Simone Wagner has won the Johann Daniel Schöpflin Prize for her dissertation “Gender and Urbanity. The authority of abbesses and provosts in south-western collegiate churches”. In her dissertation she has analysed how the authority of abbesses and provosts in collegiate churches was constructed and to what extent gender and urbanity influenced their authority…
Our former fellow Christopher Degelmann has been awarded with the prestigious Heinz Meier-Leibnitz prize by the German Research Foundation (DFG). The Meier-Leibnitz prize is the most important award presented by the DFG to early career researchers…
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.
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.
Workshop report by Fathima Thesni (Farook College, Kozhikode) on the nternational book project workshop titled ‘Towards a New History of Calicut’ on 5 & 6 January, 2024, organised by Susanne Rau and T Muhammadali.
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.
The report by Mirjam Wien on the 2023 annual conference “Ambivalences of Religion”, organised by Elisa Iori and Jörg Rüpke in November 2023 has now been published on H-Soz-Kult.
On h-soz-kult, you can now read the panel report by our fellow Heinrich Lang on the “Religion and Urbanity” panel at the 2023 Deutscher Historikertag in Leipzig. the panel “City Branding: Urbanity and the Construction of City Images in Europe and South Asia” was convened by Martin Christ, Sara Keller and Susanne Rau.
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.
Over the course of the upcoming weeks, we will publish recordings of the introductory comments by participants of the 2023 “Religious Ambivalences” conference, organised by Elisa Iori and Jörg Rüpke in November 2023 in Erfurt.
How did people try to avoid being robbed and how did they react when it happened? Wiśniewski, drawing from a complex and varied set of sources (including letters, petitions, hagiography and inscriptions) focused on the interface of religion and society, showing how people used various strategies like divination or seeking help from religious figures. Theft in his lecture appeared to us as a complex societal phenomenon, shaking the sometimes fragile trust in local communities.
The ELLA series of lectures will bring to Erfurt the foremost experts in the field from Germany and abroad to discuss their research and to present new approaches on various aspects of this dynamic and fascinating time. In line with the focus of the “Urbanity and Religion” centre in Erfurt, a keen eye will be kept o the intersection of religion and urbanity.
Pius Malekandathil on how the city branding of Goa changed with Hapsburg rule in the 16th and 17th century. The Hapsburgs resorted to different mechanisms during this period to mask the internal contradictions within the city and to fill up the “hollowness” of the urban enclave of Goa and to prevent the Portuguese and Luso-Indians from moving away from the power centre of Goa to other enclaves. The fabrication and circulation of pride-evoking epithets like “Goa Dourada“ (Golden Goa) and religious metaphorical usages like “Rome of the East”, and the creation of ‘relic-loving’ devotees within the city were some of the mechanisms sought by the Hapsburgs not only to camouflage the harsh urban reality of Goa, but also to give a positive, if inflated, imagery of the city.
We are happy to announce the opening of the COMOR exhibition in Leipzig. The exhibition will be open to the public from 1 September until 15 October 2023 at the Altes Rathaus in Leipzig. The COMOR project – short for “Configutations of European Fairs. Merchants, Objects. Routes (1350-1600) – took up the history of European fairs from the perspective of “market integrations”.
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.
