Susanne A. Friede is a member of the Research Training Group 2945: Knowing – Believing – Asserting: Production and Enforcement of Truth in the Premodern Period

The Research Training Group (RTG) 2945 investigates the production and enforcement of truth between the 13^th and 17^th centuries. It focuses on a period characterized by social, political, and religious dynamics as well as by transformations of knowledge cultures, by media changes, and by changing public spheres. During this period, more differentiated semantics of truth and knowledge emerged, while rhetorical or moral arguments and well-established institutional or ritual ways of securing truth remained effective. A multiplicity of new and established practices of asserting and enforcing truth existed simultaneously – ignoring, supporting, negating, or copying each other. The RTG seeks to attract doctoral projects that either investigate how truth is claimed, asserted, enforced, and made acceptable to guide speech, thought, action and decision-making, or that explore how processes of 'making truth' are observed and reflected in images, plays, and texts. Europe and its early colonial contact zones as well as China and Korea - which are particularly suitable for a comparative investigation due to their highly developed written cultures and their specific dynamics - will be analyzed.

By understanding truth as something that is made or produced, we acknowledge the fact that even though truth can be conceptualized as ontological, unattainable, or eternal, it only becomes tangible in the mode of its mediation. Truth must be declared or claimed, its status must be asserted, inscribed, or embodied – it always appears within media.

Complementing existing research on the history of science, on institutional validity claims, or on the role of the expert, the RTG focuses on practices and processes of making truth and explores their dependence on bodies, natural things, and artefacts. It observes truth production as a bundle of practices and material arrangements in which people, media, things, and spatial arrangements interact. Bodies, instruments, tools, natural and artificial objects, texts, images, diagrams, architectures, workshops, courthouses, or theatre stages all participate in the assertion and negotiation of truth.