufficiently explored.

The aim of my presentation is to use a prosopographical approach to examine a kind of collective portrait of the intellectual group surrounding the French magazine Esprit, and, in particular, Edvard Kocbek’s place within it. What influenced the young Slovenian poet to associate himself with this influential publication and to remain loyal to it throughout his life? How does his intellectual biography appear to us in light of this “French connection”, and how was he and his work perceived by his French contemporaries? On what foundations did the enduring relationship between Christian existentialism, personalism, and socialism rest? How did these decades-long contacts and cultural exchanges shape Kocbek’s political fate, as well as his literary and intellectual work?

This paper is based on extensive source material, including Kocbek’s diaries and articles, beginning with his stay in France and the founding of the magazine in 1932, continuing through his first personal contacts with the group in 1937, and then the wartime and post-war correspondence he maintained with Emmanuel Mounier, Jean-Marie Domenach, Albert Béguin, Pierre Emmanuel, Pierre-Aimé Touchard, and others. The materials are preserved as part of Kocbek’s personal papers at the National and University Library in Ljubljana, as well as in the archives of the journal Esprit and those of its principal protagonists at the Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine (Abbaye d’Ardenne) near Caen, France.

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Veljko Stanić is historian and translator from Belgrade. He studied history at the University of Belgrade and then pursued a Ph.D. thesis on French-Yugoslav cultural relations in the interwar period at Sorbonne University (Paris IV). His fields of interest are cultural and intellectual history of the Balkans in the 19th and 20th century, French-Yugoslav relations, dissident movement in communist Yugoslavia including figures such as Milovan Djilas and Edvard Kocbek, and also women’s intellectual history.

E-mail: veljko.stanic1984@gmail.com

Bridging Prosopographical Research Through Pragmatic Digital Integration – The Prosopographical Research Platform Austria (PFP)

The Prosopographical Research Platform Austria (PFP) offers a novel, non-invasive approach to integrating heterogeneous prosopographical datasets without requiring projects to abandon their existing tools or data models. PFP addresses a core challenge in digital prosopography: how to connect dispersed, often incompatible datasets while preserving their autonomy, provenance, and scholarly value. Rather than imposing a monolithic system, PFP embraces a pragmatic, modular architecture that harmonizes data through open standards – particularly CIDOC CRM, RDF, and SHACL – while leaving source datasets untouched in their original formats.

At its heart, PFP functions as a knowledge graph that aggregates and links entities across projects. Each dataset is stored in a versioned, named graph, ensuring traceability and non-destructive updates. A provenance layer records the origin of every statement, while a consolidation layer resolves the problem of duplicate entities (e.g., the same historical person described in multiple datasets under different identifiers). Using “owl:sameAs” relations and shared authority files (such as GND identifiers), PFP generates unified UUIDs for entities, allowing the platform to expose a single, aggregated view of an entity while retaining links to the original records. For example, the writer Arthur Schnitzler appears in both the Österreichisches Biographisches Lexikon (ÖBL) and Personen der Moderne (PMB) datasets; PFP recognizes these as the same individual and merges their data into a single, queryable entity.

The platform’s technical design reflects lessons learned from prior digital humanities projects (most notably InTaVia: https://intavia.eu): (1) reuse established tools (e.g., GitLab for versioning, Prefect for ETL workflows), (2) validate rigorously (via SHACL shapes to enforce data consistency), and (3) minimize disruption to running systems. The only custom component, RDFProxy, bridges the gap between the SPARQL endpoint and user-friendly interfaces by mapping query results to structured, nested data models. This modular design allows for independent component replacement while supporting key standards: RDF for the database backend and JSON APIs for the frontend.

PFP is still heavily under development, but nonetheless already integrates data from 11 datasets created at the Austrian Academy of Sciences (OeAW). The data is accessible via GIT (https://gitlab.oeaw.ac.at/acdh-ch/pfp/pfp-source-data), SPARQL (https://qlever-ui.acdh-dev.oeaw.ac.at/pfp), and a beta version of the API (https://pfp-api.acdh-dev.oeaw.ac.at/docs). The PFP knowledge graph currently contains well over 140,000 person proxies, about 12,000 institution proxies, and nearly 60,000 place proxies.

The presentation will give a brief overview of the technical setup and focus on application in humanities research and future development.

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Matthias Schlögl is a lead research software engineer at the ACDH. He has more than 10 years of experience in using and developing digital tools for social sciences and humanities research. He received a diploma in International Development from the University of Vienna and worked at various national and international institutions, including the University of Bath and the Berlin Social Science Center, before joining the ACDH in 2015. At the ACDH he is currently coordinating the Prosopography and Networks team within the research unit DH Research & Infrastructure.

E-mail: matthias.schloegl@oeaw.ac.at

“Acerrimus belli concitator”: A Prosopographical Study of Antonius Primus’ Military Network in 69 AD

The paper aims to conduct a prosopographical study of a group of military and political actors who emerged during the events of 69 AD, the time of the so-called Year of the Four Emperors. Through a prosopographical analysis of the political and military figures associated with Marcus Antonius Primus, the legionary legate of the Seventh Galbian legion, the paper examines the formation, composition and development of his military network. Antonius Primus, whom Tacitus famously characterized as the most ardent instigator of war (acerrimus belli concitator), played a decisive role in securing the Flavian victory during the civil wars of 69 AD. The origins of Antonius Primus’ network may be traced to the military council held at Poetovio in August 69 AD, where support for Vespasian’s cause was consolidated among the Danubian legions. The paper follows the subsequent evolution of his military network throughout the Flavian offensive in Italy, led by military forces from the Danubian and Balkan provinces, culminating in Primus’ capture of Rome and the death of Vitellius in December 69 AD. Particular attention is devoted to the commanders and military officers who formed Primus’ circle of associates and accompanied him on the march towards Rome. By reconstructing their careers, roles in the campaign, and connections with Primus, the study traces the development of the military network that emerged around him during the Flavian campaign. By reconstructing Primus’ military network, the paper aims to explore how personal and military relationships facilitated the concentration of military authority in the hands of Antonius Primus – a senator whose career had previously been marked by political setbacks and who was later able to emerge as the leading military commander of the Flavian war effort in Italy. Through a prosopographical examination of the key military actors involved in the campaign and their connections with Primus, the study seeks to provide a clearer understanding of the dynamics that shaped the Flavian offensive, its course, its outcome, and its contribution to Vespasian’s accession to power. More broadly, it aims to contribute to a nuanced understanding of military leadership, personal networks, and the exercise of power during one of the most turbulent periods of Roman imperial history.

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Rok Ribič is an MA student of History and Classical Philology at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana. His research focuses on the political and military history of the early Roman imperial period, with particular emphasis on the provinces of Pannonia, Dalmatia, and Noricum. He is currently completing two master’s theses: the first examines the role of military units from the wider Illyrian region during the civil wars of 68–70 AD, while the second employs a prosopographical approach to investigate political and military networks in 68–69 AD. His broader research interests include Roman imperial prosopography, and ancient historiography, particularly the works of Tacitus.

E-mail: rok.ribic050@gmail.com

Friends or Foes? Spain and the American Revolution

In recent years, the key role of Spain in the American Revolution, and more specifically the crucial support the Spanish Empire provided throughout the events, starting as early as 1775, has received increasing attention in academia and society. In both Spain and the United States, this interest has led to a series of publications, conferences, lectures, and exhibitions that have brought these topics to a broader audience. This effort has been necessary to correct the long-standing silencing of the various ways Spain supported the Patriots and to explain its motives for doing so.

The reasons for the creation of a narrative that, for much of the time since the American Revolution, has focused solely on France’s support are obvious: a considerable part of Spain’s crucial aid was sent through secret channels, so it received less public awareness and credit; the post-war rivalry between Spain and the United States contributed significantly to an intentional “downplaying” of Spain’s role during the Revolution; and from the beginning, the very idea of receiving support from the Spanish Empire, with its strongly Catholic orientation, was not well received by all patriots. A combination of persisting historical prejudices, negative stereotypes, and biases against Spain’s colonial empire, along with general resentments against Catholicism, were important factors in this context.

This lecture uses the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence as an ideal platform to address this historical inaccuracy and shed light on Spain’s role in the American Revolution from a global perspective (1775-1883). It does so by using a prosopographical approach, given that Spanish involvement in the War was not simply a matter of state policy but rather a network of individuals – ministers, diplomats, military officers, merchants, financiers, governors, administrators, translators, intermediaries, and intellectuals – who connected Spain with the Viceroyalty of New Spain, particularly Cuba and Louisiana, with France and the emerging United States.

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Sandra Rebok is a historian and cultural scientist specializing in 18th- and 19th-century intellectual networks and transnational cooperation, imperial expansion and exploration voyages, with a particular focus on the connection between the Spanish Empire and the U.S. nation-building process. She has spent 16 years at the Spanish National Research Council, worked for the German Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations, and served as a 3-year Marie Curie Fellow at the Huntington Library, awarded by the European Commission. She is currently a Senior Fellow at the Center for US-Mexican Studies within the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California, San Diego, and a Research Associate in the History Department at the University of San Diego. Dr. Rebok has over twenty years of scholarship on Alexander von Humboldt, Thomas Jefferson, and other leading minds of the Enlightenment. Through her two current book projects, which analyze Jefferson’s strategic pursuits in the Spanish and Mexican Southwest and the role of the Viceroyalty of New Spain in the American Revolution, she continues her research in global and interconnected history.

E-mail: sarebok@gmx.net

Scipio’s Cronies: A Prosopographical Attempt at (Re-)Constructing the Numantine Connection

The Jugurthine War (112–105 BC) presented Rome with a surprisingly persistent military and political problem. What might have been expected to constitute a relatively short campaign against the Numidian king instead lasted six years, saw a succession of Roman commanders, and became closely associated in the Roman historical tradition with corruption, aristocratic competition, and the growing political tensions of the late Republic. The obvious question is: how did Jugurtha do it? How did he manage to hold out against Rome for so long? This paper approaches the problem from a somewhat different direction; through the personal connections he may have established during his earlier service with the Roman army in Spain.

Before becoming Rome’s enemy, Jugurtha had fought alongside Roman troops at the siege of Numantia in 134–133 BC, commanding a contingent of Numidian cavalry in the army of Scipio Aemilianus. The Numantine campaign was itself an important point of convergence for a generation of Romans who would subsequently and – given their lineage – inevitably play prominent roles in the political and military history of the Republic. Among those connected with the Celtiberian and Numantine wars were Tiberius Gracchus, Gaius Marius, members of the Metelli, and Scipio Aemilianus and his wider political circle. Jugurtha’s participation therefore placed the future Numidian king within a particularly significant Roman military and aristocratic environment. But these prominent names are only the most visible part of a much larger group of men whose careers and connections are considerably more difficult to trace.

Taking this shared Spanish experience as its starting point, the paper offers a prosopographic schizzo of the individuals and networks (possibly) surrounding the Numantine and Jugurthine wars. It asks whether Jugurtha’s later dealings with Roman commanders, senators, envoys, and political intermediaries can be better understood by reconstructing connections originating during the Spanish campaigns. Particular attention is paid to the less conspicuous figures who appear at the margins of our sources, but who may have provided precisely the sort of personal connections through which Jugurtha could navigate Roman political and military circles.

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Gregor Pobežin is Associate Professor and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Cultural History, ZRC SAZU, which he has headed since 2017, and at the Faculty of Humanities, University of Primorska. His principal research interests include Greek and Roman historiography, particularly Sallust, ancient history, classical philology, narratology and the use of sources by ancient historians. His research also extends to the reception of classical culture, Neo-Latin historiography and literature, epigraphy, and the intellectual and cultural history of the northern Adriatic and Slovenian historical space. He is the author and co-author of several monographs and numerous scholarly articles, as well as translations and critical editions of Greek and Latin texts.

Since 2023 he has headed the ZRC SAZU research programme (New) Cultural History of Intellectual Heritage: The Slovenian Historical Space in a European Context (P6-0440). At the University of Primorska he coordinates the humanities component of AID HCH – Advancement in the Development of Humanities and Cultural Heritage through Artificial Intelligence (J7-60128). He is also the initiator and organiser of Divina – Days of Andreas Divus of Justinopolis, an annual international symposium devoted to Neo-Latin culture and the classical tradition.

E-mail: gregor.pobezin@zrc-sazu.si

Mapping the Networks of the Counts of Cilli: A Prosopographical Approach

The Free Lords of Sanneck (Žovneški), who were elevated to counts in 1341 and acquired the title of princes in 1436, rose meteorically within just one hundred years to become one of the leading, most influential, and elite noble dynasties of the late Middle Ages in Central Europe and, to some extent, beyond. Through diplomacy and an exceptionally well-conceived marriage policy, they established a powerful and carefully structured social network that extended across Europe, from the courts of the Iberian Peninsula in the west to Poland, Lithuania, and Prussia in the north, from Dubrovnik in the south to the Ottoman court in the east. The family achieved great success in 1405 with the marriage of Barbara of Celje to Sigismund of Luxembourg, who, at the height of his political career, was King of Hungary, King of Germany, King of Bohemia, and later Holy Roman Emperor. However, this was not their only triumph. Barbara and Sigismund’s daughter, Elizabeth, married Albert II of Habsburg, King of Hungary, Bohemia, and Germany, thus becoming Queen of Hungary, Bohemia, and Germany herself. In the 15th century, the Celje family was also linked by marriage to the Polish Jagiellonian rulers, the Hungarian palatines, the leading Croatian noble dynasty of the Frankopans, the Bavarian Dukes of Wittelsbach, the Silesian Princes of Teschen-Glogau, the Saxon House of Wettin, the Serbian despots of the Branković family, the Hungarian barons of the Hunyadi family, and even the Ottoman court, as the sister-in-law of the last Count of Celje was the sultan’s wife. Despite their remarkable rise and influence on contemporary European politics, their artistic heritage has never been systematically studied, nor has the potential of prosopographical research been fully exploited for the interpretation and understanding of their artistic commissions. This paper therefore presents an approach to investigating the social network of the Counts of Celje and assessing its influence on their decisions regarding artistic patronage and the conception of their commissions.

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Mija Oter Gorenčič is Head of the France Stele Institute of Art History at ZRC SAZU and Chair of the ZRC SAZU Scientific Council. Her research focuses on medieval art, particularly medieval iconography, monastic art and artistic patronage by medieval noble families. She is also Associate Professor at the Department of Art History, University of Maribor. She has led five national research projects and one bilateral Slovenia–Austria project. Among several awards and scholarships, she received the Joint Excellence in Science and Humanities scholarship from the Austrian Academy of Sciences. She is currently leading the research project Artistic Heritage of the Counts of Celje.

E-mail: mija.oter@zrc-sazu.si