Veronika Wieser

Academic Interests

Recent Commons Activity

About

I am Postdoc researcher at the Institute for Medieval Research, Austrian Academy of Sciences and lecturer at the University of Vienna. I am a cultural historian of Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, with an emphasis on interdisciplinary, comparative research. – I was coordinator and project member of the SFB “Visions of Community. Comparative Approaches to Ethnicity, Region and Empire in Christianity, Islam and Buddhism (400-1600 CE)” from 2011 to 2019, and I am editorial board member of the journal “Medieval Worlds: Comparative and Interdisciplinary Studies”.

My research focuses on apocalyptic thought and topics of eschatology, on historiography and ascetic communities in the Late Roman Empire and the early medieval period, with particular interest on issues of religious and ethnic identity, notions of death and salvation, and medical history.

I have co-edited two interdisciplinary volumes on apocalypticism and eschatology (Cultures of Eschatology, 2020; Abendländische Apokalyptik. Zur Genealogie der Endzeit, 2013) and I am currently working on a book on eschatology in Late Antiquity.

Publications

A Community under the Shadow of the Endtime. Apocalyptic Discourse in Late Antique Historiography and Asceticism (forthcoming, De Gruyter 2022)

Publikationen (oeaw.ac.at)

Articles:

· ‘Introduction: Approaches to Medieval Cultures of Eschatology’, in Cultures of Eschatology, vol. 1: Authority and Empire in Medieval Christian, Islamic and Buddhist Communities, ed. Veronika Wieser, Vincent Eltschinger, Johann Heiss. Cultural History of Apocalyptic Thought 3/1, De Gruyter, 2020. pp. 1–22 (mit Vincent Eltschinger) Introduction: Approaches to Medieval Cultures of Eschatology (degruyter.com)

· ‘Reading the past into the present: constructing community, identity, and apocalyptic thought in the Chronicle of Sulpicius Severus’, in Historiographies of Identity, vol. 1: Ancient and Early Christian Narratives of Community, ed. Walter Pohl, Veronika Wieser. Brepols, Turnhout 2019. pp. 247-298 http://www.brepols.net/Pages/ShowProduct.aspx?prod_id=IS-9782503581576-1

· ‘The Chronicle of Hydatius: a historical guidebook to the last days of the western Roman Empire’, in Apocalypse and Reform from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages, ed. Matthew Gabriele, James Palmer. Routledge 2018. pp. 11–30 https://www.routledge.com/Apocalypse-and-Reform-from-Late-Antiquity-to-the-Middle-Ages/Gabriele-Palmer/p/book/9781138684041

· ʻYou Only Die Twice? Abbots between Community and Empire – The Cases of Martin of Tours and Benedict of Anianeʼ, (co-authored with Rutger Kramer), in: Hortus Artium Medievalum 23 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2017), pp. 579-589; DOI: 10.1484/J.HAM.5.113745 https://www.brepolsonline.net/doi/10.1484/J.HAM.5.113745?mobileUi=0

· ʻʻLike a safe tower on a steady rockˮ: Widows, wives and mothers in the ascetic elites of Late Antiquity’, in: Tabula 14. Themed Issue Past, Present, Future: Identity in Flux, ed. Robert Kurelić, Igor Duda (2017), pp. 4-21; UDK 316.66-055.2“652“ hrcak.srce.hr/177333

Collected volumes:

· Cultures of Eschatology, vol. 1: Authority and Empire in Medieval Christian, Islamic and Buddhist Communities, ed. mit Vincent Eltschinger, Johann Heiss. Cultural History of Apocalyptic Thought 3/1, De Gruyter, 2020. Cultures of Eschatology (degruyter.com)

· Cultures of Eschatology, vol. 2: Empire & Other Worlds in Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism, ed. mitVincent Eltschinger, Johann Heiss (Cultural History of Apocalyptic Thought 3/2, De Gruyter, 2020), Cultures of Eschatology (degruyter.com)

· Historiography and Identity, vol. 1:Ancient and Early Christian Narratives of Community, ed. with Walter Pohl. Brepols 2019 http://www.brepols.net/Pages/ShowProduct.aspx?prod_id=IS-9782503581576-1

· Abendländische Apokalyptik. Kompendium zur Genealogie der Endzeit, ed. mit Christian Zolles, Catherine Feik, Martin Zolles, Leopold Schlöndorff. Cultural History of Apocalyptic Thought 1, Berlin 2013. https://www.degruyter.com/viewbooktoc/product/224242

Blog Posts

Projects

I am currently project leader of the project Mapping Medieval Peoples: Visualizing Semantic Landscapes in Early Medieval Europe (2020-2022), which proposes a new approach to the studies of ethnic identity by visualizing the ‘mental maps’ and the semantic fields that emerge from the analysis of late antique and early medieval source material. Through methods provided by semantic network analysis and mapping, the project aims to reconstruct the ways in which peoples were perceived, relying on ethnic terminology, ethnonyms and perceptions of space, and thereby to elucidate how ethnic identifications helped to perceive the early medieval social world. This will emphasize that ethnic identity is shaped by a broad intellectual repertoire, which in turn is influenced by biblical models, antique geography and ethnography, as well as by intercultural contacts and long-distance migrations causing a shift in perceptions of the other and a reorganization of space.

Mapping Medieval Peoples works on three first levels: firstly, it provides a visual representation of the semantic field of ethnic terminology including ethnonyms, attributes, stereotypical traits and labels, as well as spatial terms, including abstract concepts like East or North, geographical descriptions and indicators of centre-periphery relations; secondly, it has a spatial dimension generating a visualization of the selected authors’ views of peoples and regions; and thirdly, it integrates the temporal perspective, showing how the perception of a specific people changed and varied over the course of time and from one historical context to the other. The visualization uses the database GENS: Group terminology and ethnic nomenclature: a semantic database, Latin Europe, 400–1200 as a starting point. The database offers a systematical analysis of group terminology and includes more than 4,200 passages derived from early medieval Latin works of varied genres. In the course of the project, the database will be relaunched with additional content and the visualization components as new features.

Mapping Medieval Peoples aims to contribute to a more differentiated perception of other peoples, ethnic attributions, mobility and migration, and it will help us understand a crucial period in the history of Europe and its implications for modern political and social discourse.

Mapping Medieval Peoples: Visualizing Semantic Landscapes in Early Medieval Europe (oeaw.ac.at).

Dr.

Institute for Medieval Research, Austrian Academy of Sciences