Anne Huijbers
anne.huijbers@unifr.ch
https://orcid.org/0009-0004-6386-2094
Medieval history
- the Holy Roman Empire, especially the relationship with Italy and Rome in the late Middle Ages
- symbolic communication and rituals, especially the imperial coronations in Rome
- historiography and chronicles in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance - influence of humanism
- Religious orders, especially the Order of Preachers and the observant movements of the late Middle Ages
Senior Researcher
Department of History
Av. de Rome 2
1700 Fribourg
Biography
Anne Huijbers is a Dutch medievalist with a special interest in the "supranational" dynamics of the medieval past and in the different instruments used to create collective identities that transcended linguistic and cultural barriers. Whereas her doctoral research showed how religious orders used narratives to create (reformed) identities in late medieval and early modern Europe, her postdoctoral work has focused on the impact of empire in late medieval and Renaissance Italy and on the (unifying) functions of political rituals in Western Europe.
She studied History at the University of Groningen and the Paris-Sorbonne University, and Medieval Studies at the University of Leeds. She wrote her dissertation at Radboud University Nijmegen within the research project Religious Orders and Religious Identity Formation in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Her first monograph Zealots for Souls: Dominican Narratives of Self-Understanding during Observant Reforms, c. 1388-1517 was published by De Gruyter in 2018. Between 2016 and 2018 she stayed at the École Française de Rome with a Rubicon Fellowship of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research. She published in various international journals such as Church history, Hagiographica, Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis, and the Mélanges de l’École française de Rome. Recently she published the volume Emperors and Imperial Discourse in Italy, c. 1300-1500, which highlights the continuing importance of the imperial ideal throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth century.
Research and publications
- Performance, perception, and impact of the imperial coronations in Rome, 800-1452
From its invention in 800 to its last performance in 1452, twenty-seven imperial coronations took place in Rome. The first imperial coronation by Charlemagne is often presented as a key event in the history of medieval Europe. It is, therefore, rather odd that the long tradition which the event initiated, has not been the subject of any interpretative or comparative study for the last 77 years. The last study dates from 1942 and approaches the events as static rituals controlled by the popes. Especially at the end of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century, when historians mainly engaged with the medieval past to understand the origin and growth of the secular, modern nation state, the imperial coronations in Rome were dismissed as “antimodern” or as mere decorum with no actual meaning. Building on new approaches in the interdisciplinary fields of ritual and performance studies, my current project approaches the tradition as a vivid and enduring cultural praxis and shows both the dynamics and the continuing appeal of a tradition that ritually performed a unifying political ideology and provided Western Europe with a supreme leader and a supreme capital.
- publications