Articles on European case studies from late Antiquity until today.
Our group discovered lost places and urban memory culture within the city of Erfurt during our 16th City Walk on the 15th of April 2026. We visited three former religious or urban places and explored how they are still present, remembered or otherwise used within the urban space of Erfurt today…
As part of our closing conference on ‘Religion and Urbanity’, taking place from 1 to 5 June, we will be screening the new film ‘Gare du Monde’ [World Station] by Jacques Lévy, a former and highly esteemed KFG fellow, on Wednesday 3 June…
Von weitem ertönt Kindersang, die Kirchenglocken läuten. Feierliche Erwartung macht sich in der festlich geschmückten, mittelalterlichen Stadt breit. Der Gesang schwillt an, Frauen stimmen mit ein, lateinischer Mönchsgesang mischt sich in die hellen Stimmen. Immer lauter wird die Musik, die Prozession zieht heran. Auf dem Höhepunkt schreiten die Priester mit dem goldenen Schrein vorbei, in der sich die kostbare Heilig-Blut-Reliquie befindet. Der Gruppe folgt eine bunte Menge in liturgische Gewänder gehüllter Menschen, rote Chormäntel und Banner stechen hervor. Dieser ekstatische Aufzug lässt niemanden der Umstehenden kalt…
Walking around in cities can be connected to hearing multiple things: People chatting, the tram and other vehicles passing by, church bells ringing, maybe even a melody coming from street musicians or an organ playing when passing a church. On our 15th City Walk on the 23rd of October, we explored how those and other sounds and music have an impact on Religion and Urbanity…
This post introduces the Religion Urbanity Mapping (RUM) project. It started in 2021 with a dual focus. First, to rethink the concept of urban religion; and second, to apply this reframed concept in exploring the relatedness of religion and urbanity in the post-socialist CEE (Central and Eastern Europe) context. To date, the latter focus has been overlooked by urban studies and in the study of religion…
In June, together with other members of the Urbanity and Religion research group, I went on an excursion to Mühlhausen. Our main aim was to visit the Thuringian state exhibition Freiheit 1525. 500 Years of the Peasants’ War. However, we also had time to take a walk through the beautiful historic town. As we were exploring the town, I came across a Stolperstein in memory of Leopold Löbenstein, who was deported in 1942 and, presumably, died in Izbica. This small town, located around 250 kilometres south-east of Warsaw, served as a transit ghetto during the Second World War, to which many Jews from Western Europe were deported…
There is a moment, just before arrival, when Sancaklar Mosque is entirely invisible. The sunflower fields thin out. The hum of construction trucks grows louder. Then, a sharp-edged minaret (and nothing more) breaks the horizon. Everything else sinks. Following the slope; downwards instead of upwards. The city has vanished, but something else begins…
Traditional religious historiography attempts to grasp ‘religions’ in their becoming, possibly their founding, their slow or radical changes – similar to how urban historiography undertook. This brought transformations into view that, in the extreme case, could take on their own form in the splitting and splitting off of religious groups…
Today, the academic study of religion in the discipline widely called Religious Studies or Religionswissenschaft has developed into a large array of thematical fields and foci, of general approaches and source-specific methods. As such it is ranging from historical and anthropological disciplines through social sciences and economics to philosophies and theologies, either conceived as a proper discipline overlapping with these other disciplines or seen as a subdiscipline to the one or other of them. What I am advocating today is the use of a term defining the traditional object of Religious Studies, namely “religion” and its use for comparison on a global scale…
This interview marks the beginning of a series in which Ahmad Ali will be engaging with scholars working on India at the Max-Weber-Kolleg. He is a student of Religionswissenschaft at the University of Erfurt, currently working on the project “Religion and Urbanity: Reciprocal Formations”.
You can now read a conference report on the KFG’s last annual conference on “Religion, Urbanity and Trade. Processes of Mercantilisation in Urban Spaces”, written by Adina Eckart. The conference took place in Ettersburg from 13 to 15 November 2024 and was organized and convened by Susanne Rau and Heinrich Lang.
Critical studies of death (thanatology) have illuminated how human societies organize spaces of burial according to gender, race, class, sexual preference, and religion. Informed by these works “Necrogeographies of the Marginal Dead” introduces how studies of death, especially of persons within groups excluded from systems of power in the living world, illuminate how the structures of power exceed life extending into the afterlives of the dead…
Over the past months, members of the “Religion and Urbanity” group have published articles in the online history magazine “Epoch”. The articles as well as an introduction by Susanne Rau and Klara-Maeve O’Reilly can now be accessed via a dedicated page…
A Roman military camp, also known as a castellum or castrum, was a fortified place where soldiers lived and trained. The camps were located wherever the Roman Empire expanded and reached or created borders. They formed the starting point for military actions or were themselves the site of battles. Through their presence, the soldiers influenced the economy and the settlement area in the conquered territories. Many towns were founded by the Romans and still exist today.
KFG Fellow Edmund Kizik (Universität Gdansk) und Kerngruppenmitglied Martin Christ führen am 03. Juli 2024 einen Workshop zu frühneuzeitlichen Quellen über die Bedeutung und den Umgang mit den Toten durch.
We are interested in the connections between urbanity and religion.
This blog is connected to the DFG-funded Humanities Centre for Advanced Studies “Religion and Urbanity: Reciprocal Formations” (FOR 2779). We are based at the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies at Erfurt University.
