ENBaCH

ENBaCH - European Network for Baroque Cultural Heritage – is a research project promoted and funded by the European Commission through its Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Eight Universities, from six European countries, participate in the network: Universitat de Barcelona, Technische Universität Dresden, the Ernst-Moritz-Arndt-Universität Greifswald, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales - Paris, Università di Roma La Sapienza, Università di Teramo, Uniwersytet Warszawski, Medizinische Universität Wien.

ENBaCH’s goal is to overcome the “grand narratives” of traditional historiography and reconstruct the lives of European peoples—with their different political, religious, and cultural histories—as the result of contacts, exchanges, mutual influences, rivalries, challenges, and conflicts. The 17th century was indeed an age of intense mobility, and it was preceded and accompanied by important migrations of people as well as artifacts and ideas, which contributed to the formation of an interconnected and self-reflective cultural heritage. International trade, circulation of scholars, artists, craftsmen and a regular postal system unified Europe and helped disseminate the innovations of the Renaissance to the continent’s peripheries. The local political and cultural communities within which people, artifacts, and ideas had to be integrated did not simply accept or refuse these innovations, but responded actively, using the same materials to create new original configurations. They also reacted against such innovations, giving rise to inventive local styles through differentiation. Assimilation and differentiation thus represented the two sides of the same coin in a history of multiple encounters, exchanges, rivalries, and collaborations.

To reach its goals ENBaCH is currently developing an on-line portal with a double task: on one side, the portal will serve as an interactive repository of documents and information on the Baroque period; on the other side, it will help us disseminate the results of the research conducted by the nine institutions involved in the program. One of the challenges of this model is to develop a virtual meeting place between historical research and cultural tourism, a place where scholars can put their scientific expertise in the service of a wider audience. It has become almost a refrain that historians are unable to communicate with people outside academia. Our goal is to bridge this gap and allow anyone who uses the web to benefit from our work in the form of texts, images, films, sounds etc.

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