Urban Ambivalences
Opening comments by Susanne Rau, spokesperson of the “Religion and Urbanity” research group at the Max Weber Centre, given at the 2023 conference “Ambivalences of Religion” in Erfurt.
Category: Concepts & Theory
Jörg Rüpke on “Holidays as Divine Property”
Jörg Rüpke has just published an article on Roman holidays with our colleagues at the SFB “Strukturwandel des Eigentums/ Structural Changes of Property” on “Holidays as divine property: Moving symbols of ownership from the countryside into the city”.
Royal Funerals and Saints’ Topography in Merovingian Paris
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…
Urban religion and objects
by Jörg Rüpke. The summer school “Roman rituals: dynamics, topography and objects: Introduction to Roman religion through the prism of its materiality” – co-organized by the “Religion and Urbanity” group in Erfurt with the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris, La Sapienza, Rome, and the Université catholique de Louvain in cooperation with the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, the Ecole française de Rome, the Academia Belgica and the Museo Nazionale Etrusca Villa Giulia in September 2023 – has addressed the questions of urbanity as being reflected in and constitutive for religious objects.
Architecture can induce Resonance – Hartmut Rosa on Sara Keller’s new book
Architecture can induce resonance, but the effect remains unpredictable: here’s what we learned from the discussion between Hartmut Rosa and Sara Keller at the occasion of the Sara Keller’s book launch of Architektonische Resonanz. Das Mausoleum des indischen Sufi-Meisters Shah Vajihudin Alvi published with Schnell & Steiner…
Water as an Urban Technology in Medieval India – An Introduction by Sara Keller
Podcast of a lecture by Sara Keller in which she examined the question of the wide-ranging effects of global mobility and exchange on Indian societies and cities. The audio was recorded at the lecture series on “Global Exchanges”, organised by Elisa Iori and Mateusz Fafinski.
Shifting Paradigms in Black Death Chronologies
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…
New Glossary Entries: Urbanity, Co-Temporality, Mediation, Religion
Four new entries have been added to the UrbRel glossary, in some cases with accompanying videos by the authors
Out now: “Monasticism and the City in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages” by Fafinski & Riemenschneider (CUP)
In their new book, Fafinski and Riemenschneider reevaluate the relationship between monasticism and the city in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages in the period 400 to 700 in both post-Roman West and the eastern Mediterranean, putting both of those areas in conversation.
Urbanity
Urbanity is a practice and strategy transforming material and social arrangements into something “urban” amalgamates ideas, narratives and symbols of the urban, including media practices and spatially anchored urban behaviors. It also covers institutions and agents that seek to ensure an urban character. Propelled by these, long-term processes occur which can be summarized as urbanization, the expansion of urban spaces, or as an increasing network of settlements qualified as “cities”.
Religion
Religion is the human attribution of capabilities and agency to superhuman actors, which one tries to share with other humans but people also use to gain superiority over other humans and maybe their gods. In this way, in religious action people create a reality that allows for alternative experiences and interpretations of the everyday or even of the extra-ordinary. This opens a unique creativity. Nowhere else but in religion does human action create such different and diverse worlds (notwithstanding all those worlds of fantasy that often build on religious narratives and establish religious figures).
Mediation/Mediatisation
The terms mediatisation and mediation are intertwined but methodologically separate concepts. While sometimes they are used interchangeably (Altheide and Robert, 1988) they have developed into distinctive meanings. They are also very closely bound with the concept of media logic, a process in which “media, information technologies, and communication formats can affect events and social activities” (Altheide, 2016: 1). Mediation is a process in which the communication is influenced by various features of the medium or the genre itself, but it has limited impact on social reality (Hjarvard 2008: 6–7). As such it can also be seen as a way of putting various communication strategies in use.
Co-Temporality
Co-Temporalities is based on the insight that time is a cultural construction and therefore contingent and dependent on context, as with any social phenomena. When viewed in this way, temporality shifts from a unity to a multiplicity, subject to competing and co-operating factors that determine how co-temporalities interact and coexist. Especially in the urbanized space, temporalities tend to clash and to change, accompanied by alternating rhythms that are experienced differently by state and social actors. Co-Temporalities allows the researcher to grasp these complex temporal dynamics in the city and to better understand the relationship between urbanity and time.
2023 Annual Conference: Ambivalences of Religion
Aiming at sharpening a heuristic grid for the study of the mutual formation of religion and urbanity, the focus of the conference lies with concepts of religion that address material, socio-spatial, temporal, and power-related issues with a view on religious complexity in general and religious ambivalences in particular. The ultimate aim is to better grasp the entanglement between religion and urbanity and the ways urban and religious practices and ideas can change through the interferences of these internal tensions.
The Community as a ‘Sacred Body’ – An Interpretation of the Garden of Epicurus
Our former fellow Enrico Piergiacomi analyses a small fragment of Epicurus’ correspondence. Its an intriguing moment where religion and urbanity intersect. The philosopher’s reasoning was based on a theology that allowed to imagine the Epicurean school as a divine settlement, or ‘sacred body’, as well as on a conception of the civic and economic relationship that tries to recreate in the human city the same blessedness experienced by the. Economy and spirituality seem to coalesce a single, peaceful whole.
