The poor and the poverty in the Early Middle Ages (VI to IX centuries): a linguistic and historical approach

• Grant number: 18/11355-8
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: September 01, 2018
• End date: November 30, 2021
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - History - Ancient and Medieval History
• Principal Investigator: Marcelo Cândido da Silva
• Grantee: Thiago Juarez Ribeiro da Silva
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

"The Poor and the poverty in Early Middle Ages" project aims to understand who were the poor and how poverty was determinated in the VI to IX centuries. We know that the modern measuring methods are not perfectly applicable to these times, so we adopted the historical semantics perspective to observe how the language and the sources from that period could show us an interpretation of our main subject. Who is the poor? What are the words which designated it? In which frequency this happened and how? The "poor" had a specific function on each one of the sources that he is described? Combining search technologies with a massive amount of data, available thanks to sources' digitalization, we hope to answer these questions beyond the parameters currently accounted by historiography. (AU)