Dr Annemarie Pilarski, Deputy Chair of Prof. Andreas Merkt in the summer semester 2022 and Academic Councillor at the Chair of Ancient Church History and Patrology, has been awarded the 2022 Doctoral Prize of the Friends of the Faculty of Catholic Theology at the University of Regensburg for her dissertation "Vitae mala funerare. Poesie als Lebensbewältigung bei Eugenius von Toledo" has been awarded the 2022 Doctoral Prize of the Friends of the Faculty of Catholic Theology at the University of Regensburg.
Her dissertation will be published under the title: "Der Libellus Carminum des Eugenius von Toledo. Poesie als Lebensbewältigung und spirituelle Praxis" published by Mohr Siebeck in the series "Studien und Texte zu Antike und Christentum".
We congratulate her wholeheartedly on this well-deserved honour and wish her every success in her future research work!
Here follows the laudation of her dissertation:
"Poems about everyday utensils such as a towel, about adversity such as a plague of mosquitoes, but also about deep themes such as mortality or sin and guilt - the range of topics covered by the Visigothic poet and bishop Eugenius of Toledo in his book of poetry, which was extremely popular in the Middle Ages, is broad. In her dissertation, Annemarie Pilarski works out a basic theme from this hodgepodge of poems: poetry - i.e. writing poems, reading poems and reciting poems - is a way of coping with life. By philologically analysing and theologically commenting on individual thematically central poems and classifying them in terms of literary and theological history, in addition to providing an overview of the complete works, she liberates this author, who has so far only occasionally been considered by classical philologists, from his theological shadowy existence. By combining modern research approaches such as the 'history of emotions' or speech act theory with classical spirituality history and late antique literary history, she succeeds not only in demonstrating the spirituality-historical significance of this hitherto largely unknown author, but also in drawing attention to the value of poetry as a spiritual practice."
