„Borders“ (Grenzen) is the topic of this year history competition of the state president of Germany by the Körber Foundation (Netzwerktagung zum Geschichtswettbewerb des Bundespräsidenten 2024/2025). To kick start the event, Sara Keller and Sebastian Dorsch have been invited to give an impulse talk at the preparatory workshop of the Körber Foundation…
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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.
The KFG « Religion and Urbanity: Reciprocal Formations » is announcing its next annual conference, which will take place in Erfurt from the 4th to 6th June 2025. The topic is Making Boundaries – Performing Religion and Urbanity.
Since 2018 we have been publishing articles, reviews, reports and personal reflections on a variety of topics. In most cases they are tied in one way or an other to one of our research areas: South Asia, especially India and Pakistan, the Mediterranean from Antiquity until today, and Europe, especially in the Medieval and Early Modern period. We have picked some of our favourite entried by fellows and core group members of the Religion and Urbanity group in Erfurt.
On the 17th of April, we went on our twelfth city walk, which revolved around animals in the city and the animal turn. At three stops in the city of Erfurt we discussed different aspects of how animals are recognisable in the mutual formation of religion and urbanity. Frédéric Vandenberghe, Jörg Rüpke, Aileen Becker, and Heinrich Lang gave short presentations at the Natural History Museum on the Animal Turn in general and animals adapting to urban lifestyles; the St. Crucis Church on animals in biblical stories and displaying them in religious architecture, and finally at the Krämerbrücke (merchants bridge) on animals as resources in urban life.
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.
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.
A post by our students on the Mikvah in Erfurt. Written sources on the mikvah ion Erfurt date back to the middle of the 13th century. They show that the Jewish community had to pay taxes for the bath and the land, first to the bishop, later to the city of Erfurt. From the medieval tax lists we learn that the area around the Mikvah was densely populated.
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.
At the beginning of the 2023/24 winter semester, we organised our eleventh city walk, which was dedicated to the topic of “Jewish Heritage”. The occasion was the recent designation of Erfurt’s Jewish-Medieval heritage as a UNESCO World Heritage Site on 17 September 2023.
The report by Constanze Schaller on the workshop “Urbanity and the Formation of Religious Groups”, organised by Martin Christ in June 2023 has now been published on H-Soz-Kult.
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”.
Votive objects, be it votive offerings, sacred dedications or ex voto, are gifts to the gods made by humans, set up in a sacred place for religious purpose. They are a feature of ancient and modern societies alike and are attested in diverse contexts and settings, sharing though a common scope: by setting up votive objects, the individuals seek to enter in communication with the gods.
At the beginning of the summer term we started with our 10th City Walk which was dedicated to the topic of urban ressources. Three stops in the Old Town of Erfurt gave us the opportunity to discuss different aspects of the subject: commercialism and different interpretations of poverty in past and present, in religious and more urban environments with the visit of the Second Hand Shop at the Johannesturm in Erfurt, monasticism and the ambivalence of wealth and poverty, production and contemplation at the Augustinian monastery, and, finally, the Collegium Maius and the St Michaelis church as two significant urban institutions of the Christian university life…
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.
