About InqDialog

The Inquiry-Orientated Dialogues project (InqDialog) foregrounds the role of conversation-modeled inquiry in premodern efforts to understand the world. Funded as a four-year Momentum project by the VolkswagenStiftung under the title “Scientific Discourse in Medieval Vernacular Texts”, InqDialog challenges narratives that narrowly define zones of interest in premodern inquiry.  For instance, the project aims to expand contemporary understandings of early models of inquiry beyond the traditionally privileged sites of “scientia.” The project’s corpus comprises dialogues in diverse vernacular genres, including sermons, novels, legends, plays, and epics; this capacious perspective reveals how diverse dialogical interactions fostered the generation, exploration, and transformation of inquiry in the premodern period. InqDialog focuses on the “how” of these processes, examining the rhetorical, aesthetic, grammatical, and logical structures that underpinned these dialogues.

InqDialog also challenges narratives claiming that Renaissance-era authors pioneered open-ended dialogues by attending to a chronologically broader range of texts. While the dialogue did emerge as a distinct, clearly defined genre during the Renaissance, medieval dialogue-based discourse occurs in a wide range of textual forms, many of which exhibit striking features of epistemological openness. Consequently, the InqDialog corpus spans conventional divisions between time periods and genres in order to illuminate overlooked methods of intellectual inquiry.