« Projet HUMANITER (Humanisme méditerranéen) »

The “Mediterranean Humanism” Project intends to revisit the overly Eurocentric vision of historical “humanism”, i.e. a period from the 14th to the 16th century, by linking it to the “Mediterranean” as a geographical and cultural reality.

For this, it aims to study first, according to a disciplinary span which includes history, letters, philosophy, art history, language, anthropology, but does not exclude escapes towards geography, medicine or even law, the cultural situation at the time in each of the European countries of the member universities of the Network as it currently stands: France (Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès), Italy (Università Federico II Napoli, Università degli Studi di Salerno), Spain (Universitat de les Illes Balears Palma), Portugal (Universitade de Coimbra), and, outside Europe, Tunisia (University of Manouba Tunis).

It then aims to emphasize the cultural and intellectual crossovers that took place in the period under consideration between East and West, South and North of the Mediterranean basin, i.e. the presence of Greco-Byzantine, Jewish and Arab heritage in Western countries, or else, conversely, the European mark observable in Byzantium and in the Ottoman Empire.

Finally, it aims to feed the reflections, initiated since the appearance of the term in the 19th century, on “humanism” and its derivatives, in the figures and issues that these latter could take beyond the period concerned.