2026: Counselling Scenarios in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period. Literary Concepts of Consultation and Decision-Making
The functions and benefits of both public and private consultation have not only a practical dimension but also a social one. In the relatively loose social structures of pre-modern era, publicly visible counselling could foster consensus, and council meetings could integrate individuals into the collective and stabilise it. Accordingly, literary texts depict a wide variety of scenes of both formal and informal counselling, which, however, have so far attracted only sporadic attention in research.
The essays in this volume reconstruct historical conceptions of successful and failed advice as depicted in literary works. Adopting a comparative perspective, they combine close textual analysis with systematic reflections on the consolidation of political communities in the pre-modern era.
