Work Method

Prologue

Read the full text by the Centre Director Mette Birkedal Bruun in the PDF-file below.

The Danish National Research Foundation Centre for Privacy Studies (PRIVACY) is dedicated to interdisciplinary and collaborative research into notions of privacy and the private in the early modern period (1500–1800). The PRIVACY research team includes social and cultural historians, church historians as well as historians of architecture, of law and of political ideas. When we gather scholars from so many different disciplines each with its distinct scholarly profile and approaches, joint points of orientation are key. We need a shared analytical approach and a set of common landmarks that guide our scholarly efforts.

At PRIVACY, we have three such sets of landmarks that serve as investigatory tools in our joint work with the early modern sources – be they, for instance, texts, groundplans or assemblages of archival documents. The first concerns terminology; the second concerns the areas in which notions of privacy and the private are negotiated; the third concerns the semantic realms related to privacy and the private.

July 2019 / © Mette Birkedal Bruun
Please do not distribute without the author’s consent

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