Power and influence. Personal Influence on the Rulers of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages

权力和影响力。

• 批准号: 269296551
• 负责人: Dr. Fabian Schulz
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Seminar für Alte Geschichte
• 依托单位国家: 德国
• 项目类别: Independent Junior Research Groups
• 财政年份: 2015
• 资助国家: 德国
• 起止时间: 2014-12-31 至 2021-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/269296551?language=en
• 关键词: Power; influence.; Personal; Influence; Rulers

The fact that in autocratic regimes, those who manage to influence the decisions and opinions of rulers enjoy great power, stirs up rivalry and rumors. This evident but largely neglected correlation is best studied in the case of late antiquity, when important conditions of influence were subject to political, social and intellectual change. After the Migration Period caused the Roman Empire to split up, emperors continued to exist in the byzantine East. In the West, Germanic kings arose. Many agents tried to have the ear of the ruler: from court eunuchs, who were very close to the emperors, to bishops, who were enabled by the rise of Christianity. As a consequence, there was bitter rivalry between these various agents, which led to conflicts and promoted polemic literature. It was usually the opinion of the prevailing one which made history.Those protagonists who exerted influence on rulers have not been investigated thoroughly yet, as they formed a heterogeneous group of people that can neither be entirely understood in terms of institutions nor grasped by their proximity to the emperor. Furthermore, their means not only comprised words, but also gestures. Biased sources, in which influencing agents are based on role models (warner or temptress), influence on beliefs (like religion) and its representation on narratives (good king/ bad advisor), have either been taken for granted by scholarship or wholly rejected. Finally, neither in Classics nor in Medieval History is there a tradition of studying interpersonal influence.This project, by employing the Power/Interaction Model of Interpersonal Influence by social psychologist Bertram Raven, aims to analyse the resources and strategies of influencing agents as well as the modes and conditions of influence attempts, bypassing thereby common oppositions, which often shape or shaped the understanding of influence, like male/ female, pagan/ Christian, roman/ Germanic. At the same time, representations of agents and interactions are to be scrutinized with the instruments of discourse analysis. By casting new light on the interrelation of historical agent, literary figure and social stereotype, it is possible to distinguish between real and perceived power-shifts. The chronological and geographical disposition of the sub-projects (284-395, 395-565 East, 395-568 West) is to highlight how influence and its discourse correlate with the aforementioned shifts, thereby illustrating their historical and cultural dimension. The goal of the project is to establish interpersonal influence as a subject of historical research and to make a contribution towards political history as well as the history of mentalities by analyzing influence on rulers.

在专制政权中，那些能够影响统治者的决策和意见的人拥有巨大的权力，这一事实引发了竞争和谣言。这种明显但在很大程度上被忽视的相关性在古代晚期的情况下得到了最好的研究，当时影响的重要条件受到政治、社会和思想变化的影响。迁徙时期导致罗马帝国分裂后，皇帝继续存在于拜占庭东部。在西方，日耳曼国王崛起。许多代理人试图听取统治者的意见：从与皇帝关系密切的宫廷太监，到因基督教兴起而获得权力的主教。结果，这些不同的代理人之间出现了激烈的竞争，从而导致了冲突并促进了论战文学的发展。创造历史的通常是主流意见。那些对统治者施加影响的主角尚未被彻底调查，因为他们形成了一个异质的群体，既不能从制度上完全理解，也不能从距离上把握。给皇帝。而且，他们的手段不仅包括言语，还包括手势。带有偏见的来源，其中影响因素是基于角色模型（华纳或妖妇），对信仰的影响（如宗教）及其在叙事中的表现（好国王/坏顾问），要么被学术界视为理所当然，要么被完全拒绝。最后，无论是古典文学还是中世纪历史，都没有研究人际影响力的传统。本项目采用社会心理学家伯特伦·雷文（Bertram Raven）的人际影响力的权力/互动模型，旨在分析影响主体的资源和策略，以及影响主体的资源和策略。影响尝试的模式和条件，从而绕过常见的对立，这些对立通常塑造或塑造对影响力的理解，如男性/女性、异教徒/基督教、罗马/日耳曼人。与此同时，主体的表征和相互作用将受到话语分析工具的仔细审查。通过对历史人物、文学人物和社会刻板印象之间的相互关系提供新的认识，就有可能区分真实的权力转移和感知到的权力转移。子项目（284-395、395-565 东、395-568 西）的时间和地理分布是为了强调影响力及其话语如何与上述转变相关，从而说明其历史和文化维度。该项目的目标是将人际影响力确立为历史研究的一个主题，并通过分析对统治者的影响，为政治史和心态史做出贡献。