The conference, which was attended by Hungarian scholars representing a range of universities, research institutes and archives as well as their colleagues from the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Croatia, Poland, Germany, Italy, Romania, Serbia and Poland, focused on the changes in Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries in religious, political, economic and social contexts.
This two-day professional meeting held in the Ceremonial Hall of Déri Múzeum provided an opportunity to present the latest research findings and to foster and build international academic relations.
“The strategic objective of the university is to enhance the international profile of research at its institutes and departments. A conference of this scale amply demonstrates the extensive network of contacts maintained by the University of Debrecen as well as the progress our institution has made in international rankings. All of this represents feedback on the significant progress the university has been able to make in recent years, to which all disciplines of the institution, including the Faculty of Humanities and the Institute of History, have contributed through their own activities,” said László Pósán, Professor of the Institute of History at the Faculty of Humanities, UD to the portal hirek.unideb.hu.
For more than ten years, the research group named Hungary in Medieval Europe has regularly held international conferences. Most recently, two of these with a focus on military history, “Internationale Historische Kommission zur Erforschung des Deutschen Ordens” and “Mercenaries and Crusaders,” were hosted three years ago.
“The present event was meant to focus on a constantly recurring question in the philosophy of history. We tried to figure out if there are well-defined epochal boundaries in historical processes, implying continuity or, on the contrary, these constitute rupture and change? Our meeting also had the potential to raise a number of new aspects in this field, regarding the fields of politics, economics, the church, culture and science, with an approach from a specific perspective, exploring the changes,” said the Hungarian researcher who, in the section on cities, examined the economic policy of Hungarian cities, including Debrecen, looking for the roots of the present world in the past.
The conference was honored by the presence of two distinguished Honorary Doctors of the University of Debrecen, Professor Roman Czaja from Mikołaja Kopernika University of Toruń, member of the International Academic Advisory Board of UD, and Professor Helmut Flachenecker from the University of Würzburg, Germany.
The talks delivered at the meeting will soon be published in a book format, expected to come out sometime later this year.
In addition, the research team plans to develop its new series into a yearbook and launch a periodical journal with an ISSN number, headed by an international editorial board, titled East Central Europe: Between the Baltic and the Adriatic / Zwischen Ostsee und Adria.
The conference “Political, cultural, religious, and economic transformations in the 15th and 16th centuries” has been funded in the form of a grant from National Research, Development and Innovation Office (Nemzeti Kutatási, Fejlesztési és Innovációs Hivatal).
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