Articles on European case studies from late Antiquity until 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.
Why was the Seán Mc Dermott St Magdalene asylum – which contained also a Magdalene Laundry – located where it was? And how does this placing relate to discourses on Irish women in the city? The article offers an introduction to the historical context of the Magdalene Laundries in nineteenth and early twentieth century Ireland.
Sara Keller, postdoc with the Religion and Urbanity group, on the link between waste infrastructures and urban lifestyles. Not just prestigious fountains in large public squares, luxurious bath houses and monumental stepwells are outstanding expressions of urbanity: latrines also can contribute to the production of an urban, cultured and sophisticated way of life.
Our former fellow Vera Henkelmann on the Old Entrance in Augsburg, once famous for its engineering. The power of the council and the city of Augsburg was thus demonstrated here by the ability to restrict sight, especially light, and thus to physically intimidate those entering, even to expose them to the demonic nature of darkness and gloom.
How did aspects of gender, faith and class interplay in Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries? And which position do they occupy in Irish discourse today? The article charts both activist and academic approaches to the Magdalen Laundries in the past decades, and how aspects of gender, faith and class interplayed in them.
Our former fellow Shail Mayaram on the two colours blue: Having lived with indigo for some four decades in India, I delighted in Erfurt’s own blue colour, called woad. Woad is a very distinct blue, as in the napkin that graced my table of my IBZ (the University’s International Guest House) flat, a Christmas gift from my friend, the KFG Fellow, Raminder Kaur.
Mariia Orobinska, a former fellow with us in Erfurt, approaches the concept of urbanity from the angle of paradigmatic analysis in linguistics. It establishes the relationship between subjective and objective aspects of urbanity, which is viewed as a unique feature of a given place and characterized through “charm”, “atmosphere”, and “aesthetics”.
Our fellow Claudine Moulin on the metamorphoses of the letter >Z< in the current war on Ukraine. At first glance, Z is thus doubly coded in the context of the Ukraine invasion – once in a pro-Putin / pro-Russian context, once in the context of its interpretation as a symbol of Russian totalitarianism and a war of aggression in violation of international law.
Sometimes it is the absence that makes the obvious visible. On 4 December 2023, the music stopped at some German Christmas markets, including Erfurt. The reason for this was the protest against the high licence fees for the public – and undoubtedly sales-promoting – playing of music recordings by composers and performers who had not long since died. Christmas and songs, indeed celebrating Christmas and singing, seem to belong together. From “Silent Night” to “Dreaming of a White Christmas” and even more recent songs: it’s hard to imagine Christmas without them. And vice versa: without the festival, all these songs would lose their meaning.
Die Errichtung eines Tempels in Gispersleben läutet eine neue Ära für das interkulturelle Zusammenleben in Erfurt ein. Dieses neue Gotteshaus nahmen wir als Anlass, uns mit dem vietnamesisch-buddhistischen Leben in Erfurt genauer zu beschäftigen. Es ist erst der dritte sichtbare Tempel in den neuen deutschen Bundesländern.
This case study focuses on the question of how Paris acquired metropolitan significance as early as the 6th and 7th centuries through the presence of rulers and important saints, although the city did not historically occupy a prominent position among the cities of Gaul and was hardly larger than an unfortified suburb of Rome or Constantinople in the Merovingian period. In these two centuries, a close topographical and symbolic connection of residence, royal burial and veneration of saints emerged, which is constitutive for the dynamic development of Paris throughout the Middle Ages…
During the late Middle Ages, Erfurt was a prosperous city with a dynamic trade center, and home to one of the first universities in Europe. While its success was a result of many factors, including its geographical location, few people are aware that the colour blue had a significant impact on the development of the city.
Harry O. Maier discusses Mateusz Fafinski and Jakob Riemenscheider’s book, Monasticism and the City in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. The book provides readers with a comprehensive exploration of ancient monastic and urban sites and their inhabitants, akin to a Lonely Planet travel guide. The authors examine monasticism from five aspects: as a genre, within and as cities, with respect to monks and nuns in urban settings, in terms of monastic learning, and as a phenomenon in Afroeurasia.
After decades of doubt about the nature of the disease that caused the Black Death, the identification in 2011 of Yersinia pestis in a 14th-century London cemetery – and, most importantly, the revelation of its genetic proximity to current forms of the bacterium – closed that (sometimes harsh) debate, and demonstrated beyond all doubt the main role of paleogenomics in the future studies of historical epidemics, especially plague. However, the role of historians has not diminished with the arrival of this new protagonist in the field of disease history. On the contrary, the need for on-going multidisciplinary dialogue has become undeniable and mandatory, if the ultimate goal is effectively to advance knowledge about historical epidemic phenomena…
The basic theological idea of the Christian Christmas is the incarnation of God, the “birthday of the Lord”, as it has been called since the fourth century AD, natalis domini. What the Latin churches celebrate on 25 December, the Eastern churches associate with 6 January, Epiphany, the “Epiphany of the Lord”. You have to delve deep into the philosophy and mythology…
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.
